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Dominican Sisters to commemorate Jubilee
First of three parts
chu slt dominicans milestones
Fourteen Dominican Sisters of Peace with ties to the Dodge City Diocese are celebrating Jubilees this year: Back row : Sisters Joan Ice, Rose Mary Stein, Edith Marie Hauser, Francine Schwarzenberger; Middle row: Sisters Teresita Huse, Patricia Martinez, Loretta Podlena, Marietta Urban, Marie Antoinette Klein; Front row : Sisters Petrona Stockemer, Louise Hageman, Maire Klein, Frances Biernacki and Philomena Hrencher. - photo by COURTESY PHOTO

 

This year, the Dominican Sisters of Peace (formerly the Great Bend Dominicans) celebrate a year of Jubilee, commemorating significant profession anniversaries of 63 Golden and Diamond Jubilarians, including 14 Sisters who made their original professions of vows in Great Bend.

Three of these Sisters are commemorating milestone "Golden Jubilees:"

• Sister Joan Ice, OP, 50 years professed

Sr. Joan Ice was born in Topeka, Kansas, as Joan Yvonne to Albert and Magdalene Glotsbach Ice (both deceased) on June 7, 1940, one of three boys and five girls: William, Gerald, Thomas, Carolyn (May), Theresa (Boley), Rita (Johnson), and Catherine (Fuller). She attended Hayden High School in Topeka. When Sr. Joan first received the habit as a Dominican Sister in Great Bend, she received the name Sr. Mary Albertine. She later returned to her baptismal name, Joan.

Sr. Joan has lived and ministered throughout her religious life in the state of Kansas. She attended Immaculate Conception College in Great Bend, affiliated with Catholic University of Washington, D.C., and Sacred Heart College (now Kansas Newman University) in Wichita. She spent a year of internship at Saint Francis Hospital in Wichita and graduated from Sacred Heart College with a Bachelor of Science in medical technology. She achieved accreditation with the American Society of Clinical Pathologists as a medical technologist, and later with a specialty in blood banking. Sr. Joan worked in the lab as a Medical Technologist at Central Kansas Medical Center in Great Bend and Saint Francis Hospital in Wichita. In 1971, she became supervisor of the Blood Bank at Saint Catherine Hospital in Garden City, a position she held for several years.

In 1999, Sr. Joan took a position at Manna House of Prayer, a retreat house ministry of the Saint Joseph Sisters in Concordia, and remained there for 11 years. While in Concordia, she became an accomplished quilter and made several queen sized quilts for the Dominican Sisters’ Annual Mission Bazaar in Great Bend. At Manna House she also ministered in therapeutic touch with retreatants as a form of prayer.

Throughout most of her 50 years of ministry, Sr. Joan has shared her gift of music with parishes where she has worked. She played guitar and sang at Masses at Saint Joseph Hospital and the Cathedral in Wichita, led a small guitar group at Saint Dominic’s in Garden City, and with her lovely soprano voice, led the singing for Our Lady of Perpetual Help parish in Concordia and at her congregation’s Motherhouse in Great Bend.

Sr. Joan has just recently moved to Heartland Farm, a ministry of the Dominican Sisters of Peace near Great Bend. There she hopes to continue her quilting and be a part of all the retreats, gardening, ecological activities, and simple sustainable living practices of Heartland Farm.

Grateful for her vocation as a Dominican Sister, Sr. Joan says, "I entered religious life because I felt God was calling me to this way of life. Over the years I have felt God’s presence and love sustaining me in this call."