URBANA – Sister Julia Moriarty, who started Parkland College's nursing program and served Provena Covenant Medical Center for 46 years, will leave Champaign-Urbana next week to make her home in Kankakee.

Her last day in the local community will be Tuesday.

Moriarty is relocating to Provena St. Mary's Hospital, Kankakee.

At Covenant, Moriarty started out as a bookkeeper in the hospital business office, worked in pastoral care and in her last years took the 5 a.m. shift at the hospital's front desk, said Mindy Slack, director of volunteer services.

After Moriarty retired two years ago, she escorted patients and took on other tasks as a hard-working volunteer, Slack said.

"She's an amazingly accomplished woman and has always been a servant to others," Slack added. "She truly has the love, respect and admiration from all who have known her here. She's a kind and warm spirit, and she touches you deeply with who she is and how she helps others."

A native of Rockwell City, Iowa, the 91-year-old Moriarty said she grew up with seven brothers and two sisters and did office work for her first two years out of high school.

She first started her nursing training at St. Mary's Hospital, Kankakee, in 1938, and entered religious life the following year.

While she grew up in a Catholic family, Moriarty said, a lot of her decision to enter religious life had to do with the sisters at St. Mary's and the experience of going to prayer each morning with the other nursing students. Catholic nursing students also went to daily Mass, she said.

"I really think it was that," Moriarty added. "I wasn't used to it, living on a farm out in Iowa."

Moriarty first came to Champaign-Urbana in 1942 to finish her nursing training, but her religious order, the Servants of the Holy Heart of Mary, needed her to work as a bookkeeper at the old Mercy Hospital, which later merged with Burnham City Hospital and eventually became Provena Covenant Medical Center.

She enjoyed nursing, she said, but it wasn't until a decade later that she returned to her nursing education in Wisconsin.

During years spent away from Covenant, Moriarty established pastoral care programs at Provena St. Mary's Hospital in Kankakee and Provena Our Lady of Victory Nursing Home in Bourbonnais, spent three years working in Maryland, and started the nursing program at Parkland College in 1967.

Moriarty said she remembers Parkland approaching Mercy Hospital and asking whether it would close its nursing program if the college could assume the role of nursing education in the community. Moriarty spent five years living in the convent with other sisters at the hospital and working for Parkland to establish the nursing program. Some community colleges were also trying to start their own nursing education programs, she said, but Parkland's program succeeded because the college hired a good nursing faculty.

Kathy Lewis, a professor emeritus who is half-retired from Parkland's health professions department, said Moriarty made a big contribution to the Parkland nursing program and the community because she had a vision of what nursing should be in the community.

"From what I've heard from my colleagues who taught with her, she was well beyond everyone else in her thinking and her vision for what nursing should be, and for what nursing should be for the community and areas we serve," Lewis said.

For Moriarty, Kankakee is a familiar place to call her new home. But Champaign-Urbana, she says, is where she lived longer than anywhere else.

"For all my years here, I just say thank you to everyone who has been a friend," she said. "I've loved the community for sure."

Scholarship started in nun's honor

URBANA – The Provena Covenant Medical Center Foundation will start a scholarship fund for nursing students at Parkland College in honor of Sister Julia Moriarty.

Anyone wishing to contribute can make a tax-deductible donation to the foundation and designate it to the fund by writing "Sister Julia Fund" on the memo line of the check, said Paul Donohue, the foundation's vice president of development.

An acknowledgment and receipt will be mailed to the donor, he said.

Donations can also be made online and can be designated to the Sister Julia Fund, Donohue said.

The foundation's mailing address is 1400 W. Park St., Urbana, IL 61801.

Find the foundation online on Provena Covenant's website at http://www.provena.org/covenant.