Popular Catholic Nun, journalist and spokeswoman dies from Cancer at 67

Mary Ann Walsh, a nun who led a very public life as a journalist and longtime spokeswoman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, passed away on Tuesday, April 28 at the age of 67 after a tough battle with cancer.

Sister Walsh died in a hospice in Albany next to the regional convent of the religious order she entered as a 17-year-old novice in 1964, Religious News Service (RNS) reports.

It was gathered that Walsh had moved to her native Albany from Washington last September after it was discovered that the cancer that had been in remission since 2010 had returned.

She was able to receive better care there and live out her days with other members of the Sisters of Mercy. She was transferred to the hospice on April 23 as her condition deteriorated.

Sister Mary Ann as she was known to the many journalists she sparred and joked with and, with regularity, befriended, worked at the communications office of the American hierarchy for 20 years, retiring in the summer of 2014 just before she fell ill again.

RNS reports that she became director of media relations for the USCCB — the first woman to hold that position — after coordinating media for World Youth Day in Denver in 1993, which featured an enormously successful visit by then-Pope John Paul II.

She was born in Albany and as a high school student had been drawn to the Sisters of Mercy and their commitment of service to the poor, especially women and children.

Walsh entered the order during a period of great social upheaval in American society and in U.S. Catholicism after the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, and she was joining religious life just as many priests and nuns and brothers started leaving.

Apart from her passion for the marginalized, Walsh was a gifted writer — she earned a master’s degree in English from the College of St. Rose as well as a master’s degree in pastoral counseling from Loyola College of Maryland — and she began her journalism career at the Albany diocesan newspaper, The Evangelist.

“I entered media because I wanted to help people,” Walsh said earlier this year in a video posted by her community. “I saw people over here who had great needs, and I saw people over here who were willing to meet needs. I thought I could be the bridge. It was the time of Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘Bridge Over Troubled Waters’ and that’s what I wanted to be: I wanted to be the bridge over troubled waters.”