Janelle Sevier

“For from [the Word’s] fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.”

John 1:16

Sister Janelle Sevier, SNDdeN was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, one of four children. Her mother and father met in the Navy, where they were pharmacist mates. Her father was from Baton Rouge and her mother from New Bedford, Massachusetts. As a result, they lived in both the North and the South at different times, and she claims both as “home.” She spent most of her early schooling in Baton Rouge, but at the end of her sophomore year they moved North, where she finished her last two years at Bishop Stang High School in North Dartmouth, Mass., where she first met the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur.

After high school, she worked for a year in bookkeeping and selling shoes. “I must have been an early advocate of equal pay because I quit the first job when the owner refused to give me a raise when he had given a boy, who started at the same time as I did, a raise,” she recalls. “My work was actually more complex, and it didn’t seem fair!”

After a year of saving money and garnering some work experience, she entered the Sisters of Notre Dame. Even before high school, she says that she had a desire to join religious life. “And I was absolutely smitten by the joy and commitment the SNDs had in high school,” she says. “They were smart, joyful, and in love with God — and I wanted to be like them!”

In the mid-to-late 1970s, she taught math and science at Our Lady of the Angels School in Worcester and math at Notre Dame Academy in Tyngsboro, Mass. “But I realized I wanted to be more fully involved in people’s lives than classroom teaching at that time allowed, and I had already felt a call to missionary life,” she says. So after two years at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, and with a master’s in theological studies with specialization in cross-cultural studies, she joined the Sisters on a mission in the Kenya Unit from 1980-1999.

During that time, after language school in Tanzania, she worked in Kisumu for eight years as part of the diocese’s pastoral team, focusing on human and spiritual development. “This included anything from running a program for street boys to being a chaplain for the women’s prison to doing “Life in the Spirit” retreats and spiritual direction,” she says.

From there, she spent 10 years in Nairobi doing vocation and formation work while teaching theology at two seminaries. She worked in a large, very poor parish in the heart of Nairobi (St. Teresa Parish), giving directed retreats to parishioners, training lay spiritual directors for the parish, and helping develop Small Christian Communities. She then spent a year in the northern desert of Kenya, in Kakuma, at the UNHCR Refugee Camp, where she was part of a pastoral team for the diocese of Rumbek (Sudan) that had opened a Parish within the refugee camp. She was involved in working with small groups, reflecting on their experience of God and life, and providing weekly liturgical experiences and at moments of crisis.

She worked with AIDS patients and their families in Zimbabwe, and established a program for children affected by AIDS in the Diocese of Bulawayo for the AIDS and Orphan Care Project. In Les Cayes, Haiti, she and another SNDdeN began a ministry to very poor women and children.

Since returning stateside, she has been involved with a variety of ministries and activities, including servicing those affected by AIDS with the Family Service of Greater Baton Rouge, Baton Rouge.

Pastoral ministries included St. Jude Parish, St. Aloysius Parish, and St. Thomas More Parish in Baton Rouge; Immaculate Conception Parish, Denham Springs, Louisiana; and in Massachusetts, Saint Thomas the Apostle Parish, Peabody, Gonzaga Retreat House, Gloucester, and Miramar Retreat Center, Duxbury. She also served as director of Mission Integration in Ipswich, Mass.

“I feel very graced to have lived the life I have had thus far — and I am deeply grateful to God for all the people and experiences that have been part of it. I have been privileged to have been with ‘the poor in the most abandoned places,’ to share deeply in the experience of God in people’s lives, and to have known God’s touch in my own. God is indeed good.”