Mary Catherine Conway (Aug. 26, 1948-Aug. 13, 2023) was a remarkable, accomplished woman who had an amazing life.

Born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Mary grew up in Easton, Pennsylvania, and attended St. Bernard’s Elementary School and Notre Dame High School there. She wanted to go to college and did the research and applied for and received scholarships to attend Trinity College in Washington, D.C. She graduated in 1970 and got her first job in journalism at the Catholic Standard, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Washington, where she began to make her mark. 

Mary covered major news events in the nation’s capital. She also met and interviewed many important people – international figures, cardinals and missionaries, local parish priests, women religious and ordinary parishioners, and others who served the poor and the needy. She brought their stories to life in the pages of the Catholic Standard until 1985, when she left to found the Catholic Islander newspaper in the U.S. Virgin Islands. 

Among the major stories Mary covered was the 1976 consistory when Washington Archbishop William Baum was made a cardinal. That trip to Rome proved to be a turning point. She became friends with Msgr. Lorenzo Albacete, who became her spiritual director. Msgr. Albacete was a brilliant theologian who also had a wicked sense of humor, and he encouraged Mary to follow her dreams.

Not long after that, Mary interviewed a certain Capuchin friar about his work with the tenants of a rundown building in Washington, D.C. She not only wrote a moving story for the Catholic Standard, but she also stayed in touch and became friends with Father Sean O’Malley (now the cardinal archbishop of Boston). 

Then, when he was named bishop of the Diocese of St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands, Bishop O’Malley asked Mary to help start a Catholic newspaper there. She put her furniture in storage and left her books in the care of a colleague and moved to St. Croix, where she was a one-woman editor, publisher, photographer, reporter and business manager. She got the newspaper up and running and kept it going far beyond the original one year she originally signed on for.

Mary became an islander herself. She lived there for nearly 15 years, surviving and rebuilding after two major hurricanes. She weathered Hurricane Hugo on St. Croix by holing up in one of the ancient buildings on the island that had been built by Danish colonists with 12-foot stone walls. There was a priest who also was on that church property with her. They carried the tabernacle to the safest part of the building and waited out the storm together. That priest later joked that he survived the storm “with Jesus and Mary.”

Ninety percent of the buildings on St. Croix were destroyed. Mary stayed on the island to report and the Catholic Islander stayed in business. Eventually Mary moved to St. Thomas and found a safe basement apartment. Then Hurricane Marilyn hit. She wrote a hair-raising story about her experience in that hurricane. The house above her apartment was blown away, literally.

Having lost everything she owned twice, and following other traumatic experiences, Mary finally returned to the U.S. mainland around the end of the century. She lived with family for awhile and then took a job in New York City, working for the Redemptorist Fathers in Brooklyn. She wasn’t there long, when 9/11 happened. The neighborhood where she lived in Brooklyn was home to many first responders. The community was doubly devastated by the loss of life.

Mary worked in Brooklyn, traveling around the Baltimore Province of the Redemptorists, until her retirement in 2011. She lived with family in Florida briefly and then relocated to Hyattsville, Maryland, where she lived until her death. She is survived by four siblings: Neal Conway, Patrick Conway, Helen McLeary and Diane Brown. Other survivors include her aunt, Ann McDonald, and many nieces and nephews and cousins from her extended but very close family.

(Anne Healey, the sister-in-law of Mary Conway, has served in Maryland’s House of Delegates since 1991, representing District 22 in Prince George’s County. Anne Healey is married to Deacon Neal Conway, Mary Conway’s brother who serves at St. Jerome Parish in Hyattsville, Maryland. Mary Conway’s Funeral Mass will be held on Monday Sept. 11 at 10 a.m. at St. Jerome Church, and the main celebrant will be Boston Cardinal Sean O’Malley.)