Sister inspired students with humor and kindness
Mary Faith Dargan ’70 PhD was a beloved teacher, Connecticut resident and Dominican Sister of Peace, a Catholic congregation based in Columbus.
Sister Christine Cosgrove remembers her first encounter with Sister Mary Faith Dargan ’70 PhD. Dargan had recently graduated from Ohio State and was teaching at Albertus Magnus College in Connecticut. “It was my first class at Albertus, and I’d never met a college professor before,” Cosgrove says. She imagined they were stuffy and humorless. “Mary Faith burst into the classroom and was raring to go. She had so much enthusiasm for life and learning and such a great sense of humor; it was as if all the lights had come on in the building.”
Dargan, who died Sept. 29 at age 92, was a member of the Dominican Sisters of Peace, a congregation of Roman Catholic sisters headquartered in Columbus. She taught classics and Latin at Albertus Magnus for more than 40 years and served as academic dean for a decade. She led numerous study abroad programs in Greece and Italy and was on the Ohio Dominican University Board of Trustees.
“I have so much gratitude to have had her in my life,” says Cosgrove, who teaches classics at St. Vincent Ferrer High School in Manhattan. “She helped me realize God wanted me to be a Dominican sister and a teacher.”
Sister Joan Franks ’71 MA met Dargan at Ohio State. “Everywhere she went, she immediately made lifelong friends,” Franks says. “She had such a love for teaching and such a great sense of humor. She told her students, ‘We’ll have so much fun,’ and they did. … She exemplified the four pillars of Dominican life: prayer, community, service and study.”
The two women were in the midst of their training for the Dominican sisters while at Ohio State. “We had taken a vow of poverty and had very little money, but got transportation money from the Dominican sisters,” Franks says. “We lived a mile from campus and took the bus, but Mary Faith had this great idea that if we walked, we could use our transportation money for the movies. She loved the movies.”
Cosgrove’s mother was diagnosed with cancer several years ago. “I visited her, and she showed me a note from Mary Faith. She told me Mary Faith wrote her every week and always mailed it so it arrived just before her chemotherapy treatment. She was kindness itself.”
