Lydia is a woman of very strong faith.

I think Lydia's life as a sister of Loretto permeated her day- to-day life.

It's everything about who she is and how she acts and what she does.

Sister Lydia has been active at volunteering in Denver as well as work abroad.

She is a connector and a community leader.

It's about the good that she does for others As strong and enduring as the Rocky Mountains, they stood beside as visionary as the views of the Grand Plains.

They looked across.

The women inducted into the Colorado Women's Hall of Fame are trailblazers whose work has improved and enriched our lives.

They are teachers, scientists, ranchers, leaders in business, education, religion, and the arts, women who have been recognized for their many contributions to our state, our country, and the world.

I'm Reynelda Muse and these are the stories of great Colorado women.

I would describe Lydia as a vowed sister of Loretto.

They are people who strongly believe in compassion for others, a welcoming spirit, a belief in hospitality, and they are deeply connected with values that aren't just of the church.

She's very well known in the Denver community.

Lydia has been on numerous committees and and worked on different foundations From choosing the art at Denver International Airport when it first opened to being a part of the Rose Community Foundation.

She's dedicated to what she does.

When she commits to something, she follows through with it.

Sister Lydia made you want to become involved.

She put that into you.

Lydia has this real knack for knowing how to cultivate an interest in that mission or that purpose.

She was so kind to me, supported me and it made me feel like I was important.

She has such a talent and knowing how to help an individual assess what resources they have and how those resources can be of benefit to groups, institutions that need a helping hand.

I was born in San Mateo, New Mexico to Pablo and Pablita Peña in 1934 after they had had five boys.

Her father was so happy to finally have a daughter that he went out into the street with a pistol and shot it up in the air, Which was totally out of character for my father.

But he wanted the community to know that at long last, Pablo and Pablita had had a baby girl.

The village was very excited.

My father was a rancher, mostly sheep.

He owned some horses and some cattle, but it was a very large sheep ranch.

Pablita Peña.

Lydia's mother was quite the homemaker.

She had an orchard and a very large garden And almost everything that we had for meals was grown by my parents and my brothers.

When Lydia was an infant, she became very ill.

I got double pneumonia.

My family, mom and dad called the doctor.

He examined me and told my parents that I would not live till morning.

You can imagine a disappointment in my parents that finally they had had a girl and now I was dying.

Her parents had a woman come to the house to treat her, a curandera, which is a medicine woman, and she came and she wrapped her in blankets and lavender and did treatments with her.

The next morning I awakened crying, and you can imagine the glee of my parents and they took good care of me.

Her parents were, were very loving.

They really wanted her to get a good education.

They wanted their daughter to have something special so that she could be successful.

I think her experience going to St.

Vincent Academy when she moved from the village of San Mateo to Albuquerque gave her a lot of strength to try new things, to be adventurous.

I was 12 going on 13 and I wanted to go to school badly.

The students came from all over New Mexico.

We were all boarding there.

Most of the borders there were not Hispanic, so there were some who were a little bit prejudice.

It's very hard when people decide they don't like somebody because it hurts them more than the other.

So I made it a point to go to that person and ask her what was going on.

We had a very good talk, so I learned the importance of being honest and being kind.

In my honesty, when I graduated from St.

Vincent, my parents decided that they wanted me to get a college education, a good education.

She talks about when she was in Albuquerque and they did a presentation about different schools and she saw the presentation about Loretto Heights and knew that that was where she wanted to go.

I guess I wanted to go to a Catholic school.

I wanted to go to a school where sisters taught, and it wasn't until my junior year that I remember thinking, you know, I think I'd like to be a sister.

But then the thought went away.

Yeah, I wasn't really there yet.

A Catholic girl back in the, in the sixties, that would be a question one would ask, do I have a religious vocation?

Is God calling me?

I was taking a class from Sister Mary Louise, I think it was, and she said to me, mother Felicitas, the head of the Sisters of Loretto is coming from Kentucky.

I'm wondering if you'd like to talk with her.

I was very smart, and I said, yes, I would.

