Chicagoland

Mercy Sister JoAnn Persch, 91, longtime advocate for migrants, dies

By Chicago Catholic staff
Nov 18, 2025 7:47:00 PM

Mercy Sister JoAnn Persch, 91, long time advocate for migrants, dies

Longtime advocate for immigrants and immigration reform, Mercy Sister JoAnn Perch, 91, died Nov. 14, 2025. (Karen Callaway/Chicago Catholic)
Mercy Sister JoAnn Persch informs the congregation they were denied entrance to distribute Communion to detainees as hundreds of participants joined the Coalition for Spiritual and Public Leadership, a Catholic and Christian-rooted organization, for a Mass held outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement center in Broadview on Nov. 1, 2025. (Karen Callaway/Chicago Catholic)
Sisters Jo Ann Persch (74) and Sister Pat Murphy (80) celebrated with hundreds of clergy and their supporters in front of the Broadview Immigrant Detention Center on April 30, 2009. After 2 and a half years of weekly prayer vigils outside of the facility, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agreed to allow the clergy to pray with immigrant detainees on the deportation buses on Friday mornings during a trial period for the next month. The nuns and 18 other religious leaders and allies had declared that they would engage in civil disobedience by blocking the gates to the facility if prayer was not made available to the immigrant detainees. (Karen Callaway/Chicago Catholic)
Mercy Sister JoAnn stands with supporters in front of the Broadview Immigrant Detention Center on April 30, 2009. (Karen Callaway/Chicago Catholic)
Mercy Sister JoAnn Persch is comforted by Father Larry Dowling as she reads the name of detained children who died during a prayer vigil for the Archdiocese of Chicago’s Immigration Ministry on Oct. 16, 2019 at the Healing Garden, Holy Family Church, 1080 W. Roosevelt Rd., Chicago. The group announced a 40-day call for praying, fasting and action for immigrant children and their families. (Karen Callaway/Chicago Catholic)
Mercy Sisters Pat Murphy and JoAnn Persch prepare to sign a 40-day call for praying, fasting and action for immigrant children and their families. (Karen Callaway/Chicago Catholic)
Mercy Sister JoAnn Persch speaks to Instituto Pastoral Migratoria participants about their ministry as they took park in an immersion experience on July 13, 2018 at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Detention Center in Broadview. (Karen Callaway/Chicago Catholic)
Sister Joann Persch and Christian Brother Bede Baldry sing at the start of the event. Over a thousand people gathered for an interfaith prayer forum at Our Lady of Mercy Church in Chicago on March 21, 2009. (Karen Callaway/Chicago Catholic)
Sister JoAnn Persch joined Catholic priests, religious sisters and brothers, along with representatives from Christian, Muslim and Jewish religions for a press conference on May 12, 2010 at Holy Name Cathedral. The group met to oppose the enactment and implementation of Arizona SB 1070, which criminalizes undocumented immigrants, and to call on the Federal Government to freeze non-felony deportations and move swiftly toward passing compassionate, comprehensive immigration legislation. (Karen Callaway/Catholic New World)
From left, Mercy Sisters Pat Murphy and Jo Ann Persch sing with Syrian refugee Marwan Saffa during the service. St. Barnabas Parish, 10134 S. Longwood Dr., hosts the interfaith event “You Are My Neighbor” on March 2, 2017. The event featured speakers from the Catholic, Jewish and Muslim traditions and was an effort to show support for refugees and immigrants following recent executive orders banning refugees entering the U.S. from certain countries like Syria. (Karen Callaway Chicago Catholic)

Mercy Sister JoAnn Persch, 91, died unexpectedly on Nov. 14. She had been a Sister of Mercy for 73 years.

Sister JoAnn was well known for her tireless advocacy for migrants and refugees, working for decades with her partner in ministry, Sister Pat Murphy, who died July 21.

Sister JoAnn continued to lend her voice and presence to efforts to help immigrants, even after Sister Pat’s death. On Nov. 1, she was in the delegation of clergy, religious and laypeople who attempted to bring the Eucharist to people detained in the Broadview Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility.

Sister JoAnn shared the news that they had been denied entry after speaking with an Illinois State Police officer outside the center.

