Sister Joan Minella, former principal and pastoral life director, dies

A funeral Mass for School Sister of Notre Dame Joan Marie Minella was offered May 30 at Villa Assumpta in Towson. Sister Joan died May 9, just a few days shy of turning 90.

Raised in Rochester, N.Y., Sister Joan entered the novitiate on July 12, 1954, at Villa Assumpta, where she took the name Mary Clemens, meaning merciful. She professed first vows on July 30, 1955 and made her final profession on July 30, 1961.

She was a teacher at St. Patrick School in Mount Savage (1955-63); Our Lady of Good Counsel School in Baltimore (1963-66); and Our Lady of Hope School, Dundalk (1966-69).

Sister Joan was principal of St. John the Evangelist School in Hydes (1969-72) and St. Mark School, Catonsville (1972-74).

She served as Chief Procurate-Advocate on the Archdiocese of Baltimore’s marriage tribunal (1980-87) and on her religious community’s leadership team (1987-96).

Sister Joan was among the first pastoral life directors in the Archdiocese of Baltimore, holding that leadership position at St. Ann in Grantsville and St. Patrick in Mount Savage (1997-2003) and Prince of Peace in Edgewood (2003-09). She stepped down in 2009 for health reasons.

In a 2009 interview with the Catholic Review, Sister Joan said she enjoyed being with parishioners as a pastoral life director.

“I liked being with them at moments of happiness and being able to listen in times of sadness,” said Sister Joan, the first woman pastoral life director in Harford County.

While most people embraced her leadership role in Western Maryland and Harford County, Sister Joan acknowledged that it took some a longer time to accept the concept of someone other than a priest leading their parish.

“But people began to see that it would work,” she told the Catholic Review. “They realized I wasn’t coming to change the church.”

She added that using pastoral life directors is “a wonderful way for people to see men and women together in leadership in a parish – the ordained and the nonordained.”

At Prince of Peace, Sister Joan helped bring what was then a 350-family parish out of debt as the community paid off its church and celebrated a mortgage burning.

From 2010 to 2020, Sister Joan was a part-time archivist at the Institute of Notre Dame in Baltimore. She also volunteered at Villa Assumpta.

Elsewhere, she served in Philadelphia and her order’s generalate in Rome.

Joan held a bachelor’s degree in music education from what is now Notre Dame of Maryland University in Baltimore; a master’s degree in religious studies from Mundelein College in Chicago, and a master’s degree in pastoral counseling from what is now Loyola University Maryland in Baltimore.

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