In the early 1980s, I was teaching at Bishop Gallagher High School and felt inspired to become a volunteer for the Team for Justice in jail ministry. Conversations indicated that I could best serve by forming a small team that would go weekly to the jail facility in Eloise to prepare the incarcerated to take their G.E.D. exam (the high school equivalency test). Sister Marie Geraldine Brownell, an Adrian Dominican Sister, had already agreed to help, but we needed a third to make it go. I asked my friend, Sister Beatrice Marie Plamondon (Albertus), if she were interested, and immediately she said “yes.” At the time, Sister Beatrice was teaching 5th Grade at Queen of Apostles School in Hamtramck. Permission was sought from the Provincial Minister, Mother Clarentine, and we began.
Sister Beatrice taught Math to a group of women in the facility and she was greatly admired by them as well as by the staff rather quickly. Sister and I had already been friends for several years by then, but this was our first shared apostolic project. How my eyes were opened! It was there that I first realized that wherever I found Sister Beatrice, in the jail, in the parish neighborhood in Hamtramck, or for many years later at her parish in Saginaw, she steps forward quickly whenever the needy are present. Whether they are the incarcerated, the handicapped confined to their homes, the widowed or poor parishioner, the lonely or the poor, she has a knack for seeking them out and being present to them. What a living example she has always been for me of Franciscan values, Clarian fidelity and Felician service.
When her cousin, Saint Andre Bessette, was canonized in Rome, I happened to be assigned to Rome as a professor at the Pontifical Angelicum University, and I was delighted to share the happiness of that event and some of the delights of Rome with Sister Beatrice, and her Dominican sister, Sister Maxine. They and their deceased Felician aunt, Sister Bernadine Fabiszak, have been my friends for nearly fifty years now.
–Father Michael Monshau, O.P.
