Sister Patricia Wormann on her retirement and seeking Jesus
Sister Patricia Wormann, O.P., the Archdiocese of Newark’s Delegate for Religious, will be retiring at the end of June after eight years in her role and 61 years of serving the people of God in religious life.
Sister Pat, who will turn 79 in September, said that it is important to know when to “let go.”
“Sometimes people get caught up in their work as their priority when living should be the priority. Work is certainly a part of living, but it is not all of living,” she said. “Ultimately, my identity is in being me and that’s what I bring back to God.”
Appointed the archdiocesan Delegate for Religious in 2018, Sister Pat has served as Cardinal Tobin’s representative and liaison to men and women religious. There are currently 52 congregations of religious women and 22 congregations of religious men active in the archdiocese. Her work has involved visiting and spending time with the various communities, listening to concerns, providing resources, helping to resolve questions, and extending support to leadership and community members as they seek to share God’s love with others.
For the past few years, Sister Pat has also supported Catholic Extension Society, advancing its efforts in support of remote and underserved Church communities. She plans to continue her involvement with the organization after her retirement.
But first she will do some traveling to catch up with family and friends. After that, Sister Pat looks forward to discovering where the Lord needs her, “without having to worry about paperwork!”
Trusting in God’s presence
Those who know Sister Pat agree she deserves some time off. Her service to the Church over the last six decades has been active and diverse, spanning Catholic education, pastoral care, clinical counseling, preaching, and numerous other areas of ministry.
Asked if there is a common thread in her career, Sister Pat refers to a book recommended by Pope Leo XIV, The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence, a 17th century Carmelite friar. In his 2025 introduction to the book, the pope describes the effort to place God’s presence at the center of one’s life as “simple and arduous at the same time.” He continues:
“This remembrance, which is something more than a simple memory because it involves our sentiments and affections, overcomes every moralism and every reduction of the Gospel to a mere set of rules, and shows us that truly, as Jesus promised us, the experience of entrusting ourselves to God the Father already gives us the hundredfold here below.”
That sense trusting in God and seeking his presence has played an important role in Sister Pat’s life from the beginning of her vocational journey.
She can recall attending Mount Carmel School in Ridgewood, NJ, when her teacher Mrs. Ryan had the boys and girls in her class write letters to religious communities, “because she knew if we sent a letter and got something back, that would teach us something valuable.”
Young Patricia decided to write to a community in Holyoke, Massachusetts. “They wrote back to me and something about that was mysterious and not nameable,” she recalls.
Five years later, Patricia received another sign when she was asked to spend time with the sister superior of the Daughters of Divine Charity who had recently arrived in her parish. “They lived in a farmhouse some distance away, and on the weekends the younger sisters attended Seton Hall, so I went out there to keep their superior company,” Sister Pat recalled.
“One day, my mother came to pick me up and the superior told me, ‘You know, you’d make a good sister.’ I thought, if she only knew how I treated by brothers! But somehow, what she said stuck with me.”
She attended Saint Joseph Hill Academy, a high school for girls in Staten Island, run by the Daughters of Divine Charity. From there, Sister Pat entered the congregation and spent the next 20 years in the community. “I loved them and still do to this day,” she said.
Called to be a witness
Years later, while on a leave of absence in East Orange where she was doing social work and counseling, a woman came up to her and asked if she was a nun, although she was not wearing her habit at the time:
“I said, ‘Well, why do you ask that?’ and she replied, ‘Because you treat us differently than anybody has treated us.’”
Sister Pat was surprised. “It couldn’t have been a ‘religious’ kind of thing, because during breaks the women would be reading Bibles and I’d be flipping through Vogue Magazine in the staff room.”
“The next morning—I can still vividly remember—I was between my bedroom and the kitchen and I heard, whether it was God or just a voice in my heart, ‘You’re called to be a public witness of my mercy, and it’s not about a habit, it’s about who you are,’” Sister Pat said. After spending a year in discernment, she entered the Sisters of Saint Dominic of Caldwell.
“For me, the story of my vocation has always been the Emmaus story, because it’s that journey of encountering Jesus along the way,” she said. “People will ask me, ‘Why are you doing that?’ or ‘Why did you go there?’ and I always say, ‘It’s because I don’t want to miss Jesus.’”
Reflecting on a ‘shared journey’
In a letter to the communities she has served for the last eight years, Sister Pat called her time as the Delegate for Religious a “profound blessing.” She thanked Cardinal Tobin “for entrusting me with this sacred responsibility,” and praised all those who have offered their support and encouragement during her tenure.
Reflecting on the joys and sorrows during her “shared journey” with the men and women religious of the archdiocese, she said that she had recognized God’s presence. “Through it all, God journeys with us—rejoicing with us in moments of blessing and holding us close in the unknown and sometimes dark places along the way.”
Sister Pat later said that she has come to appreciate even more the richness of all the different charisms present in the archdiocese, even as she recognizes that participation in religious life is in decline.
“The myth is that there were always a lot of sisters and priests, but that isn’t true,” she said. “Certainly, there were a large number of vocations after World War II, but when people worry about declining numbers, I’ll remind them that there were four sisters who founded our congregation and there are still 64 of us left!”
All about relationships
“Religious life is emerging in a new way,” Sister Pat said. “Looking around, we see that even our older religious are very involved with issues like social justice, peacemaking, and caring for immigrants.”
“There’s also a sense that young people want to be around those who lead the consecrated life,” she added. “They may never enter a religious community themselves, but they are attracted to a life that is simple and not so complicated and where people are valued.”
For Sister Pat, the key is relationships: “You can have lots of projects, but if there isn’t a sense of relationship, that we value other people, what’s the point? That’s one of the basic points of the pope’s new encyclical on AI. Do we really want to replace human beings and the whole sense of being human with something that tells us what to say or do?”
“People are hungry for that sense of relationship and living a human life, young people are hungry for that, but older people, too,” Sister Pat said.
For Sister Pat, that hunger was answered in religious life. “My community is my family,” she said. “I’m not a lone ranger, I’m part of something much bigger than myself,” she said.
To view more photos looking back at Sister Pat’s life and her recent retirement party, CLICK HERE.
Featured image: Sister Patricia Wormann, O.P., will retire as Cardinal Tobin’s Delegate for Religious on June 30. On June 8, the Archdiocese of Newark thanked her for her service and wished her well in her retirement with a party. (Photo by Elena Torres / Archdiocese of Newark)
