A memorial service for Loretto Sister Kay Lane was celebrated Nov. 23 in the Church of the Seven Dolors on the grounds of Loretto Motherhouse in Nerinx, Kentucky. Sister Kay died Nov. 14 at Loretto Motherhouse Infirmary. She was a longtime educator who served for nearly half a century in parochial schools in the St. Louis Archdiocese and in California and Kentucky.
Sister Kay was 87 and in the 69th year of her life as a Sister of Loretto at the Foot of the Cross.
Born in Mobile, Alabama, Sister Kay entered the Sisters of Loretto in 1951 and later that year was received into the congregation, taking the name Sister Timothy Marie. She made her first vows in 1953 and her final vows in 1957. Sister Kay earned a bachelor’s degree in education, with minors in philosophy and French, in 1962 and a master’s in teaching, with an emphasis on liturgy, in 1968, both from Webster College (now University) in St. Louis.
In the St. Louis Archdiocese, Sister Kay taught in St. Louis at St. Pius School in 1954, Sacred Heart from 1959-62 and Visitation-Holy Ghost from 1962-68. Elsewhere, she taught in parochial elementary schools for five years in Louisville and was a teacher and principal in parochial schools in California. One of Sister Kay’s novitiate classmates, Loretto Sister Marian McAvoy, noted Sister Kay was an “excellent school woman. As principal she was very aware of her faculty’s needs. She had a way of bringing out what was good in people. And not just people, either; plants and animals as well responded to Kay’s encouragement.”
Sister Kay retired from teaching in 2000. She moved to Marion County, Ky., in 2013. Late this fall Sister Kay moved to Loretto Motherhouse Infirmary, where she resided until her death. She donated her body to the University of Louisville School of Medicine.
