Back when Richard Nixon was telling a skeptical nation, “I am not a crook,” Patricia Ann Dowling was a rookie in the hospitality business. Right out of University of Massachusetts, Amherst and into the Holiday Inn corporation, managing a front office and keeping the books.
About once a year, hotel staff would give blood at a Catholic hospital near Lawrence, Massachusetts, then operated by the Sisters of Bon Secours. The religious staff at “the Bon,” made a strong impression and young Dowling was taken with their kindness, professionalism and, she said, “their earthy sense of humor.”
Dowling was also on her own for the first time in her life, “23-years-old and fending for myself,” she said. A cradle Catholic, she attended weekly Mass and sang in the choir. But it wasn’t until she began praying — quietly, in earnest and alone — that great events came to pass.
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