As Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School in Washington, D.C., marks the 225th anniversary of its founding in 1799 as the first Catholic girls’ school in the original 13 states, the 133 young women in its class of 2024 were addressed at their June 4 graduation ceremony by a woman who has witnessed and made history in her nearly eight decades at the school – Visitation Sister Mary Berchmans Hannan.
“There is no one who embodies the charism of Salesian spiritual and the mission of Georgetown Visitation more than Sister,” said Christine McGovern, the school’s dean of faculty, in introducing Sister Berchmans as the graduation speaker.
Sister Mary Berchmans, a native of Rye, New York, entered Georgetown Visitation, her mother’s alma mater, as a student in 1945. She graduated from the school in 1948 and its former junior college in 1950, later entering the Visitation order, making her permanent vows in 1955. After teaching Latin at Visitation, Sister Berchmans became Head of School there in 1969, and 20 years later became its president, serving in that role until 2007, when she became its president emerita.
McGovern noted how after a devastating fire in 1993 left only the walls standing of Georgetown Visitation’s historic academic building, Sister Berchmans’ calm leadership and steady faith led the rebuilding effort for its Founders Hall, which reopened as a state-of-the-art educational facility with wiring for technology, launching a new era for the school.
Sister Berchmans also played a leading role in the issuance of a 2018 report on the history of enslaved people at Georgetown Visitation in the years before emancipation in the District of Columbia. That project’s goal was to honestly evaluate the past and encourage critical thinking, reflection, prayer and action in the school community. She also helped found the school’s St. Jane de Chantal Salesian Center that fosters the Visitation Sisters’ Salesian spirituality among the students, faculty and alumnae.
Berchmans Hall, a two-story wing dedicated at Georgetown Visitation in 2019 and named in honor of Sister Berchmans, includes an art studio and classrooms for math and science and laboratories.
After being introduced at the graduation ceremony, Sister Mary Berchmans Hannan – who is now 93 – smiled as she stepped up to the microphone and addressed the students as the “lovely graduates of 2024.”
“Georgetown Visitation has grown up with our country. Our school, founded in 1799, has been in existence through every president’s tenure, except our first president, George Washington,” Sister Berchmans said, adding, “Like our nation, Visitation has evolved and grown.”
She noted that during that span of 225 years, the school first known as “The Young Ladies Academy” and later as Georgetown Visitation Convent, is today known as Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School, or by its nickname, “Visi.”
Sister Berchmans emphasized that the school’s mission to meet the challenges of today’s world has stood firm over the years, through challenges including “wars, the Depression, 9/11, a devastating fire, the list could go on. Each challenge has been met with stalwart courage. This is the role which faith has played in the life of our school.”
She added, “We guide our students to become self-reliant, intellectually mature women of faith, vision and purpose.”
The Visitation sister encouraged the graduates to look upon times of trial, and opportunities, “as gifts to be accepted and nurtured.” Sister Berchmans noted how she arrived as a student at Georgetown Visitation in 1945, one month after World War II ended.
That war, she said, engendered a spirit of sacrifice in their lives, after times of rationing basic necessities and growing Victory Gardens in backyards to provide vegetables. “We learned how to live within the limits of these deprivations and emerged as stronger individuals,” she said.
Sister Berchmans then underscored how the class of 2024 had begun their four years at Georgetown Visitation “with your own set of deprivations and challenges” at the onset of a global pandemic.
“COVID forced you to spend your first months as freshmen in isolation in your bedrooms or some other quiet spot in your home in front of a computer screen. You were attached to a machine, deprived of personal interactions with new classmates and teachers. How disappointing this was for you!” she said, adding, “Marshmallow Roast and Gold White games were postponed – the very activities that create opportunities for new friendships to flourish.”
The Visitation sister pointed out that, “As so often happens in our lives, difficult situations can lead us to develop an inner strength and outward calm to meet challenges head on. The class of 2024 will go down in the annals of Visitation as a class that rebounded from the forced isolation that marked its first few months in a new school with vim, vigor and vitality. Most importantly, the deprivations of your first few months of high school have resulted in your appreciation and value of good friends and their place in your lives.”
She encouraged the graduates to use their qualities of resilience, inquisitiveness and compassion to “make a difference in the lives of those who need you the most,” and to use the “little virtues” of Salesian spirituality as touchstones in their lives. “Carry them with you in mind and heart and share them with your new friends,” she said.
Sister Berchmans highlighted how the Gospel story of Mary’s visitation with her cousin Elizabeth exemplifies the importance of relationships and “the heart of our Visitation spirit which you will be carrying beyond these walls.”
She expressed hope that each of the graduates will have abiding friendships as they move into a new phase of their lives, but she cautioned them to be wary of the distractions of technology.
“In this relentlessly technological age, don’t let cell phones and all their social media apps substitute for close, human connections,” she said, adding, “Let technology have its place, but don’t let it deprive you of the beauty and grace of faithful friends, a treasured gift.”
Sister Berchmans said she was bequeathing to the class of 2024 the motto of her own class of 1948, which has become part of the school’s 225th anniversary logo: “Onward, Upward, Christward, Together.”
“Finally, as you leave this campus today, please remember that the doors of 35th Street always remain open to you, and that the sisters are always on the alert to offer prayers for you and your families, especially during times of challenge. Don’t hesitate to call,” she said.
Concluding her remarks, Sister Berchmans said, “Goodbye dear graduates of 2024, graduates of this special year in the history of our school. You have made your mark. God bless you all.”
Then the students, faculty, staff, families and guests in attendance gave her a long standing ovation.
An opening prayer was offered at the graduation by Mother Anne Francis Ng’ang’a, who serves as the Visitation monastery’s superior. She noted they were celebrating “the resilient class of 2024” who had weathered storms during their school years with courage, perseverance and gentle strength. “We pray that each will use her God-given gifts, with faith, vision and purpose, to make our world a better place,” she said, encouraging students to “remember they can do all things through Christ who strengthens them.”
Dr. Barbara McGraw Edmondson, the president at Georgetown Visitation, welcomed the graduates and their guests, and later, she and Leonor Limarzi Ponzio, the school’s principal, and Susan Foreman, its academic dean, presented the members of the class of 2024 with diplomas and the school’s traditional crescent pins. The crescent is part of the coat-of-arms of St. Francis de Sales, who along with St. Jane de Chantal founded the Visitation order in France in 1610.
Malena Montero Johnson of Georgetown Visitation’s class of 2024 gave the student address, comparing the sisterhood of that school’s students to the March sisters in the classic novel Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. “Despite their differences, the sisters are unified by their love,” she said. “They take different paths in life, but they end up together, bound by their shared experiences and values.”
The Georgetown Visitation graduating senior said their school “has cultivated an environment that allows us to be unified under one heart, spirit and body. We can claim this sisterhood that looks and feels like the March sisters… (who) spent years learning about what makes them so special, just as all of us have been doing for the past four years.”
Noting the words of St. Francis de Sales, “Be who you are and be that well,” Montero Johnson said, “Visitation has allowed us to grow in the 'little virtues' as we began to understand our true selves. All of the tools have been given to us, so now it’s our turn to take the Visitation ideals and carry them into the world.”
As she concluded her student address, she said, “While today we leave the building and the people we have surrounded ourselves with, we don’t leave Visitation, because the values and the sisterhood will stay with us.”
The graduation closed with the singing of the school’s alma mater, Cor Jesu, and with the new Georgetown Visitation graduates marching forth to a recessional by Franz Schubert.
