USA Today Honors Sister Lynn Marie Welbig as South Dakota Woman of the Year

USA Today has named Sister Lynn Marie Welbig of the Presentation Sisters the South Dakota Woman of the Year. Sister Lynn Marie delivered eloquent moral testimony against Governor Kristi Noem’s history-censorship bills and helped push the Legislature to water down one of those bills and kill the other.

Sister Lynn Marie’s comments about her experience in the Legislature stand in stark contrast to our high-politicking but low-performing Governor. For one thing, Sister Lynn Marie gets the impression that, while her political stands often run counter to the ideology of our majority party, legislators actually listen to her:

…I think the Capitol, the legislators and the other lobbyists are not used to having a sister out there.

If I sit down to testify before a committee, it’s noticeable. Everything quiets down. The eyes are on me, because I’m kind of exotic. I’m not somebody they’re used to. On the other hand, I sense there’s a certain trust of the sisters – not necessarily Sister Lynn Marie – but the sisters have standing in the state. I feel that out there.

When I speak, they sense I’m not just politicking. I’m trying to get at a just issue, a resolution of something that would be good for the people. I think there’s a kind of respect, but it certainly was a surprise to me when I was asked to be a lobbyist, because that’s not typically what (sisters) have been doing [Sister Lynn Marie Welbig, in Morgan Matzen, “USA Today’s Women of the Year Honors Sister Lynn Marie Wlebig, ‘A Nun the Lord Let Loose’,” Sioux Falls Argus Leader, 2022.03.13].

Maybe legislators are more inclined to at least listen to Sister Lynn Marie than to our distracted Governor because Sister Lynn Marie’s courage is focused on serving others, not herself:

Courage has to have a companion that I call faith. Real courage is not self-serving, it’s other-serving. You see something that is broken, and that needs to be addressed, and somehow you have within your heart and soul the vision to see it and to say, “I can’t leave this alone. I have to do something about it, even if it means big costs or sacrifice.” I think it takes faith to do that. That’s how I would define courage. It takes faith in vision and of course, the heart and the backbone to do it [Sister Lynn Marie Welbig, in Matzen, 2022.03.13].

Like Noem, Sister Lynn Marie speaks of growing up amidst hard farm life. Unlike Kristi Noem, Sister Lynn Marie seeks not sympathy for her travails but understanding of what we can learn from that hard upbringing:

I was raised on a farm and we were very “do it yourself” people, so when you are those kinds of people, you take care of things, and you fix things, and you grow things, and you love the earth, and you are tied to the earth. So I think early in my formative self, I wanted to make the world a better place.

And then I learned about Nano Nagle. She’s the woman from Ireland who founded the Presentation Sisters. Now she’s a model for me of seeing what’s going on in the world, and if you want to put that in a Christian context, you hold that issue up against the Gospel, and where there’s dissonance, you’re called to go to work. Do something about this. Don’t just talk about it, don’t just look at it, don’t just wring your hand, get out and do something [transcribed from video].

…I was born and raised during World War II, when many of the staples we needed were rationed, so we were used to sacrificial living.

I went to school with the Presentation Sisters, and there was this one nun in particular, Sister Helen. Most of us were farm kids. Sister Helen would say to us, “Now when you get out of school, you don’t want to just go out there and try to get rich and be dumb, fat and happy. You want to change the world. You want to leave a footprint. You want to leave the world better than you found it. This is the Christian way. This is what Jesus would want you to do.”

Then I learned about Nano Nagle, a woman from Ireland and the founder of the Presentation Sisters. She had gone to France to get educated, then came back home and saw what was happening to her people. She said, “I can’t let this go,” so she became a covert operator.

She went out and gathered girls off the street, found an old, empty garage and started a school there. She got some other women to help her, and pretty soon, she had several of these covert schools going. She’s a model for me [Sister Lynn Marie Welbig, in Matzen, 2022.03.13].

Sister Lynn Marie Welbig is a model of humble public service. She deserves USA Today’s recognition and our gratitude for her efforts to live out her values and improve our world.