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Happening ... in the Local Church
 Sister
Raphael Kochert, OSF, served for 23 years in hospital pastoral care,
including 16 in Lafayette. (Photos by Kevin Cullen) |
 Sister
Raphael stands in the back yard of the convent on State Street in
Lafayette. After 16 years of hospital pastoral care in Lafayette, she
returned this month to the motherhouse in Mishawaka. |
By Kevin Cullen
The
Catholic Moment
LAFAYETTE — Sister Raphael Kochert, OSF, spent 23 years in hospital pastoral care. As a certified chaplain, she got to know thousands of patients who were facing surgery, recuperating or undergoing treatment.
She listened, prayed, laughed and wept. Her presence strengthened worn-out families. In rooms filled with cold technology, she offered compassion, spirituality and the love of Jesus Christ.
This month, at age 75, Sister Raphael is starting a new chapter in her life. After 16 years of hospital work in Lafayette, she recently returned to the motherhouse of the Sisters of St. Francis of Perpetual Adoration in Mishawaka. She will tend the gardens there, and do whatever else is expected of her.
“I know I will be happy and involved,” she said. “… You bloom where you are planted.”
But she conceded that it will take some time to adjust.
“I have known some of the dialysis patients for years,” she said. “There is a bond there. I will miss them very much.”
Recently, one of them asked her, “Sister, who will come in when I’m real sick? Who will be there?”
“It floored me to see that it meant so much,” Sister Raphael said. “You have to build them up, and let them know that they are just as great as they were before, that it (kidney failure) hasn’t changed them as people. In American culture, what you do is who you are, and people have to feel productive.”
“She was there when I needed her. The Lord couldn’t have brought a better person into my life,” Sherry New, of Lafayette, said in an earlier interview. She met Sister Raphael after undergoing major surgery at St. Elizabeth Central Medical Center.
“She came almost every day I was there, and she gave me the encouragement I needed. I felt like I had known her forever,” she said. “She focused on me, and provided the feeling that I was not alone. Nobody likes hospitals, but she made my stay a very nice one.”
Sister Raphael, a Lafayette native, is the oldest of seven children and the daughter of a nurse. Always religious and service-oriented, she entered the convent in Mishawaka in 1952 and made her perpetual vows in 1961. She taught in Catholic schools for 25 years before moving into pastoral care in 1985.
When not working with patients, she served as facilitator at the monthly meetings of a local grief support group. She also spearheaded a program for the parents of babies who died as the result of miscarriage. Three times a year, burial services are held in Lafayette’s St. Boniface Cemetery, beside a monument inscribed with the words, “God Bless Our Little Ones.”
But most of her time was spent at St. Elizabeth Central, visiting patients and families. She said she felt privileged to be allowed into the lives of so many people.
“I was able to be there at a time when people needed me,” she said. “I was a presence, somebody there with a smile. I know that meant so much to them.”
More than once, patients told her, “You were interested in me, not in how the disease was going.”
Sabine Mills, a registered nurse at St. Elizabeth Central Medical Center, has known Sister Raphael for 10 years.
“She is very bubbly, friendly, and always smiles. She is just very positive and she always came when we needed her for spiritual help,” she said. “She supported patients and families if a patient was not doing well … she was never afraid to jump in and tend to the staff, too.”
Sister Raphael was a friend to many lonely older patients without family, Mills said.
“She definitely left a lasting impression,” she said. “She will be missed.”
Father Paul Graf, a chaplain at St. Elizabeth Regional Health, worked with Sister Raphael for 16 years.
“She did a very wonderful job in spiritual care, and was always very patient-oriented,” he said. “.… She always wanted to be in the rooms visiting patients and families … She didn’t like doing the (office) work. She wanted to be a hands-on chaplain. People always enjoyed her visits, whether they were Catholic or non-Catholic.”
Father Graf said that Sister Raphael could relate to others because she was “down-to-earth. She has the great ability of befriending people very easily. She met them where they were as patients, and discussed anything they wanted to discuss. She didn’t come in with her agenda. She didn’t come in to direct things; she let them be the lead.”
He said he appreciated her long service as sacristan for the hospital chapel. She ordered hosts, candles and other supplies, and sometimes would bring flowers from the convent garden.
Sister Raphael said that people often respect nuns. Even non-Catholics sensed that she — dressed in her plain brown skirt and black veil, and wearing a crucifix around her neck — was there to offer solace.
“Most people know I am just there to help, but others were afraid that I would try to convert them,” she said with a smile. “Some think I am going to try to reform them. One said, ‘I don’t want any of that ‘God business.’
“You listen, and respond,” she said. “What you hear prompts your response. It’s not always words, and that is a hard lesson to learn.”
To her, every person was equal. Race, wealth and religious affiliation didn’t matter. If a patient didn’t want her around, she left. But often, the same person later would want to talk.
But sometimes, words were useless. Instead, she simply held a patient’s hand, or hugged a worried loved one.
Jesus recognized the power of human touch, she said. He could have healed lepers by words alone, but instead he touched them.
Touch, she said, establishes “a connection between two people. Words can fall by the wayside. Sometimes, especially with people with chronic diseases, a little touch says, ‘Hey, I think you’re OK. You are a person.’”
Hospital pastoral work can be physically and spiritually draining. When asked what got her going each morning, she smiled and said, “Coffee!”
“Morning coffee, and sitting down and talking to the Lord,” Sister Raphael said.
Prayer always has been her fuel, her gasoline.
“I had an empty feeling when I didn’t ‘gas up’ by myself and with the other sisters in community,” she said. “That reminded me that there is more to this than just talking to patients. You have to refill or there will be nothing there for you to give.”
Exercise cleared her mind. She often could be seen walking to and from the hospital, or walking along a path at the convent on State Street, where she lived with four other women religious.
She’s especially happy to have helped the grieving parents of unborn children who died. Those parents always received pastoral care, but before she arrived, no burial rites were held for the babies.
“I felt that something was missing,” Sister Raphael said.
Parents were allowed to hold their dead baby, if they wanted to, and they received a “certificate of life.” The cemetery monument marks the graves of scores of fetuses and embryos.
“When you go by, you often see parents at the plot,” Sister Raphael said. “They often leave flowers. It is a place for them to go. They see that they’re really not alone.”
Leaving Lafayette wasn’t easy. A sister and two brothers live in, or near, the city. Still, she feels a sense of satisfaction as she looks back over her stay, and thinks about the lives she has touched.
“I know I did what God gave me to do,” she said.