Birth: October 29, 1931
Profession: July 21, 1960
Death: October 31, 2023
Rosemary Frances Bearss, RSCJ
Rosemary Bearss loved a great question. She loved to ask them and receive them. She loved to learn and question and ponder. Rosemary loved Don Quixote and his great friend Sancho. She loved being part of seeing others become their best selves and to discover the whisper of their God. She loved purple, the Golden State Warriors, the Oregon Trail, trains (especially those connected to Union Pacific Railroad), everything that had to do with the Barnyard in Miami, and Shamrock, the crazy dog she won at the raffle in the Duchesne Academy Conge. Rosemary loved to think things out, to gather people together for meaningful conversations, to eat great food, and most of all, she loved people. Like the image of the quilting circle, she loved gathering people together to stitch ideas, memories, and prophetic imaginations bound together with honesty, around a table where each participant made a commitment to remain – to “stay at the table” until it was done. Rosemary loved her birthday, October 29, more than most any other day, and it is fitting that she waited to cross the boundary into new life until after her family and friends had welcomed her into her 91st year.
Rosemary was born the fourth and youngest child of Mary Ellen McKenna and Harry James Bearss. Her parents had several things in common: both came from families where education and agriculture intersected. Both left the farms of their origin to pursue lives as educators, meeting in a two-room schoolhouse in Vancouver, Washington. While neither spent many years in a classroom, they never stopped educating. Her mother’s family immigrated from Ireland and found their way to the Oregon coast where the land was similar to the soil of Ireland, while her father was the 12th generation of midwestern farmers, having arrived on the Eastern shores of this new land in 1636.
Like so many things in Rosemary’s life, most of her life was lived – not on the edges or coasts, but in the middle of things. From educator to auditor general of Union Pacific Railroad, her father’s work necessitated a move from her birthplace in Portland, Oregon to Omaha, Nebraska when Rosemary was 10. In that move, she learned life lessons about letting go of what you love while never leaving behind the people who have shaped your life. In the fullness of life, Rosemary now knows her sister three years older, Patricia, who died of meningitis the year before Rosemary was born. Rosemary’s birth, following the death of a child, shaped the way she reverenced life. Early on, she knew that one of the most powerful gifts one could give another was to listen whole-heartedly, without judgement or attempts to control; listening to the gift of life and love, never to be taken for granted.
Throughout her life, Rosemary was greatly loved by her brother Jim, 10 years her senior, and her older sister, Eileen, with whom she would share the deepest journey of their lives as Religious of the Sacred Heart. In 1944, as Jim was leaving for three years in the South Pacific in World War II, he married Mary Eileen Mailand, who was always grateful for the sisters she inherited by marrying Jim. They loved sharing their 5 children, 11 grandchildren, and 19 great-grandchildren with Rosemary and Eileen. Throughout her life, Rosemary kept track of each one as though they had been the singular focus of her attention and life.
The move to Omaha was a ground-shifting moment in the young Bearss family. For Rosemary, the experience initiated a process of understanding that became a central organizing principle in her life. She began noticing the power of choice. She saw how different members of her family dealt with challenge, change, abundance, scarcity, loss, and possibility. She recounted how it shaped her understanding that the small choices form the large ones, and with every small choice, the large decisions are made. This experience was deepened as her adolescence was fashioned by World War II. Eventually, she would connect these questions to her life-long journey of discernment: the way God worked with her and the way she worked with God.
Her questions and her ability to understand life’s fragility awakened a desire to make her life’s journey one of seeking truth, right action, following an interior invitation, ignited in her years as a student at Duchesne College in Omaha, Nebraska. Some years earlier, her sister Eileen had entered the Society of the Sacred Heart, so Rosemary knew something of the urgings of the Spirit. But it was her experience as a student in relationship to the RSCJ at Duchesne that led her to follow her own vocational pathway. It was to follow the questions in an ever-deepening labyrinth of truth that led her to the Society of the Sacred Heart in 1951.
