Sister Mary Ruth Dittman, SDS, to Celebrate 60th Jubilee

Called and Blessed will be the 2009 jubilee theme of Salvatorian Sisters in North America making their jubilees of religious profession. A Mass of Thanksgiving will be offered on Saturday, June 27, at the Sacred Heart School of Theology Chapel in Hales Corners, Wisconsin. A reception and dinner will follow the liturgy. Sister Mary Ruth Dittman, SDS, of Phoenix, Arizona, will be celebrating her 60th jubilee of religious profession.

Sister Mary Ruth is a volunteer in the nursery at Children’s Hospital in Phoenix. This spring she received a special tribute from the Phoenix Region Catholic charities for a lifetime commitment to charity and justice. Her ministry includes premature and other infants at Los Niño’s Hospital. Several times each month she also prays outside abortion clinics and most Thursdays at a local cemetery as indigent persons are buried and assists at the St. Vincent de Paul Food Pantry.

Today, she is a member of Saints Simon and Jude Cathedral, Phoenix.

Working with babies and children has been her lifelong personal ministry. “These ministries fill my life. God has been so good to me,” she explained. She has also attended the funerals of hundreds of babies, providing sympathy, prayers and words of comfort to the bereaved families.

Sister Mary Ruth entered the Sisters of the Divine Savior in 1948 and made her First Vows on August 13, 1949. She was born and raised in Sheldon, Iowa, and was a member of St. Patrick’s Parish

During her years of service she has ministered as a teacher for 15 years and nurse for thirty years. She taught at parish schools in Wausau, Bloomer, Sheboygan Falls and Milwaukee, all in Wisconsin; and in Sisseton, South Dakota, and Huntsville, Alabama. She has lived and volunteered in Phoenix since 1995.

As a licensed practical nurse, she served at St. Joseph Community Hospital in West Bend, Wisconsin, at St. Mary’s Nursing Home and for twenty-six years at the then Milwaukee County Hospital in neo-natal care and rehabilitation in Milwaukee.

As she reminisces at this jubilee, she is filled with gratitude for her parents and family and to God for the gift of her vocation to the Sisters of the Divine Savior.

“I have tried to be a gentle, caring presence to people from the alone and vulnerable to babies, students and the elderly,” she said.