Frances “Fran” Tobin, RSCJ

Religious of the Sacred Heart, Frances “Fran” Tobin died December 27, 2025, in Atherton, California. Fran was born on July 18,1934, in San Antonio, Texas, to Frances Travers Tobin and Donald Jerome Tobin. She was one of four children with two sisters and a brother. The family moved from San Antonio to Hartford, Connecticut, and to Baltimore, Maryland, before they returned to Houston and Dallas, Texas.

Fran’s primary education was in schools in Maryland. She attended Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart in New York and completed her B.A. in English in May of 1956. In a published book related to contemporary American nuns, Fran reflects: “I was not your church person. I preferred parties and sports. I played tennis and golf and sailed a lot. I didn’t really know much about God.”

Fran entered the Society of the Sacred Heart at Kenwood in 1956 and made her first vows in 1959. After a year’s education training at Kenwood, she served as a teacher, counselor, and administrator at the Sacred Heart Schools in Rochester and Buffalo. In the summers, she attended Manhattanville, where she completed an MA program in 1964 after writing her thesis on Death and Resurrection in “The Wreck of the Deutschland” by Gerald Manley Hopkins.

Sister Tobin made her probation and final profession in Rome on July 21, 1964. She returned to the Sacred Heart school in Buffalo as head of the middle school and assumed the same position at Kenwood from 1966 to 1969. Following a year of teaching and advising high school students at the Academy of the Sacred Heart in Noroton, Connecticut, Sister Tobin earned her Master of Divinity in Theology from Andover Newton Theological School, graduating cum laude in 1973.

Between 1973 and 1979, Sister Tobin served as director of pastoral field education at St. John’s Provincial Seminary in Plymouth, Michigan. She was the first woman to hold this role at the seminary, where priests from across Michigan were trained. She taught classes in the Theology of Ministry, Foundations for Pastoral Care, and Women in Church and Society. For two of her years at the seminary, Sister Tobin was chairperson of the U.S. Bishops’ Committee on Women in Seminaries and in 1975 was a facilitator of the Archdiocesan Pastoral Assembly.

In 1980, while taking a sabbatical in Detroit, Sister Tobin joined the Team for Justice, an organization focused on reforming the city’s prison system. She served as a counselor to women in jail for two or three years and also held the position of Archdiocesan Correctional Chaplain to Women. In 1981, Sister Tobin found herself in court defending jailed young women prostitutes and drug addicts; once a judge asked her: “When are you going to law school? Because you’re doing what a lawyer does every time you come into the courtroom.”

To further develop her advocacy abilities and deepen her understanding of the law, Sister Tobin, at the age of 49, enrolled at Antioch Law School in Washington, D.C., an institution dedicated to preparing students to serve as legal advocates for underprivileged communities. She received her J.D. in 1984. Following her admission to the bar, she spent three months in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua to enhance her Spanish language proficiency, which would facilitate effective communication with Hispanic women. Sister Tobin collaborated with the Central American Refugee Legal Center in Houston for the next six years from 1984 to 1990, where she helped with political asylum and amnesty cases.

Because of asthma, upon her doctor’s advice, Sister Tobin left Houston to become an immigration attorney and director of immigration court cases in San Deigo. She worked at Catholic Charities from 1990 to 2006 where her court cases often involved assisting undocumented or battered women and children.

Following a sabbatical year in 2006, Sister Tobin relocated to Redwood City, where she undertook roles including serving as the UN-NGO US Province liaison, representing the Society in matters concerning Medicare and Medicaid, and facilitating discussions on immigration across various forums. She also assisted low-income families with HICAP, a Health Insurance Counseling and Advocacy Program.

In 2011, Sister Tobin was sent on a year’s mission to Uganda-Kenya. She had a call for many years to go to the missions and said, “I believe this call is a continuation of the other calls, a call building on all the others in my life … it involves listening, pondering, walking daily in the present, loving the gift of the moment.” Sister Tobin would enjoy two more months during the summer of 2014 in Uganda.

When she returned from her full year in Uganda, Sister Tobin again joined the religious community in Redwood City where she continued from 2012 to 2019 the ministries she had established in this city. She was a very active member of the Intercommunity Legal Conference (INLC). One of the actions members participated in was at the international America’s Cup Race in the Bay Area; during their competitions, Fran and the INLC brought the issue of the injustice of human trafficking to visitors’ attention and educated hotel management to develop policies against trafficking. She was in all her ministries a warrior for justice!

In 2019, Sister Tobin retired to the Oakwood Retirement Community in Atherton, California, and spent the next six years as an active, loving member of the community. The Associates of San Francisco said that she “set high standards and backed them up with experiences from her own life. The sincerity and fortitude of her faith journey strengthened us.” Sister Tobin once said “I like to teach, counsel and advocate, but it is always with a sense of empowering others, getting them to affirm themselves. She surely kindled that “fire” Christ came to cast on this earth.  

On December 27, 2025, Sister Tobin passed away, leaving a legacy of courage and inspiration advocating for justice.

A memorial mass was held for Sister Tobin on January 12, 2026. Memorial contributions in memory of Sister Frances Tobin, RSCJ, may be made to the Society of the Sacred Heart, P.O. Box 958047, St. Louis, MO 63195-8047, or online at https://rscj.org/donate.