Sister Kathleen Keenan
This year’s devastating earthquake in Haiti meant a personal loss for Sister Kathleen Marie Keenan, RSM, senior vice president of mission and sponsorship for Mercy Health System, the largest Catholic health care provider in Southeastern Pennsylvania.
As a decade-long member of the Global Health Ministry Board of Catholic Health East, Mercy’s parent organization, she has visited Haiti, Peru, and other developing countries where the Sisters of Mercy have a presence to set up health care teams in remote communities that have never seen a doctor or nurse.
“On my last trip to Haiti, I had a great visit with Archbishop (Joseph Serge) Miot. Less than a year later, he died in the Cathedral with 100 seminarians who were having a retreat experience. For me, these were not just faces on the media, they were people I knew,” she says.
But because of her work, many earthquake survivors received medical care from Mercy teams, some on the ground, some flown in from Mercy hospitals in the Philadelphia region.
Along with her RSM, Sister Kathleen has another set of letters at the end of her name: MBA. This native of Springfield, Delaware County, the descendant of Irish immigrants from Tyrone, has had a 40-year career of leadership in a variety of fields: As a teacher and principal of parish schools; as director of Catholic education for the Sisters of Mercy supervising 45 schools along the east coast; and finally in health care ministry for which she got an MBA in health care administration and another masters in long-term care administration to add to her masters in education administration.
Today, her job is to insure that everyone who works in a Mercy hospital understands Mercy’s mission: “to provide compassionate care and access to people living in the communities where our hospitals are located.
“We don’t turn anyone away from our hospitals, no matter their ability to pay,” she says. “We try to serve the whole person. There’s a pastoral aspect to our care. We treat the person, not just the injury—mind, body, and spirit, and their families are included in that equation. The Sisters of Mercy are unique among religious. All religious take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. We take a fourth vow—to serve the poor, sick, and uneducated. In some ways you can see I’ve lived out those vows.”
Not just in some ways.