So when I went in to talk with her, I said, well, the reason I'm here is because I'm having thoughts about becoming a sister.

She said, well, what would you like to know?

And I, I said, well, how does one go to Loretto?

She gave me the information.

I applied, I was accepted, and I went.

So when Lydia came to her parents to announce that she was going to join the convent, her mother was very happy.

Her father, on the other hand, was not happy.

I think he wanted her to forge her own path And they came to see me at Christmas.

They flew to Loretto, Kentucky.

I told them that I was staying, that that's what I want, and my father was totally sold on it.

I quickly learned after I entered Loretto that we were all in education.

We were teachers.

That was our mission, so to speak.

It was a great fit for me.

Their main focus has been education and education primarily of young women.

I found the sisters Loretto pretty progressive for the times, And they are deeply connected with values that aren't just of the church, but are values that I think most of us, including someone like me who was not Catholic and was not religious when I went to Loretto, could find valuable.

So this could be almost paradoxical way of seeing something that supports and encourages independence and individuality and responsibility as an individual while attending to the needs of the community and to those in the community.

It's a beautiful mix of values.

The first year I was a postulant for nine months and during that year they explained what religious life was about and what we would be doing.

We would have different offices, they called them.

We would have a job every day and then we prayed.

We had a prayer in the morning, prayer at noon, prayer at night, And then one is admitted by the community into the novitiate, and that second year is a year devoted to prayer and service.

Lydia found education for herself to be very important, and she was always curious, always wanting to learn more.

Those three years in the novitiate, I went to Webster College in St.

Louis in the summers and I took art classes and then eventually I went to St.

Louis U, and got a degree, and there was a time in my life when I was doing art all the time.

I did calligraphy first and then I did acrylic painting and then I did ceramics and I did wood carving.

I tried everything.

At the end of that three year period, I was sent to teach right here in Denver at St.

Mary's Academy.

I taught my and art appreciation.

I got along very well at St.

Mary's and I was there for seven years.

Mother Eduardo, who was my superior, said to me, sister Francis Marie wants you at Loretto Heights.

And I said, and what?

I'm not prepared.

You'll get prepared At Loretto Heights, I'm teaching mostly art appreciation.

I didn't teach the science after my first year at Loretto Heights.

I sailed for Europe and I studied at the University of Madrid and it was a thrill to be able to go there.

She did study female artists and was intrigued by the discipline.

I wanted to be the best teacher of art history in the world for my doctorate.

I wrote about Agnes Tait.

She was very willing to be interviewed and to tell me about her life.

She was in Santa Fe and I visited her several times.

I'm Lydia Peña, a sister of Loretto who entered the community in 1955.

In 1958, I was assigned to St.

Mary's Academy and in 1965 I was sent to Loretto Heights College where I have taught art history, directed the Beaumont Art Gallery, and more recently have become involved with the University Without Walls, a program for adult learners.

At that time, Loretta Heights was having some problems and guess who was in the middle of solving them?

Sister Lydia.

I remember very distinctly sitting in the auditorium in the Center for Performing Arts and the announcement being made by the Loretta Heights Board of Trustees that Loretto Heights was closing, that it would no longer exist, and that any students who wanted to apply could apply at Regis College in west Denver.

Sisters were really torn.

They didn't want to sell the school, but it just was becoming financially unfeasible for them, and I think that was very difficult for them to face.

They had put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into the heights and to let go of that was a very painful thing and it was not universally well received.

There were people who were critical of the decision, critical of the people who made the decision, critical of people who were implementing it, and people like Lydia who were directly impacted by it.

I was the only sister of Loretto who at that point was invited to go with Regis.

That was not easy, but it was the right thing to do When Sister Lydia was offered a position there and accepted it, I think she felt the brunt of a lot of the, of the negativity over what had transpired.

There was resentment from the faculty and from the Sisters of Loretto as a whole, I think, and, and certainly from the alums.

A lot of alums were just heartbroken, but they were angry.

At that point in time, I think Sister Lydia really became a leader and brought people together who had a lot of different emotions, right, because people who were going to Regis had jobs and people who were not, their programs were not being picked up by Regis.

