Reflection on the life of Sister Sally White, GNSH

Written on: June 2, 2026

By Sister Eileen White, GNSH
May 13, 2026

Sr. Sally White was born and baptized Sarah Gardiner White. She liked to remind people that was her real name. In Atlanta, there were only about 1% Catholics when her family was growing up there. Her father was not Catholic; her mother was, but Sally and her siblings all went to Catholic school.

Sally met the Grey Nuns in 6th grade and began to study them to see if they measured up. Lucky us—she loved the Sisters who taught her and found them to be, in her words, “different.” She wrote that she saw graciousness and goodness in them.

When she graduated from high school, she bravely traveled to Melrose with two other girls—Mary Sue Thomas and Virginia Carley. She took the religious name of Sister Francis Maureen eventually and, after novitiate, started teaching in far-away, sometimes freezing-cold Buffalo. For two decades, she taught upper grades—at Christ the King and St. Jude the Apostle in Atlanta and at Holy Angels in Buffalo. She also served as the first principal of St. Jude’s. Judy Walsh and Patsy have attested to the way that Sally took new teachers and young Grey Nuns under her wing, mentored them, and cheered them on. All of us loved it when she referred to us as precious. At Holy Angels, an 8th-grade boy who got in trouble with Sr. Sally sometimes wound up in Mary Court’s 1st-grade classroom, where he would have to figure out how to fit into one of those tiny desks.

In the early ’70s, Sally was elected to the Administrative Board of the Grey Nuns. After serving with the leadership team of the congregation for four years, she asked permission for sabbatical time, and Julia told me that during that time, when she was in administration, she had a really strong experience of God’s call to a deeper sense of prayer and spirituality, and she spent a year and a half in a House of Prayer in Wisconsin and in Texas. Sally was passionate about ongoing formation in spirituality for all Grey Nuns, and she loved developing her own prayer life and sharing her faith with others. She lived for a time in our house of prayer on the property of the Motherhouse. Subsequently, she served the congregation for about four years as director of initial formation and vocations. It was during that time that formation summers brought Grey Nuns and interested young people to live and minister together at the Gesu parish in North Philadelphia. Sally was the perfect addition to the mix of nuns and youngish people. She had the easiest laugh. When Jackie Weigle arrived with about 14 bags of essential items, for example (this was before she decided to join the Grey Nuns), Sally dubbed her room “the selfish room.” Then, the whole summer, Sally and the other residents went to the “selfish room” to find any item they suddenly needed. I guess Jackie had the last laugh.

She returned to her beloved Atlanta in 1983, teaching at Pius X High School. She was really discerning, searching for a new path to use her gifts and fulfill her longings. She discovered she loved visiting the elderly and the sick. She asked to study pastoral ministry and eventually became certified as a chaplain. Offered a job at St. Joseph’s Hospital, she became the oncology chaplain for that hospital for more than 20 years. She made a dear friend of fellow chaplain, Father Steve Yander, who will celebrate a memorial Mass for Sally at St. Jude’s on the 21st of this month. Sally didn’t want her nieces, nephews, and cousins to have to travel to Philadelphia, so she wished that there would be a Mass in Atlanta. The director of oncology nursing at St. Joseph’s said this in an article in the Georgia Bulletin at the time of Sally’s golden jubilee:

“She’s our shining light. She has a love of life, and she is very optimistic about everything. Even in the face of despair, she always has a glimmer of hope, and that’s what she shows our patients. They are physically changed when she leaves them, whether they have more peace or more joy. There is a physical manifestation of her work because she is so awesome. We just love her dearly.”

Although St. Joseph’s Hospital was a Catholic hospital, most of the patients were not Catholic, and many had never seen a Catholic Sister. But Sally was the perfect missionary. Sister Barbara Harrington told me that a staff member who was not Catholic was dying. He asked Sally to do his funeral. Barbara also wrote of an elderly Romanian asylee who Sally helped to convert to Catholicism before he died. In Sally’s writings about herself, she told of a gentleman who saw her name tag, which read SALLY WHITE CHAPLAIN, and asked if that meant she was the only white chaplain. She recalled one patient who said to her, “Ma’am, my preacher told me that even Catholics can go to heaven!” She responded, “Well, that is just wonderful news!” She wrote about a “little lady from rural North Georgia, who was dying,” and I can just hear her saying this: “She was just a precious, nice lady, and she said to me, ‘Sister Sally, I never died before and I don’t know how to do it. Will you help me?’” Sally wrote, “It just about broke my heart.”

