“Be diligent in serving the poor. Love the poor, honor them, my children, as you would honor Christ Himself.”
St. Louise de Marillac
Kateri Maureen Koverman: Imaging God’s Gentle Love
By S. Patricia Wittberg
S. Kateri Maureen Koverman saw first-hand how the experiences of war caused much suffering and stress on the soldiers serving and dedicated her later years to ministering to veterans.
In the Book of Genesis we learn that we are created in the image and likeness of God. In St. John’s letter, Christians are told that God is love. S. Kateri Maureen Koverman’s entire life reflected these teachings: war and violence, she said, destroys the love image that God created each of us to be.
This belief called S. Kateri to accompany those terribly affected by wars. Her call first came while she was studying at The Catholic University in Washington, D.C. in the 1960s. A guest speaker in her class said there was a need for religious to go to Vietnam. S. Kateri didn’t know where Vietnam was, and had to look on a globe to find it. But she had a profound experience of God calling her to go there.
It took some time for arrangements to be made, but S. Kateri found other ways to work for peace and nonviolence in the meantime. She opened a Youth Club for Santa Maria Community Services in Cincinnati’s East Price Hill neighborhood, where she worked to lessen tensions between the Black and white teens there. Using creative means, she raised enough money to take both groups on a bus trip to Washington, D.C., so that they could get to know and understand each other better. But her heart was in the call to Vietnam. S. Joyce Brehm, who served with S. Kateri at Santa Maria, remembers her excitement when she was able to announce, “The Community is letting me go to Vietnam!”
Initially, S. Kateri felt her role was simply to accompany and help the those afflicted by the war. Her first mission was to gather the elderly people left behind in a village which the warring armies had destroyed. She helped them start an aquaculture fish pond and plant banana trees to support themselves. But during the withdrawal of the U.S. forces and the fall of Saigon, she was asked to help in “Operation Babylift,” so that hundreds of children, orphaned or simply caught up in the war, could be sent to the U.S. for adoption. Originally, the program was very organized, with each baby baptized, provided with I.D. papers, and sent to adoptive parents selected and waiting in the United States. But at the end things became chaotic. S. Andrea Koverman, her cousin, remembers S. Kateri telling her how babies were abandoned in the streets or simply shoved into their arms as the planes were taking off. Initially, they placed the babies in banana crates, one baby to a crate, for transport. But the infants actually seemed calmer if there were two of them in each box. Plus, more children could fit on the plane that way.
After Vietnam, S. Kateri went to El Salvador to work with the inhabitants of Tenancingo, a supposedly neutral “peace village.” But in those days immediately after the martyrdom of lay missionary Jean Donovan and Sisters Maura Clarke, Ita Ford and Dorothy Kazel, no place was neutral or peaceful. S. Kateri said that it was the most brutal place she had ever been. She recounted how once, after she had finished a children’s religion class about God’s love, one little boy came running back a few minutes later in hysterics. His mother had been brutally murdered by the guerillas while he was in S. Kateri’s class – for giving food “to the wrong side.” S. Nancy Bramlage, who visited S. Kateri, said she felt the villagers’ pervasive fear. While she was there, they helped a woman look in the forest for her “disappeared” husband. He was never found.
S. Kateri’s own life was in danger many times. Once, she was going in a U.S. army helicopter to retrieve children left behind in a destroyed Vietnamese village. In mid-flight, the pilot’s orders changed and he had to leave her in a rice paddy while he went to rescue some soldiers. She waited all day for him to come back; he had been shot down. William Yaley, who with his wife adopted a Babylift child, said, “She put her life on the line – driving orphans to Tan Son Nhat Airport in Saigon, dodging artillery explosions, rockets and small arms fire, then bribing officials to get children onto airplanes.”I In El Salvador, she was threatened with death several times, and once had a loaded gun pressed against her chest as she challenged the guerillas. As she told S. Andrea, “I have seen the worst things a human being can do to another. I have looked into eyes that have no soul. That is why they do such terrible things.”
In 2000 S. Kateri Maureen Koverman started Them Bones Veteran Community, a treatment and advocacy organization for veterans in Cincinnati.
S. Kateri did not return home from these experiences unscathed. She found herself reliving her memories over and over and worried that she was losing her mind. “After much anguish,” S. Andrea said, “she realized she was suffering from Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).” This convinced her that the soldiers who had served in Vietnam were as much victims of the war as the civilians were. She devoted the rest of her life to helping them. In 1994, she co-founded Joseph House in Cincinnati as a safe haven for veterans suffering from PTSD, addictions, and homelessness. Later, she established a counseling center called “Them Bones” – a reference to the prophet Ezekiel’s vision of God breathing life back into dry bones as an image of Divine love for those who have lost hope. Even at the end of her life, she was working for her veterans, moving Them Bones to the Motherhouse so that she could continue her ministry. One of the very last things she did was to get support for a Veteran’s Pod at the Cincinnati Justice Center, so that the veterans who are incarcerated there can support each other.
S. Andrea said that S. Kateri let nothing stand in her way. On a shelf in her office at Them Bones she had a toy Bradley tank, to which her picture had been affixed. She told S. Andrea that the veterans had given it to her. Disturbed by the warlike image, she had asked if they really saw her that way. “Yes,” the soldiers said, “you are as relentless as that tank in advocating for us.” She kept the toy and looked at it every day to remind herself that God’s love is also gentle.
S. Kateri died in 2016, but her influence has not. Both Sisters Joyce and Andrea said they “idolized” her and “had her on a pedestal.” Her example and invitation were the reason they became Sisters of Charity themselves. The teens she gathered at Santa Maria’s Youth Club hangout still remember her as “Our Mother Teresa right here in Cincinnati.”II William and Arlene Yaley named their adopted daughter after S. Kateri; as he said, “She is truly an unheralded saint who will be missed dearly.”III Alicia Patterson, the current director of Joseph House, believes its “astounding growth” – from a small beginning to its new facility with 58 residential beds and outpatient services – is because of S. Kateri: “Because she believed in the guys, because she cared.” Because she answered the call to image God’s love.
IWilliam Yaley, “The Unsung Saint of South Vietnam.” Notre Dame Magazine, November 16, 2016IIDan Warnock, “Fire Station and Sister Kateri Maureen.” Price Hill Historical Society, Heritage on the Hill, Volume 33, Number 9, March 2023IIIWilliam Yaley, “The Unsung Saint of South Vietnam.”
Dedication
S. Andrea Koverman, cousin of the late S. Kateri Maureen Koverman, addresses the audience at the dedication of Joseph House’s new facility for women and men veterans in June 2024.
Board Room
S. Andrea Koverman and her sister, Teresa, stand next to the plaque in the Board Room of the newly dedicated Joseph honoring their late cousin, S. Kateri Koverman, as the organization’s co-founder.
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