In her 72 years in the Society of the Sacred Heart, Rosemary’s passion for listening, discernment, shaping structures to invite participation, giving and receiving spiritual accompaniment, and participatory decision-making grew stronger as she consistently followed the route her questions took her. She was formed and shaped as a learner by her time at Duchesne College, Jesuit School of Theology in Chicago, and DePaul University. But, most of all, it was her conviction that the pathway to freedom, happiness, integrity, and joy was the way of discernment. She believed that the Society of the Sacred Heart had a particular invitation to probe the depths of the spirituality of those early conversations of Madeleine Sophie at the table in France and to re-interpret the new questions through the power of individual and communal discernment. This way of being, for Rosemary, was not a process to be dusted off for decision-making, but the distinctive way of living for every Religious of the Sacred Heart.
Rosemary Frances Bearss was a woman of the prairie: hard-working, tenacious in willingness to fight for the one others believed unworthy, and as creative with an idea as she was as a quilter, a knitter, an artist and an author. She never left behind her ancestral passion for discovery. She loved the Oregon Trail, heralding the stories of adventure of both her family journeys across the Atlantic ocean to farm, and the members of the Society who were willing to be wrong in their pursuit of a new imagination. Rosemary was always a student, with a book in hand and a notebook to capture it. Her office, lined with binders filled with notes, lectures, prayer services, and interesting facts, there was always one labeled “new ideas and questions.” She was an early adapter of the Women’s Ordination Conference and the Christian Life Community movement. She believed in our responsibility to make visible the work of Catholic Social Thought and Vatican II and she was proud to have been part of Nance O’Neil’s first team for the newly formed US Province. She held both innovation and tradition in her hand and was unabashed to recognize her own limitations and paradoxes.
Most of all, Rosemary Frances Bearss was in relationship with the world. She loved serving the Society of the Sacred Heart in whatever way she was asked. She both loved and struggled in her life of 17 years of leadership in the Chicago and United States Provinces, but it was, for her, a profound act of love. She fought with her life for the Act of Hope and believed that it would come to fruition in someone else’s lifetime. She was willing to stay at the table for the difficult conversations about polarities, believing that the work of the Society of the Sacred Heart must include the work of seeking equality and justice – for all. She saw racism, sexism, and divisions between socio-economic divides as a place where the educational mission of the Society of the Sacred Heart had a particular responsibility and opportunity, and she always wanted to do more, and to do it more quickly than it seemed possible.
Towards the end of her life, Rosemary described falling in love all over again with the mission of the Society of the Sacred Heart and her integration of that love with the Act of Hope. Her 20 years at the Barnyard in Miami, Florida were years of being love and being in love, for Rosemary. She loved the children, her work, the possibility of building bridges of transformation that this was living the Act of Hope. She loved her years, her role, and the people with whom she lived and worked, and grieved when it was time to depart for Oakwood.
Yet, waiting for her at Oakwood was her sister, Eileen. In 60 years of religious life, Eileen and Rosemary had never lived in the same city, much less the same house. Together, they learned how to love one another in the letting go, the letting be, the slower steps and longer times for quiet. They watched hundreds of hours of the Golden State Warriors, found spots together in the dining room, shared a bit of banter about the homily, and waited for the next family phone call. These were years of release into the real, and they did it together.
While a car accident and the onset of dementia stole words from Rosemary, the precious commodity which had been her powerful means of exchange, her presence, never failed. It was impossible to tell if Rosemary knew who was calling her name, but it was clear that this woman of discernment never waivered from her knowing the voice of God.
And so…what does she say to us today: It’s all about choices |The little decisions make the big ones |Stay at the Table |Discern |Love One Another as I have loved you. We give thanks, in the Society of the Sacred Heart, and the Bearss Family….for a life well lived.
A Funeral Mass was held on December 7, 2023, in Atherton, California.
Memorial Contributions can be made to the Society of the Sacred Heart, United States-Canada, 4120 Forest Park Avenue, St. Louis, MO 63108.
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