Little Company of Mary Hospital chaplain James Thompson reflected Tuesday on whether the two nuns killed in a bizarre crash last week in Oak Lawn served a greater purpose by being in the path of an out-of-control pickup truck.
Thompson spoke to about 400 mourners at St. Bernadette Catholic Church in Evergreen Park during a funeral Mass for Sister Jean Stickney, 86, and Sister Kab Kyoung Kim, 48, who went by Anna.
Thompson said that after the Oct. 5 crash, a hospital receptionist asked him whether Stickney and Kim were “kind of like martyrs.”
The receptionist had been approached by a woman who had been in a nearby car with her two children at the time of the collision, Thompson said. The woman believed that if the truck had not hit the sisters’ car, “a lot more people would be dead, and I wouldn’t be here and neither would my children,” the chaplain said.
Thompson, a Catholic priest for 43 years, said the crash that killed Stickney and Kim was so shocking, “you couldn’t stay with the grief. It jumped over to the horror of the accident.”
“Today,” he continued, “we are here to grieve. The accident was a week ago. It’s no longer on the front page of the paper. We have to set the accident aside and horror, and need to be with our grief, with our loss.”
Thompson stressed that mourners should “celebrate (the sisters’) entrance into heaven and the joining with those who have gone before them.”
Stickney and Kim served at Little Company of Mary Hospital, the Evergreen Park medical center that the order founded about 85 years ago.
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Stickney was from New Hampshire, became a nun in 1951 and served on the hospital’s board of directors.
Kim was from South Korea and had been living in the United States for the past two years to continue her education. She worked in a hospital program that helps children deal with the loss of a loved one.
The two nuns lived together with several other sisters in Evergreen Park.