Sally and Eileen Murray’s presence all those years at St. Jude’s made a huge impact on the parishioners and everyone whose paths they crossed. Besides her ministry as chaplain, Sally co-founded a Pax Christi St. Jude Chapter—still in existence today. She was honored as a peacemaker when they established a Peace Pole there in 2009. Those of us who knew Sally over the years know that underneath her sweet Southern demeanor, there was a fierce fighter whose opinions were not easily revised. She loved deeply and would give you her life if you needed her. She could also beat you up pretty handily if you differed with a conviction she held dear. But she always did so with Southern charm.

Sally loved her family, and they loved her back. Sally said that her brothers and sister were extremely intellectual, but that she, Sally, was the nicest. How she could make us laugh! Some of her Atlanta relatives remembered her playfulness when they were kids and how shocked they were to see her hair when we progressed from habit to common dress. They recalled that she played kickball and hide-and-seek—and often hid in the bathtub, behind the shower curtain, in her habit! She could be a lifesaver for kids, too. Once, her nephew reported, she and his mother got together and wrote the paper he was supposed to be writing—just to ensure that he wouldn’t get an “F.” They remembered how devastated she was by her sister’s death, but that she spoke to them afterward at the wake compassionately about their mother to strengthen them and console them. I enjoyed learning from them that Sally loved horseback riding at their vacation home. Her niece, Alison, said she was terrified that her horse would kill Sally, but Sally was not in the least bit concerned. Of course, many of us knew how she loved cats—sometimes more than people! Daisy was a favorite, but there were plenty of others. Dear friends and companions Eileen Schmidt, Eileen Murray, Frances William, Patsy Geary, Jean Liston, Judy Walsh and her sister, Connie, Kate Woody, and probably every Atlanta resident knew how Sally loved cats. Those from the Broad Street community may remember promising olives to the cat who escaped periodically to get him to come back.

Sally also loved exceptionally good spiritual books and mysteries. She was proud to be a Democrat and to think outside the box. But she also knew fidelity—the faithfulness of her God, the love of the Sacred Heart, her own faithfulness to her family, friends, and to God’s call. Sr. Julia recalled how painful it was for Sally to leave St. Jude’s and come to the Motherhouse. They got up a petition to the community to beg them to let her stay. But when Sally did get to the Motherhouse, she made a heroic effort to “get over” her anger. Julia said it took a while, but she did get there and became a compassionate presence at Yardley.

Sally often said that the Grey Nun congregation was very good to her. She was grateful for the opportunities she had as a Grey Nun, especially the chance to respond to a call to deepen her prayer life and to get a master’s degree in pastoral studies in a program sponsored by Loyola University, New Orleans. Those studies led to her chaplaincy and some of the happiest years of her life. She loved us Grey Nuns. We were very fortunate. She was ferocious when she thought we were making bad decisions and wholehearted when she thought our discernment was true and wise. She loved our St. Marguerite and saw Marguerite’s charism as contemporary for our times. She worked with the Marguerite d’Youville Institute Committee to publish several resources—Woven Together: Reflections on the Litany to the Eternal Father and Divine Providence. She said we needed Marguerite’s universal outreach, especially in our society that does not understand or appreciate the uniqueness of different cultures, languages, and skin colors. That was one of her thousands of important insights.

Dear Sally, Francis Maureen, Aunt Sally, Sarah Gardiner—thank you for sharing life’s journey with us. Go now in peace, faithful friend of God, as you take our love into paradise.

This entry was posted in In Loving Memory and tagged: Christ the King Atlanta, Loyola University, Melrose, Reflection on the Life, Sister Eileen White, Sister Sally White, St. Joseph's Hospital, St. Jude the Apostle