Sister Mary Luke Tobin, 98; Participated in Second Vatican Council

Sister Mary Luke Tobin, 98, the only American woman to participate in the Roman Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council, died Thursday in Nerinx, Ky.

Tobin, a former superior general and president of the Sisters of Loretto order from 1958 to 1970, died at the order’s motherhouse in Nerinx, where she retired in 1999.

When she was invited to Rome, she was president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, a group of leaders from U.S. congregations of nuns.

Tobin was invited to attend the third and the final sessions of the Second Vatican Council in Rome in 1964 and 1965. A dozen other women were invited to observe the ecumenical proceedings, but she was one of only three women in the world to participate in policymaking.

She did much of her work in her native Denver but traveled the world on missions for peace, including visits to what was then called Saigon in South Vietnam and to Paris during the Vietnam War, and later to El Salvador and Northern Ireland during conflicts there.

While living in Nerinx, Tobin became friends with Trappist monk Thomas Merton, who lived at the nearby Abbey of Gethsemani.

After Merton’s accidental death in 1968, Tobin became a lecturer on Merton’s teachings and writings, was a co-founder of the International Thomas Merton Society and established the Thomas Merton Center for Creative Exchange in Denver in 1979.