From star athlete to religious life

A call to work with at risk youth

When Janette Hernández heard her calling she was a star athlete and held the Texas state shot-put record for several years. The only girl, in a family of four boys, she remembers as a child sitting at her father’s feet listening as he prepared talks, based on the Word of God, which he later shared with various groups.  

In looking back, she recalls how the Notre Dame Sisters seemed so “real” and “normal” yet they were not married. It was during these years that Janette began to feel some faint stirring within that moved her thinking from being married, mothering perhaps at least 12 children, to being a Religious Sister. “I had a new thirst within…moving me to become involved in teaching religious education classes. It’s like all this energy I had within, that was sort of detoured for a couple of years, now God had a plan for all of this,” says Sister Janette.

It was then that she knew God was calling her to religious life and although many, starting with her family, did not believe she would take this path, there were the few who believed and encouraged her to answer the call. It’s not that her parents were against her vocation, they had always encouraged their children to follow their dreams, but more that the only girl would leave this Hispanic familia to enter God’s service and in their minds become totally removed from them, which of course has not been the case. So, on July 16, 1978 the entire family, Sister Janette states, “All the FAMILIA,” accepted with joy and some tears her answering God’s call.

Today, Sister Janette is a Missionary Catechists of Divine Providence and has worked as an elementary school teacher, catechist, a Director of Religious Education, a youth resource consultant for the Archdiocese of San Antonio, and as a therapist in a high security youth facility. She is a licensed therapist in Texas, visiting professor at Our Lady of the Lake University and adjunct faculty member at the Mexican American Cultural Center.

Working with imprisoned youth has taught Sister Janette that there are many kinds of prisons, un-freeness, as she calls it, we each must face in our daily lives. “These youth are no different from us except they have not been handed sufficient tools or opportunities to forge their lives differently, coming from much neglect, suffering and extremely abusive life experiences--the total opposite of safe, protected environments. This in no way spells out defeat for young Hispanics but it does mean that the affirmation to believe in self, success, love, to believe in others and in God will need to be consciously nurtured by all that surrounds them.”

The Catholic Church in Sister Janette’s vision “can either be an instrument of alienation for young Hispanics by looking down on them and not meeting them in their reality or it can be a powerful vehicle of God’s grace offering them an experience of challenging love, affirmation, and gusto por la vida (a great motivation for living life).”

Your turn
What is your motivation in life? Have you ever thought of the possibility of a religious vocation? How would your family react? Would you be afraid to leave your family and your environment?  

For this reason I invite you to fan into a flame the gift of God you received. For God did not give us a spirit of fear, but of strength, and love, and good judgment (2 Tim 1:6-7).