REMINDER – you’re invited to the Memorial Mass on Oct. 1, to Honor Sr. Constance Dodd, S.M.
Sr. Constance Dodd, S.M., served as the director of the Catholic Charities Neighborhood Center (the 18th Street Center) in Wheeling, for 12 years. We will honor and celebrate her life at a memorial Mass at 1:30 pm, October 1, 2025, at the center.
Sister died on August 8th in the care of her religious sisters in Michigan.
Sister Constance served Catholic Charities WV, working with the poor and homeless from 1996 to 2008.
Under her leadership, the center expanded its outreach serving 108,751 meals to shut-ins, providing 16,670 lunches at the center, and filling 8,651 food orders in a year’s time.
Sister Constance also established a walk-in clinic at the center, where a doctor and nurse volunteered their time. Prescriptions, therapy, and hospital care were provided at no cost. Additionally, dental and eye care were also provided by volunteer doctors Sr. Constance secured to help.
She entered into a joint project with the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill to establish a
“drop-in” center for the mentally ill in the area.
She left Wheeling in Sept. 13, 2008, to work in the Marist Sisters’ retirement home in a suburb of Detroit.
She was born on June 4, 1933, in Ballindoon County Sligo, Ireland. When she was 21, she answered God’s call and entered the Marist Sisters, the order that ran the boarding school she had attended. She came to serve in the US in 1956. She taught and served as principal at St. Albert the Great School in Dearborn Heights, MI.
Her vocation journey took her to Quebec, Canada, before the Marist Sisters called her to Rome to work in their administration offices handling charitable service in Mexico, Colombia and Brazil.
She returned to the US and began working in Wheeling for the Catholic Charities Neighborhood Center in 1996.
According to her obituary, she loved the Catholic Charities WV ministry and working in Wheeling particularly, “and was in many ways the face of service to the most disadvantaged of the area. She said once that, at the end of each day, she could say: ‘The hungry were fed today. The poor were clothed. The sick were visited.’ “
