Tower Topics ~ Summer 2001

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'Quintessential ladies' grace Holy Week at the Abbey

Brother Blaise Bonderer compares Grace and Helen Reardon to the women at the tomb.

“They are Conception Abbey’s own witnesses to the Resurrection,” he says. “Every time I see them arrive for Holy Week, I say, ‘OK, we can have Easter now. The Reardon girls are here.’”

For the past 16 years, the Reardon sisters of Kansas City have been an institution at Conception Abbey’s Holy Week services and sunrise vigil. Dressed impeccably, sitting in the front pew, the attractive sisters are “the most elegant, refined women you’ll ever meet,” says Conception monk Father Benedict Neenan. “They are the quintessential ladies,” Brother Blaise agrees.

Grace (left) and Helen Reardon this year continued their long
tradition of attending Holy Week services at the Abbey.

Born more than nine decades ago on a farm eight miles southwest of the Abbey, Grace and Helen were baptized, confirmed, and received first Communion in the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception, then a parish church. It was several decades after they left the farm for successful careers in Kansas City, when the Reardon sisters were visiting their ailing brother at St. Francis Hospital in nearby Maryville, that the monastic community extended a personal invitation and a tradition was born.

The sisters visit with Brother Blaise Bonderer over Easter lunch.

“Father Reginald (Sanders) would come to the hospital to say Mass and visit our brother, and he invited us to come to Holy Week at the Abbey,” Helen recalls. “So we did.” And they’ve been back every year since.

The relationship between the monks and the women, who have since joined Conception’s oblate program, has been a symbiotic one.

Each year, at the beginning of Holy Week, a monk from the Abbey goes to Kansas City and drives the sisters to Conception. When their brother Maurice was still alive, Brother Blaise would even take the three siblings on Sunday drives in the country.

In return, the sisters pray.

“The strength of their prayers helped get us through the renewal of the Basilica,” says Brother William Buchholz. “Their faithfulness and prayer life keep us and them going.”

The sisters sheepishly shake their head at such praise.

“They are so good to us,” Grace says of the monks. “We just enjoy being there.”

The long journey north and the sunrise Easter service are a highlight of the year for Grace and Helen.

“The vigil is beautiful, even if it is at 4:30 in the morning,” Helen jokes.

Grace, who is 93, and Helen, who won’t reveal her age, don’t get around as well as they used to. They walk with canes and getting to the Basilica from their room in Marian Hall requires the aid of seminarians, who are all too eager to help a pair of women who have gained somewhat of a celebrity status among the students over the years.

Despite the hardships of the trip, each year, as they file out of the church, Grace and Helen say the same thing they’ve said for 16 years.

“We’ll be back next year if we can.”

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