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Sister Concepta Marie Brennan, M.M., a pioneering missioner to Panama, Nicaragua and Mexico, died on Dec. 25 at the Maryknoll Sisters Residential Care IV in Ossining. She was 95.
She was one of an initial group of seven Maryknoll sisters sent to Central America in 1943. She helped found the mission in Ancon, Panama City, in the Panama Canal Zone. In 1950 she was also among the first Maryknoll sisters to open the mission in Siuna, Nicaragua. She co-founded the Instituto Seglar de Maria Immaculada, a community of young Yucatan women in Merida, Mexico, in 1958. She served as the institute’s superior from 1959 to 1968.
Sister Concepta Marie then taught at the Maryknoll school in Mexico City before serving among the poor in parishes operated by Maryknoll priests in Mexico City and in Cuernavaca, Morelos State. She continued in that ministry from 1974 until her retirement in 2001. In 1983 she became the first Maryknoll sister to complete 40 years of mission work in Latin America.
Born in Philadelphia, she entered Maryknoll in 1936 and professed her final vows in 1942. She attended the University of Pennsylvania and held a diploma in pastoral theology and catechetics from the Catechetical Institute of Mexico and a professional certificate in catechetics from the Pastoral Institute in Carlow, Ireland.
A Funeral Mass was offered Dec. 29 in the main chapel at the Maryknoll Sisters Center in Ossining. Burial was in the sisters’ cemetery.
