MILWAUKEE — Sister Rose Stietz has made her way from Gratiot to Milwaukee with many stops along the way. 

Now she’s celebrating 60 years as a Dominican Sister and continues helping others by volunteering with a community outreach program for those who have lost loved ones that’s spanned more than two decades. 

Stietz was raised on a farm two miles west of Gratiot. She and her four brothers and five sisters had jobs on the farm and attended Gratiot schools. After graduating from Gratiot High School in 1953, she said she worked at Farm Bureau Insurance for two years. 

It was then she said she felt a calling, and although she didn’t know entirely what she was getting herself into at the time, she made her way to Racine to become a Dominican Sister. 

“I barely knew what a convent was,” she said, noting she was part of St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in town. “We knew what sisters were because they’d come to Gratiot from Holy Rosary in Darlington for vacation summer school.”

She said, while there with few other girls she knew, the convent eventually proved to be a life change.

“It was where I was supposed to be,” she said. “There were good times and bad times — like any life has good times and bad times.”

Through the years, Stietz has traveled the world and has done some notable things. She said she was in Detroit at one point to teach but the school closed. She then became involved with the Delano grape strike in California that lasted from 1965 to 1970. The workers’ grape boycott by the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee and the United Farm Workers was against growers within the state, calling for unionized, better quality work. 

She traveled to India in 1984 to find the secret of the Ghandi approach to non-violence. 

She’s been active in several social justice issues and is heavily integrated in the peace movement. 

For the last seven years, Stietz has been involved in the Catholic Worker Movement, which has houses for homeless people to provide a shelter, or safe place for people looking to be protected. 

“There are problems out there and you have to do something about it,” she said.

She’s also supported several outreach programs — one that she’s continued for more than two decades that coordinates prayer vigils for murder victims at the sites of the crime. Stietz started the program with an interfaith group in Milwaukee — simply because she said she felt it was needed. 

“The people all wondered where the churches were,” she said of why she felt compelled to start the program. 

Eventually, the vigils became too frequent for some pastors to attend — she held six in the first two weeks — and secretaries were needed to help coordinate things as well. 

She was forced to continue the program on her own with volunteers through her church, St. Martin de Porres Catholic Church, in Milwaukee. She said the process moves rapidly, and there’s often only around 24 to 48 hours between getting information and putting together an event. 

It’s a program that’s touched her heart deeply, she said. 

“Once in a while we were the funeral for the person too,” she said, noting that sometimes there was no family connection for anything more than the vigil. 

“I didn’t know them,” she said of those for whom she holds the vigils. “But I got to know the families. There would be some rough times but when you’d end up with a family who needed it — I don’t want to say it was rewarding — but I hope it gave them comfort.”

Stietz is soft-spoken, and hesitant to share about herself and all she’s accomplished through the years. That doesn’t stop her from making an impact on the world around her.

“Those who knew me when I was a child would say I’m shy,” she said. “I overcame that.”

Although she doesn’t get back to Gratiot often anymore, she said she was able to get reacquainted with the area from 1988 to 1992 when she spent time with her mother before she passed away. Her parents were Leona (Gille) and Henry Stietz. 

Stietz received her bachelor’s degree in education from Dominican College in Racine before earning a master’s degree from Wayne State University in Detroit and a CNA from Blackhawk Technical College in Monroe. 

Stietz considers her work in ministry rewarding and fulfilling, knowing that she has been able to help people through ministry and the church. 

“There’s always a need and there’s always sharing people’s good times and bad times,” Stietz said.  “Just being available, being present, it helps.”