Nun Who Helped Poor Is Dead at 81

Sister Henrietta Sauvageau, who spent more than 60 years ministering to the poor, the homeless, the addicted and the deaf in Orange County, has died at age 81.

Her fellow Sisters of St. Joseph described her as an irrepressible person to whom it was nearly impossible to say no. She had a knack for organizing and would go to great lengths to help anybody in need, other nuns said.

“I used to say, ‘I’m not going to go out with you any more, Sister Henrietta; you’re a perfect beggar,’ ” recalled Sister Angela Lemay, 85, a friend from childhood. “But it was always for the poor, never for herself.”

Once Sister Henrietta learned that St. Joseph Hospital had purchased new mattresses, and she resolved to give the old ones to poor families.

“I said, ‘But how are you going to move the mattresses?’ ” Sister Angela said. “She said, ‘Never you mind.’ There was a circus in town, and somehow she got the men to help her.” The mattresses were indeed delivered--in a circus van.

“She would get anything and everything from anybody,” Sister Angela said. “You couldn’t say no to Henrietta.”

Born Mathilde Sauvageau in 1908 in Manchester, N.H., she went to work in a shoe factory after completing the eighth grade. According to Sister Angela, who worked in the same factory, she gave most of her earnings to a local religious order, and on Saturday nights persuaded her friend to come with her to an orphanage, where they would put little girls’ hair up for Sunday curls.

As a child, she suffered from polio, and once confided that she had been told by a doctor that she would not walk again, Sister Rose Marie Redding said. “She said, ‘Oh, yes I will. If God wills it, I will walk again.’ She promised God: ‘I won’t complain about my legs if I can walk again.’ And even when her legs hurt her, she never did complain.”

After hearing about nuns who were ministering to homeless immigrants in Los Angeles, she came west and entered the Sisters of St. Joseph convent in Orange in 1927, taking her final vows in 1933.

Sister Henrietta taught school in Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego for about 15 years, and was stationed permanently in Orange in 1945.

She began a home for women with alcohol or chemical dependency and founded programs for the hearing-impaired, Sister Rose Marie said. And in 1975, she volunteered to help the first Vietnamese refugees who arrived after the fall of Saigon and were sent to Camp Pendleton.

For the past few years she had suffered from diabetes and had difficulty walking, but she got around in an electric cart, and “never missed a party,” Sister Rose Marie said. Sister Henrietta continued to visit women in the dependency program until she suffered a stroke in early November. She died Saturday of kidney failure.

Sister Henrietta is survived by an older sister, Bertha Marston, who lives in the convent’s infirmary, and by a stepsister, nieces, nephews and cousins.

A Rosary prayer service will be held at 5 p.m. Thursday, followed by a Mass of the Resurrection at 7 p.m. in the Motherhouse Chapel, 480 S. Batavia St., Orange. Burial services will be at 9 a.m. Friday in the chapel, with burial in Holy Sepulcher Cemetery in Orange.