Sister Madeline “Maddie” Dorsey, M.M.

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Sister Madeline “Maddie” Dorsey, M.M., died Feb. 13 at Maryknoll Sisters Center in Ossining. She was 102.

From 1976 to 1981, she was on mission in El Salvador during the Central American nation’s civil war. When four Churchwomen were brutally murdered by Salvadoran national guardsmen in 1980, she was one of the Maryknoll Sisters who identified the bodies. In 1981, when the Salvadoran Church and government authorities said the safety of the sisters could not be assured, they reluctantly left the country.

She served on a team of Maryknoll Sisters who in 1955 opened the first racially integrated hospital in the United States, Queen of the World Hospital in Kansas City, Mo. She and another Maryknoll sister, representing black doctors who worked with them at Queen of the World Hospital, marched in Alabama on the front lines from Selma to Montgomery in 1965.

She received her first overseas mission to Panama in 1945, working in public health and teaching catechetics. She was then assigned to Riberalta, Bolivia, and served as a public health nurse and nursing supervisor and helped set up a jungle hospital. She served in Ceylon, 1949-1955, and Peru, 1966-1971.

She returned to the Maryknoll Sisters Center, assisting with health services in the sisters’ Bethany Nursing Home until 1976.

The next 16 years, through 1992, were spent in Central America.

In 1993, she returned to Maryknoll Sisters Center, serving the elderly sisters and assisting with outreach among the Hispanic community through St. Ann’s parish and the Open Door Family Medical Centers in Ossining.

She retired in 2006.

Born in Brooklyn, she entered the Maryknoll Sisters in 1936 and professed final vows in 1942.

She earned a bachelor’s degree in nursing from The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and a master’s in religious studies from Maryknoll Seminary.

She donated her body to science. A Memorial Mass was offered Feb. 18. Her remains will be interred at Maryknoll Sisters Cemetery in Ossining at a later date.

Sister Madeline “Maddie” Dorsey, M.M.