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Sister Rosemary Melsopp, M.S.C., a nurse who cared for the poor in the United States and overseas, died Jan. 16 at McAuley Hall Health Care Center in Watchung, N.J. She was 87.
She earned a nursing degree at St. Catherine’s Hospital in Brooklyn and served there and at French Hospital in Manhattan. Later she cared for AIDS patients at St. Clare’s Hospital in Manhattan. She cared for persons with Hansen’s disease in Bangladesh and Pakistan, and those with AIDS in Haiti.
She worked with miners and their families in West Virginia, served at a hospital in Canada and was the staff nurse for a year at Manhattanville College.
Born in Manhattan, she entered the Marianites of Holy Cross in New Orleans in 1944 and professed final vows at Our Lady of Princeton, her congregation’s former provincialate in Princeton, N.J., in 1949. She had resided at McAuley Hall Health Care Center since 1999.
She is survived by a brother, Robert, and a sister, Sister Carol Melsopp, P.B.V.M., who teaches at Sacred Heart School in Newburgh and formerly was principal of Sacred Heart School in Highland Falls.
A Funeral Mass was celebrated Jan. 20 in the chapel of the McAuley center by Father Michael P. McLoughlin, pastor of St. Stephen’s parish in Warwick. Burial was at Our Lady of Princeton Cemetery in Princeton.
