Sr. Sheila M. Patenaude FMM

Born in Tacoma, Washington, of Canadian parents who became US citizens on her 15th birthday, Sheila was given the Gaelic form of St. Cecilia (patron saint of music) for her first name, since her mother taught music. Her surname is archaic French for Pater Noster (“Our Father”), and throughout her life, both God’s fatherly Providence and music have been very important to her spiritual life.

Saddened by the death of two children soon before Sheila’s birth, her family moved to California, where Sheila was raised with her younger sister. She attended schools run by the Sisters of St. Joseph and Dominican Sisters, but surrounded by Franciscan missions and attending a Franciscan church, Sheila knew she would become a missionary from age 9 and a Franciscan and religious from age 15. All this made the FMM charism very attractive to her, when she first met the FMMs in high school.

At age 18, Sheila travelled East with her mother to join the FMM’s at Fruit Hill, RI. As a young religious, she worked as house assistant and group mother for young children at 45th Street, New York, became provincial secretary, and taught briefly at Fall River. After beginning college in Brooklyn, Sheila transferred to Emmanuel College and received a BA in Sociology and an M.A. in English from Boston College before being sent to India via Rome in 1964. The group went by ship, stopped at Fatima and Majorca, and while waiting four months in Rome for her visa to India, Sheila helped out at the Secretariat and fell in love with Rome, which she later visited several times as a translator and for a Tabor Sabbatical in 2002.

For almost five years Sheila taught at Maris Stella College in Vijayawada, India, and organized a students’ Social Service League that regularly visited nearby poor villages. In 1969, because of her mother’s illness and the Indian Government’s proposed new policy of changing the teaching medium to local state languages, Sheila returned home briefly and was then missioned to West Africa. She taught high school in Liberia and also worked with the young adult RCIA program, the Legion of Mary, and prison ministry. At the prison Sheila picked up an infection that left her with a constant fever, so she recuperated briefly in Senegal, became provincial secretary in Burkina Faso (then Upper Volta) and was then missioned in Tamale, Ghana, for eight years. There, as Regional Coordinator of the Christian Mothers’ Association, Sheila gave leadership training courses to women in three dioceses and organized 14 local village groups in her own parish. She learned how to speak Dagbani and held monthly meetings with mostly Muslim and animist women’s groups in each village, using the SEE, JUDGE, ACT method to discuss and act re: local health and other issues. She also started the Dagomba Women’s Credit Union and prepared a few women for Christian baptism. For her 25th anniversary, the parish and Sisters arranged a huge festival, with dancing and costumes of three tribes and Mass and renewal of vows in Dagbani in the local parish church.

During her last three years in Ghana, Sheila was also a Peace Corps Volunteer, but due to health problems, she returned to the USA in October 1979 for a health check-up, Exodus Sabbatical program in New Mexico, and a short parish ministry in Hazlehurst, Georgia.

In 1980 Sheila went to New York for major surgery, and after her recuperation, taught GED in a women’s halfway house in Harlem (Project Greenhope) and then taught at St. Pius V High School in the South Bronx.

She was vocation director for six years and compiled a two-volume history of the FMM in the USA before being missioned to Chamberino, New Mexico, in 2003. There Sheila taught English at two local community colleges and World Religious Traditions at the University of Phoenix. When the Chamberino house closed, she moved to Las Cruces, taught part-time at the community college, and was also a tutor and substitute high school teacher, as well as spiritual assistant for a Secular Franciscan fraternity. In 2017 Sheila resigned as Adjunct Professor and SFO spiritual assistant and was assigned to Fruit Hill to help reorganize and update the province archives.

Sheila was missioned to Ein Karim Community Oct 3,2024, in residence at St. Antoine’s Skilled Nursing Care. She passed away peacefully on September 14, 2026. May her gentle soul rest in peace.

Visitation service will begin at 6:00 pm on Thursday, September 24th with her Mass of Christian Burial on Friday, September 25th at 10:00 am at the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary, 399 Fruit Hill Avenue, North Providence. Burial will follow in Resurrection Cemetery, Cumberland.