Millions of Americans were introduced to Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt for the first time as the TV-friendly team chaplain for the Loyola University of Chicago men’s basketball team during its improbable 2018 run to the NCAA Final Four.
But since her passing at age 106 on Oct. 9, those who knew her as their classroom teacher during her LA days are convinced that Jean’s life lessons will live on.
In a reflection published on AngelusNews.com, former student Cardinal Roger M. Mahony credited her with “the grace that encouraged me to enter the seminary.” The archbishop emeritus of Los Angeles was one of Schmidt’s first eighth-grade students in a classroom of nearly 80 at St. Charles Borromeo parish school in North Hollywood back in the 1940s.
“I am still amazed with the way she motivated all of us to learn that we had no discipline problems in the classroom,” wrote Cardinal Mahony. “Any little whisper, she was at your desk with that look — and you never spoke out of turn again.”
Father Thomas P. Rausch, SJ, emeritus professor of theology at Loyola Marymount University and a member of St. Charles School’s Class of 1955, told Angelus that “I think she saw the good in me that I wasn’t able to see for myself,” leading to his religious life, starting with her altar-server training.
“She was always glad to see you, encouraging, supportive. I would visit her on Sheridan Road during my few visits to Chicago, and she was always the same. Like so many religious sisters, she played an important role in shaping so many of us.”
Another St. Charles grad from 1955, Tom Von Der Ahe, remembered Jean as “a disciplinarian, but very fair. He didn’t realize until later in life just how much influence she had despite her physical size.
“When I visited her in Chicago a couple of years ago, she still had an incredible smile and her mind was as sharp as a tack, but I had this vision from eighth grade of a towering nun that had our undivided respect,” said Von Der Ahe. “And I was 5-foot-7 at the time, so I wasn’t little even though I remember having to look up to her. When I visited her, as she rose from her desk, I was surprised to see that she, at 100 years old, was now no more than 5-feet tall. My immediate reaction was, ‘Where did she go?’ ”
Jean went a lot of places.
Dolores Schmidt, born in San Francisco in 1919, took the name Sister Jean when she entered the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary (BVM) in 1938 in Dubuque, Iowa.
By 1941, she was starting her teaching career in Los Angeles at St. Bernard Catholic School in Glassell Park, as the school was under construction and classes were taught in the church hall. The school officially opened the day before Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941, and Jean recalled gathering food and blankets in case students couldn’t leave the facility. She would later describe it as an experience that brought her and the students closer to each other and to God.
In 1946, after returning to Iowa to profess her final vows, Jean moved to St. Charles Borromeo Catholic School and was assigned to the eighth-grade class at a school with some 900 children enrolled, the largest elementary school west of the Rockies. At that point, she talked the pastor into letting her start a girls' basketball team, a sport she played and enjoyed growing up.
Jean was teaching seventh and eighth grade as well as serving as principal at St. Brendan School in Hancock Park in 1961 when her community gave her a surprising new assignment: to teach at Mundelein College near Chicago.
In 1991, Mundelein merged with Loyola of Chicago and, three years later, rather than retire, she was invited to work with both the men’s and women’s basketball teams as their chaplain and scholastic adviser.
Wearing a maroon and gold scarf, she was the 98-year-old good luck charm rooting from her near-courtside wheelchair as Loyola’s Ramblers defied the odds and became the Cinderella team of the 2018 tournament.
“A number of our players are not Catholic, but we pray together anyway,” she told Angelus in 2018. “We’re blessed to be able to do what we do, and each person on the team is faithful in his own particular way. And even if they don’t actively practice their faith, I know that at some point they’ll come back to it because they realize they need God in their lives. I’m not worried about them; they are good young men.”
She officially announced her retirement as the team chaplain on Sept. 24, just two weeks before her death.
Ken Martinet, also from St. Charles’ Class of 1955, said he, too, considered the priesthood because of her influence. She helped guide him to Loyola High School. He ended up as president and CEO of Big Brothers and Big Sisters of Los Angeles County.
A parishioner at St. Bede the Venerable Church in La Cañada Flintridge, Martinet wrote in a Facebook post that when Jean’s 2023 book came out, “Wake Up With Purpose! What I’ve Learned in My First Hundred Years” (HarperCollinsFocus, $22.99), he and his wife listened to the audio version of it as they were finishing a vacation.
“It was like hearing her all over again in school,” Martinet said.
