Sister Noreen Duffy knew she would become a Catholic nun when she was a fourth-grader in "dead center Ireland."
Her family never wondered where she was because the young Duffy, who later taught generations of students at St. Eugene's Catholic school in Santa Rosa, could always be found across the canal from her home at the convent.
"My father would say, why don't you move your bed over there?" said Duffy.
At age 16 in 1957 she did. Eventually, she came 5,000 miles across the globe to Orange County where she joined the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange and eventually taught for decades at Santa Rosa's St. Eugene's Cathedral School.
Duffy's journey in many ways mirrors that of the founding members of St. Joseph of Orange, an order that helped build Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital and in the decades since has had a profound impact on Sonoma County.
This order celebrated the centennial of its founding this year.
Mother Bernard Gosselin and eight nuns traveled by train and then boat from Le Grange, Ill., to Eureka in 1912, arriving with 60 cents among them to start a school.
The Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange started their first hospital in Eureka in response to a devastating flu epidemic in 1918.
Over the century, the religious order has grown, now running 26 schools and a $4.2 billion hospital system, including Memorial Hospital.
They have been an integral part of the growth of Sonoma County, particularly Santa Rosa, said businessman and philanthropist Henry Trione.
"They provided us the hospital and through the years it grew," Trione said. "The size of the facility now is ... I don't know how many times bigger than the original hospital."
The facility opened Jan. 1, 1950, with 90 beds, 12 patients and 93 employees. Today, Memorial has 278 beds and is expanding its emergency room.
Over six decades in Sonoma County, the Sisters established mobile health and dental clinics and after-school programs, they ministered to Sonoma County Jail inmates and taught generations at St. Eugene's Cathedral School.
At Memorial, 68 nuns have held administrative, clinical and ministerial positions. Some were stern administrators in business attire and others chatted with the pharmacists and made patients smile, said Wendy Peterson, a registered nurse who has worked at Memorial for 43 years.
"They really were all very different people," said Peterson. "But they were always willing to stop and listen to what you had to say."
One of the most outspoken sisters to serve in the county, Sister Michaela Rock, was dog-headed in her fight to improve health services for the disadvantaged. She bluntly described Santa Rosa's divide between the affluent eastern neighborhoods and poor and immigrant neighborhoods to the west.
"Highway 101 is a curtain, not just a ribbon of asphalt," she told a reporter in 1994.
Two years later, she persuaded St. Joseph Health to put up the seed money for a clinic serving the Roseland district in southwest Santa Rosa.
Southwest Community Health Center, on Lombardi Court off Sebastopol Road, opened in 1996. St. Joseph's contributed $2.5 million during the clinic's first three years.
With 500 members at its peak, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange now numbers 150. The schools and hospitals for the most part run without them.
Their umbrella order, the Sisters of St. Joseph, traces its heritage back to 17th-century France, said Sister Mary Beth Ingham, a general council member based in the order's headquarters in Orange.
"Even though we are small, we are all over the state of California," Ingham said. "We have more schools now than we did when we had sisters running them. We have more hospitals than we did when we had sisters running them."
Today, there are as many as 14,000 Sisters of St. Joseph worldwide and about 9,000 in the United States.
Although their numbers are dwindling, they do not recruit members. People must be called to the vocation, Ingham said.
"Our own charism is about working with other people," Ingham said. "It is not about having everyone become a Sister of St. Joseph, but rather working with men and women who have the same vision of serving that we do."
Two Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange remain in Sonoma County.
Duffy, who knew she was called to serve since she was a child in Ireland, has renewed that call each year through decades of teaching six days a week and grading papers on the seventh. She's seen three movies in 25 years ("Fried Green Tomatoes," "Lion King" and "Mamma Mia") and retired in 2010 after teaching for 51 years, including 23 at St. Eugene's.
She still teaches religion at St. Eugene's, helps with mass and choir practices and meets with patients at Memorial.
"I will stay as long as I can function," Duffy said.
For Sister Sharon Fritsch, who manages the 42-unit Vigil Light apartments for low-income seniors from a small tidy office behind the Flamingo Hotel, her journey began in a chapel when she was a high schooler from San Francisco's Bay View neighborhood.
"Have you ever fallen in love?" said Fritsch, tears in her eyes. "As real as you are in front of me, God was in front of me."
God told Fritsch to give away her things to the poor. Her vocation took her to South Central Los Angeles to teach English to immigrant children, to Santa Ana to run programs for teen mothers and all the way to New York City where she joined and eventually ran a nonprofit group aimed at curbing world hunger.
"Our lives move," Fritsch said. "I had burning desires to help people."
You can reach Staff Writer Julie Johnson at 521-5220 or julie.johnson@pressdemocrat.com.
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