60th Jubilee-Sister Bernadette Duggan, M.M.

Duggan, Bernadette CordisSister Bernadette Duggan, M.M. from Boston, MA will be celebrating her 60th Jubilee this year.

Sister Bernadette Duggan was born in Boston, MA. After earning her R.N. at Catherine Labouré School of Nursing in Dorchester, MA in 1958, she entered the Maryknoll Sisters. In 1967, Sister Bernadette completed her B.S. in Nursing at Salve Regina College in Newport, R.I. and went on to receive her Master’s degree in Public Health Nursing from the University of Minnesota in 1969.

Assigned to the Philippines in 1970, Sister Bernadette worked in St. Joseph’s Hospital in Manapla which was administered by the Maryknoll Sisters. It was a practice facility for students in a bacalaurate program in Bacolod and she enjoyed being the field work guide for the nurses in formation. For the next ten years Sister Bernadette worked on the island of Mindanao in the mountains of Upi, Maguindanao with the tribal Tiruray people. She opened a clinic and paramedic training program. By 1984, a fine Tiruray nurse-midwife took over the work and Sister Bernadette was assigned to the Maryknoll Sisters Center for congregational service until 1988. In 1989, she was assigned to Bangladesh.

This allowed Sister Bernadette Cordis to contribute her nursing talents in health services at Maryknoll, NY. In 1989, she was assigned to Bangaldesh where she served with a Maryknoll Sister doctor in a small rural hospital near the reserve for the Royal Bengal Tiger, so they had tiger bite patients. Sister Bernadette said if the patients got to them alive, they could save them because “we had a team where each knew what to do, and immediately.”  Actually, most of their patients were women with complications of pregnancy because the Muslim women preferred being examined by a woman doctor. They had pre- and post-natal clinics and classes for local traditional midwives. After fifteen years, a Sister doctor of another community arrived and this freed Sister Bernadette Cordis to respond in 2006 to a request for a nurse in the AIDS Hospice Seedling of Hope administered by the Maryknoll team in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

In November 2008, Sister Bernadette was assigned to the Rogers Community, Maryknoll, NY and worked in outpatient care as a companion on medical trips.