“It breaks my heart to say it,” said Sister JoAnn. “Sisters and brothers detained in this horrendous situation, we asked to come and bring you comfort. The officer very sincerely tried, and the answer was no.”

Born in Milwaukee, Sister JoAnn entered the Sisters of Mercy in Des Plaines in 1952, when she was 18. She earned a bachelor’s degree in home economics from St. Xavier College (now University), and a master’s in religious education from Loyola University Chicago.

She taught at Catholic schools in the Archdiocese of Chicago, along with a three-year assignment teaching in Fox Point, Wisconsin, north of Milwaukee. It was during her time there, from 1959 to 1962, that she first met Sister Pat.

Sisters JoAnn and Pat later ministered together at Little Brothers — Friends of the Elderly in the 1980s, and in 1990 became two of the founding members of the Su Casa Catholic Worker House in Chicago, spending the next seven years serving refugees from Central America who were survivors of war, torture and political persecution.

From 1997 until 2002, Sisters JoAnn and Pat ministered together at Casa Notre Dame in Chicago, a shelter for women fleeing domestic violence or recovering from addiction.

Beginning in January 2007, the two sisters began organizing weekly prayer vigils outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing center in Broadview, the final stop for migrants scheduled for deportation. They attended the prayer vigils every Friday morning.

Those prayer vigils led to the creation of an interfaith coalition to minister to the needs of immigrants and refugees in which the Sister JoAnn and Sister Pat took key roles.

In 2008, Sisters JoAnn and Pat were instrumental in the passage of a bill by the Illinois House and Senate that permitted them — and other faith leaders — access to provide spiritual care for migrants in state detention facilities.

Eventually, they were allowed inside the Broadview facility and sometimes on the buses to pray with people about to be deported.

“For years, Sister JoAnn joined her lifelong friend, Sister Pat, praying the rosary every Friday for immigrants at Broadview who faced separation from their families and deportation to an unknown fate,” said Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois, who had their names entered into the Congressional Record in 2018 for Women’s History Month. “These nuns were often the last to see these immigrants before they embarked on their life-changing journeys.”

Because of their relentless advocacy on behalf of migrants and refugees, the two sisters were affectionately nicknamed “Rabble” and “Rouser” by friends and fellow advocates in the faith community, according to their religious community; Sister JoAnn playfully conceded that she didn’t know which was which.

“When Sister Pat Murphy recently died, not unexpectedly, the sadness, concern and love of our Mercy community turned immediately to Sister JoAnn Persch, Pat’s forever Sister of Mercy partner in the ministry of justice, activism, compassion, prayer and love,” Sister Susan Sanders, president of the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas, said in a statement. “Now, God has so soon asked us to mourn JoAnn’s unexpected death this week.”

Sister JoAnn and Sister Pat’s determination to minister to migrants and refugees, grounded in both Scripture and Catholic social teaching, led the pair to challenge policies that were unjust and that failed to recognize the inherent dignity in each person. “Peacefully and respectfully, we never take no for an answer,” Sister JoAnn said in a November 2025 interview with The Daily Beast.

Sisters JoAnn and Pat participated in the 2018 Catholic Day of Action with Dreamers in Washington, D.C., a nonviolent civil disobedience protest in support of immigrants that took place in the Russell Senate Office Building; both Sisters Pat and JoAnn were arrested by Capitol Police during the protest.

In 2022, after Texas began sending busloads of migrants to Chicago, Sisters JoAnn and Pat  worked with sisters, lay associates and other supporters to found Catherine’s Caring Cause.

The non-profit, named in honor of Sisters of Mercy founder Catherine McAuley, started by helping one family seeking asylum — a mother from Sierra Leone with five children — to resettle in the Chicago area. Now it has helped more than two dozen families.

In 2023, Sisters JoAnn and Pat received the Cardinal Blase Cupich Lifetime Achievement Award during the archdiocese’s annual immigration ministry.

The funeral Mass for Sister JoAnn will take place on Nov. 24 at 10 a.m. in St. Barbabas Catholic Church, 10134 S. Longwood Drive. It can be live streamed here.

 

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