Sister Dorothy Rubner, M.M.

Sister Dorothy Rubner, M.M., who served in China during the tumult of the communist takeover, died Dec. 18 at the Maryknoll Residential Care IV. She was 91.

Assigned to China in 1946, she served at an isolated mission in Wuzhou Diocese, Guangdong Province, before she was placed under house arrest with another Maryknoll nun, Sister Rose Bernadette Gallagher, after the Communists came to power in 1949. She was held from 1950 to 1952 and then expelled from mainland China along with other foreign missionaries.

Arriving in Hong Kong, she began serving the needs of thousands of Chinese refugees then flooding into the British colony. She served in Chai Wan and King’s Park doing pastoral work and helping refugees build new homes and rebuild their lives.

She returned to the United States in 1953 to work with the Chinese immigrant communities in New York and Chicago. She went back to Hong Kong in 1967 to establish the Kwun Tong Pastoral Center. In 1981 she volunteered with other Maryknoll Sisters to open a new mission in Macau close to the China border. She served there eight years organizing programs for the elderly and for new migrants.

In 1994, she returned to Hong Kong, where she began a whole new ministry at 75, working for the English-language diocesan weekly.

Born in Milwaukee, Wis., she entered the Maryknoll Sisters in 1940, taking the religious name Sister Barbara Marie. She professed final vows in 1946.

A Funeral Mass was offered on Dec. 28 at the main chapel of the Maryknoll Sisters Center in Ossining. Burial followed in the sisters’ cemetery.