A funeral Mass for Sister Frances Watkowski, S.S.N.D., was offered July 19 at Villa Assumpta in Baltimore followed with internment at Notch Cliff Cemetery in Glen Arm. Sister Frances died July 16; she was 83.
Sister Frances was a lifelong resident of Baltimore. She first met the School Sisters of Notre Dame in 1931, when she was a student at Our Lady of Good Counsel School in Baltimore. She attended the Institute of Notre Dame in Baltimore and then entered the School Sisters of Notre Dame in 1945 from Our Lady of Good Counsel. Sister Frances entered the novitiate in July 1947 and made her profession in August 1948. Sister Frances (then called Sister Mary Frances Cabrini) then taught in New York. In 1955 she obtained her bachelor’s in elementary and secondary education from Nazareth College of Rochester, N.Y. In 1959 Sister Frances taught French, Latin and Religion at St. Mary’s High School in Annapolis. She completed a second undergraduate degree, this time in English, from Nazareth College in 1961. In 1966 she began teaching at Bishop Walsh High School in Cumberland, Md., and she also received a master’s in social sciences from Morgan State College (now Morgan State University) in Baltimore.
From 1976 to 1979, Sister Frances was the local leader and a teacher at her alma mater, the Institute of Notre Dame in Baltimore. In 1979, she began teaching at St. Maria Goretti High School in Hagerstown, Md., where she taught social studies for 12 years. Many of Sister Frances’ students at St. Maria Goretti received local and state awards for essays or orations, so she accompanied them to Ocean City, Md., several times and also to the United Nations in New York.
Sister Frances taught English in Japan for two months in 1985, and she went to Hungary in 1991 to teach English for 3 years. Afterwards, she returned to the United States to work in her province’s finance office. She worked there until she became too ill to continue.