Sister Mary Agnes discusses path to her vocation and mission of Sisters of Life

Donovan said “it’s uniquely true now” that it can be hard for women of faith to see the God-given gifts in themselves. “If you are a woman of faith, you’re living in a way that’s countering a prevalent culture. So you don’t fit in, and you don’t fit the mold,” she said in an interview with EWTN News’ Colm Flynn, with an excerpt aired on “EWTN News Nightly” and broadcast in full on EWTN’s YouTube channel.

“So it’s very important to have other people around you ratify, and encourage, and identify that ‘You are uniquely gifted in this way and this is a gift that has been given, that you can develop, and give back to the world,’” she said.

To honor her many years of helping women, the GIVEN Institute announced this week Donovan will receive the 2026 GIVEN Fiat Award. GIVEN, a nonprofit organization that helps young women identify their gifts for the Church and the world, will honor her witness to the dignity of women and the gift of life.

To recognize these God-given gifts, Donovan said “other people notice it first, and they’ll tell you.”

Path to religious life

Before joining religious life, Donovan said she had other plans. Growing up in Pennsylvania in the farming country, “I always thought, because of the circumstances, I’d be a farmer’s wife,” she said. “I thought I would have six children.”

Later on, Donovan developed an interest in psychology. “I think I loved people, and that was probably the basis of my own interest in pursuing psychology,” she said. “I think just to understand the human person.”

She went to college for a degree in educational psychology and eventually completed her doctorate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After school, Donovan began teaching at Columbia University in New York.

While at Columbia, “I thought that would be my life forever,” she said. “I had no intention of leaving.” But then everything changed during a retreat at the end of her first year teaching in New York.

“It was an Ignatian retreat where you pray in silence for eight days and basically listen to, and see things, that you don’t see when you’re not silent and you’re not praying,” she said. “I think what happened was that essentially an encounter with the love of God just turned my life upside down.”

It was “a calling to give all of my life to God, and he would decide what that would look like. So in other words, it was a call to love, to give all of my mind, my heart, my soul, the entirety of my life,” she said.

Joining religious life then “seemed obvious to me,” she said. “I told my retreat director that. I said, ‘I’ll be in a convent next year at this time.’” Donovan then entered religious life in 1991, when the Sisters of Life was founded, and became a sister by 1993.

Sisters of Life

While many call her a founder or co-founder of the Sisters of Life, Donovan said: “I’ve never thought of myself that way.” It was Cardinal John O’Connor who “actually received the charismatic grace, that is the foundational grace of our community. I was the first superior, and a long-term superior.”

“I think all of the first 50 sisters are probably foundational sisters. We all contributed to the foundation of mission, to the foundation of our common life, everything about our lives. You do it together in a community,” she said.

More than three decades after the order was founded, the sisters continue their mission in a time it is especially needed, she said.

“We live in an age when most people don’t get up in the morning and feel that their life matters deeply to many. They question the meaning and the purpose of their lives,” she said.

“Our purpose as Sisters of Life is to answer that very ache in the heart of man, which is to say that ‘You are of infinite value, that you came from a Creator who created you with a particular purpose for your life. And only you can fulfill that purpose.’”

The Sisters of Life primarily work with women experiencing unexpected pregnancies and are “deliberating among their options,” she said. “I think that the women that call us are calling us because they want to know everything before they make that decision.”

“They may not be practicing their faith, but they have some life of faith within them. They don’t want to ignore that because everything in their being tells them that this is an important decision,” she said.

“So our job is simply to help them slow down long enough to simply think through with their heart more than their mind: ‘What is before me and what my options are,’” she said. “It’s really a call to listen deeply to the heart of another and to allow her to speak what is within her heart, so that she can hear herself.”

Many women who come to the sisters have already had abortions after they “quickly made a decision,” she said. They are not as quick to do it again because “the experience of abortion is not what it’s described to be. It’s an experience they never want to have again,” she said.

“No woman would ever choose abortion if she had options that were real,” Donovan said. The sisters then “help her find what she needs so that she can reasonably make that decision. Because the decision for abortion is often one that is vaguely coerced by the culture, by withdrawing all the supports that are needed.”

“No one comes to us by force. They only come to us voluntarily. We don’t seek them. They walk through our doors,” she said. “She is coming to us because, in fact, she’s feeling coerced into a decision that she doesn’t like or desire.”

Impact of the sisters’ ministry

After 35 years of ministry, many of the children the Sisters of Life helped bring into the world are now adults. The sisters “stay in touch with many of them and they’re part of our family,” Donovan said.

“They do their confirmation service hours with us” and “they come back and they volunteer,” she said.

“Every Christmas, when we have our Christmas party, you look at all these children that are there … and you stand there and you say: ‘Not one of them would probably be alive. Not one of them,’” Donovan said.

“It’s the most wondrous mission … to receive these women, to usher them through a program of retreat and prayer and gatherings where they explore and understand what has happened in their life. They come to us sometimes weeks and months after the abortion. Sometimes they come decades after,” Donovan said.

“It’s the most wonderful thing … to see these women actually begin to believe in the mercy and the tenderness of the heart of God,” she said.

The Sisters of Life continues its mission, and the number of sisters continues to grow with it. As the number of religious vocations goes down, the order has not experienced a decline with around 145 sisters today.

“God has blessed us with vocations,” Donovan said. But, “we need many more.”