Maria Delaney
“A person does more good in the place where divine Providence has put her than would all others with more talents.” – St. Julie Billiart
Sister Maria Anne Delaney, SNDdeN was born Anne Delaney in Marlboro, Massachusetts, where her father owned a newsstand. The Sisters of Saint Joseph taught her at Immaculate Conception Elementary in Marlborough, Massachusetts. She went on to Hudson Catholic High School in Hudson, Massachusetts, where she first met the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur and heard the call to vocation.
This was a call, however, that she tried to ignore. “My first pull to religious life came when I was fifteen,” she explains, “and I didn’t like the thought at all. I prayed about it, and I spoke with a Sister. Notre Dame attracted me because I had a devotion to Mary and because the Sisters were very approachable; they didn’t seem ‘otherworldly.'” She also liked the fact that they were international.
Her parents wanted her to finish college before making her decision. As a freshman at Emmanuel, she broke her hip in a toboggan accident. “They decided it could have been worse,” she shares, “so they might as well let me enter!” She entered the novitiate at the age of 19.
In 2024, she was chosen to serve her fellow Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur as a member of the U.S. East-West Province Leadership Team.
Sister Maria is profoundly grateful for her decades of service, mission and leadership. “I am deeply grateful for 60 years of life as a Sister of Notre Dame de Namur,” she reflects. “It has been a great gift and I pray that other women, if called in this direction, will also have the opportunity to live their lives as consecrated religious.”
