Sr. Gertrude Lilly, FHM

Mother General, Franciscan Handmaids of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, New York City

The Franciscan Handmaids were founded in 1916 in Savannah, Georgia, by an African American woman and a French missionary priest because of a bill in the Georgia legislature that would have made it illegal for whites to educate blacks in the state. Fr. Ignatius Lissner was concerned that the bill might become law. He was running a school for black students, maintained by white Franciscan sisters. To protect the ministry, he got permission to start an order of black sisters to teach black children and invited Elizabeth Williams, who became Mother Mary Theodore, FHM, to lead the congregation.



The New York Handmaids began in 1923, when Cardinal Hayes invited some of the sisters to New York to found a nursery for black children. The congregation established a house on Staten Island in 1929, and for the next 80 years followed a mission of education, social justice and serving the poor.

In 2010, the average age of our sisters was around 78, and we had so few vocations that we had to decide whether to close. Through prayer, we chose to follow the mandate of the pope, who said we should all get out of our comfort zone and become vibrant evangelizers. Then in 2014 we had an invitation to go to Africa, and now we have vocations coming from Africa and the Caribbean.

We are missionaries now, so we send people all over. Our members, according to their talents, will be assigned in the USA, the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Carib-bean, Africa, wherever we are needed. Their mission will be social justice and pastoral care in communities and parishes in need. The sisters in Africa so far are in parishes serving in mar-riage preparation, home care of the elderly and rural clinics.

In New York, we still run the St. Edward food pantry on Staten Island, which serves 20,000 families in a year, and we are transitioning in Harlem to expand our mission of early childhood education to include an after-school program for children in need, plus food and nutritional support for homeless children and services for single mothers. We are currently negotiating for small houses we can use for this program, taking care of children holistically and helping their mothers rise above the poverty level.

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