Sister Pat Murray

Current Mission Location – Maryknoll Sisters Center- Maryknoll, NY

Hailing from Brooklyn, NY, Pat Murray was born May 23, 1939 to Ellen (Reynolds) Murray and Roger Murray. Pat graduated from St. Brendan’s High School, Brooklyn in 1957.

Pat Murray joined Maryknoll in 1959 at the Novitiate in Valley Park, MO. She pronounced First Vows August 22, 1962 and Final Vows November 2, 1971 in El Salvador. After First Vows, from 1963-67, she gave Congregational Service at the Maryknoll Society Center serving as secretary to the Father General of the Maryknoll Society and earning a B.S. in Community Service from Rogers College, Maryknoll, NY in 1969.

Sister Pat received her first mission assignment to El Salvador in 1969. There she worked with communities, youth and women’s groups in San Salvador, the country’s capital.

In 1975after earning an Master of Education-Counseling degree in counseling from the University of Georgia, Sister Pat was assigned to ministering in a small town in Nicaragua during the Somoza dictatorship. Urged by the town’s catechists, Sister Pat and other Maryknoll missioners helped teenage girls escape from prostitution. She helped the girls find other work in the region. Years later, Sister Pat would go to Albany, NY, to call for increased penalties for human traffickers.

In Leon, Nicaragua, she worked in a housing project until she and six other Maryknoll Sisters found themselves caught in the crossfire of the final offensive during the civil war in 1979. They took shelter inside a half-finished school which they organized as a refugee shelter for 400 people where they sheltered for seven long weeks. After the war, Sister Pat worked on a pastoral and mental health team in Leon and also supervised the work-study program at a medical college.

Returning to New York, Sister Pat managed our computer services office at Maryknoll while serving as a senior counselor at the Putnam-Northern Westchester Women’s Center.

She then worked as the retirement and renewal coordinator for the Maryknoll Sisters until 2015 when she herself retired.