Dolores Moloney

Sister Dolores Moloney, SNDdeN was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1939, the daughter of James and Cecile (Meilleur) Moloney. On Sundays, after Mass, Sister Dolores remembers walking with her family to the Lynn Woods Reservation, a municipal park, and learning about the Native Americans who once lived in the area.

She and her older sister attended St. Mary’s throughout grade school and high school, where they were taught by the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur. As young as second grade, Sister Dolores looked at her teachers and thought, “I want to be like them when I grow up.” As a fifth grader, she began serving in the church’s sacristy, cleaning and setting up for Mass each week, a role she continued through high school.

Although she was confident in her calling to religious life, Sister Dolores didn’t tell a soul other than her best friend, Elaine, until she was a senior in high school. She remembers the night she shared her plans to join the convent with her parents. First she brought it up with her mother while her father was at work. Mother said, “Whatever you want, dear.”

“It was after 10 at night when my father came home from work, and when I heard him, I scrambled into bed,” she recalls. “He shouted, ‘WHAT?’ and he came into my bedroom, just walked right in, and asked, ‘What did you just tell your mother?’ He was upset for a couple of weeks, but then it was okay. We had a very good relationship.”

She entered the novitiate after graduating in 1956, and took the religious name Sister James Cecilia, after her parents. For 49 years, she taught first graders throughout Massachusetts.

“I remember there was a little girl in my class named Colleen,” says Sister Dolores. “One day after school, her mother came in and said, ‘Sister, every day Colleen comes home and tells me what a beautiful voice you have. Would you sing something for me?’ I would sing all the time with the children, but I never thought my voice was particularly good. So I started, ‘The wheels on the bus go round and round …’ She said, ‘Thank you, Sister,’ went out the door and never asked me to sing again!”

After retiring from the classroom, Sister Dolores worked for 19 years as the secretary at St. Patrick’s School in Lowell, Massachusetts.

“I loved teaching, but working at St. Patrick’s was wonderful, too,” she says. “I loved it. The families were mostly Southeast Asians – Laotian, Vietnamese, Cambodians. They came to me to pay tuition, and we talked and talked. They always kissed me goodbye. As a staff member, I could visit the kids in the classroom and say silly things to make them laugh—and then leave and let the teacher deal with it!”

After retiring again from her job at St. Patrick’s, Sister Dolores took a sabbatical and was then called to live at the novitiate in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she mentored younger Sisters.

As she reflected on her 70 years of religious life, celebrated in 2026, Sister Dolores thanked our good God.

“I’m very grateful for the life that God has given me,” she says. “I couldn’t have asked for better. I’ve had hard times, of course, but God has been good to me and gave me wonderful people to live with and work with.”

Updated in 2026.