Daughter of Charity Sr. Anne Marie Lamoureux knows the restorative power of a retreat. A cancer survivor who for nearly 20 years worked in a community care center in New York’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, she finds her annual retreat offers peace and a chance for “letting God talk to me.”
A thought came to her when she heard a question posed at her congregation’s provincial meeting regarding future outreach projects: If money were no object, what would your dream be? What if, she wondered, the people on society’s margins — addicts, the homeless, the poor and isolated — could get to feel that same comfort in retreats designed for them?
Lamoureux saw her dream realized through Seeds of Hope, a program she helped create at the National Shrine of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton in Emmitsburg, Maryland, where she serves as a docent. Since 2018, Seeds of Hope has brought in hundreds of people from area 12-step programs, homeless shelters and impoverished rural areas for daylong retreats that include meals, meditation, fellowship and even time to tour the buildings and historic grounds where Seton, the first native-born American saint, and her congregation lived.