She was kind of in a lot of ways, sort of the bridge or the link between programs at Loretto Heights and, programs at Regis University.

Sister Lydia knew that alums, even though they had graduated many years before that, something about that Loretto spirit was still so important to them.

She wanted to maintain some recognition of Loretto Heights and their place in the history of Regis University.

So she was the one that designed, if you will, or had the idea for a group called Spirit of Loretto.

Spirit of Loretto was mainly formed for the alums and to keep Loretta Heights in everybody's mind, It gave people who did not have a job at Regis and everybody as a whole, a place to bring, um, their memories, their grief about the closing, their goals for the future of still keeping the energy of it all going.

She saved the legacy of Loretta Heights College by forming that committee and bringing so many alums back into a place of belonging, feeling good about their school and feeling good about, uh, helping Regis become a university and, and a real turnaround was a remarkable achievement for her.

It made a big difference with many Loretto people finally accepting the change.

She was talking to a lot of Loretto alums already, and Father Sharon, who's the president of Regis, ask her if she would be willing to call alums from Loretto Heights and talk to them and, and obviously his idea was to fundraise, but Lydia was not used to asking people for anything, especially money.

She was stunned, you know, nobody had ever asked her to do fundraising, but she took the challenge.

It's another example of a time that she was asked to do something and, uh, didn't doubt and rose to the occasion and really, you know, stepped in to do amazing, beautiful work.

With that, She was able to communicate with the alums, former students, and encourage them to raise money for Regis and programs at Regis.

She came to Dallas to meet with my husband and myself, and that was the first time I met her.

It was shortly after that that Father Sheeran had asked me to become a trustee, and I think Lydia had some input into that because her concern was to put someone from Loretto Heights as a trustee on the board, because the majority of the board members are Regis graduates, and I was a woman, which we need on the board.

I was a woman and I was a Loretto Heights graduate.

She was a very good asset for Regis.

I know personally she's received recognition at Regis, their highest award and the spirit of Loretto gave her a surprise, spirit of Loretto Award because she didn't want to be nominated, but we felt it was appropriate to at least acknowledge our gratefulness for her.

And so she received that award.

After she retired from Regis, she traveled to Ghana to help with the establishment of school.

I was asked by the Sisters of Loretto to do fundraising.

I did not consider myself a fundraiser, but I went to Ghana and I was actually there seven weeks and I fundraised and I made money for the sisters who were there.

But more importantly, it was my general fundraising and Pakistan.

Pakistan is what I really made a lot of money for.

The school in Pakistan has been there for many years and it has helped many people, many children and parents.

Sister Pearl McGivney asked me to raise a million for Pakistan.

I learned about Pakistan.

I decided I was going to do it, and I did it.

I went over a million.

I think the reason that Lydia is so good at fundraising is because she gets to know people.

She knows so many people, and after living in Denver for 50 years, she's made a lot of connections.

Whatever she did was fundraising.

She always looked for somebody who had money, and if she didn't know him, she'd call me and say, do you know this guy?

And we did pretty well together in those days.

I went on the board of a cancer institution and I met her at one of the meetings that they had, and I was so impressed because here was a little nun who had more spark than most of the women I knew.

She was amazing.

Wherever I was, she was, she showed up somehow and we became good friends.

Lydia has been on numerous committees and, and worked on different foundations.

I was on a committee, a very important committee at the Denver Art Museum where we focused on ethnicity.

We were trying to get as many people involved from different ethnicities.

I was invited to be part of the Women's Foundation and eventually I chaired it.

I was on Rose Community Foundation.

I was chair of the board of Rose when we sold it to HCA and we didn't know what we were gonna do with the money.

So we had a big group together, which she was part of, to decide whether to be a private foundation or a community.

I wanted to be private.

She wanted to be community.

She won.

She always did win.

She also participated in the planning of Denver International Airport.

Uh, she was on the Blue Ribbon Committee for that.

I belonged to the committee at the airport.

Not only that was bringing in art exhibits, but that was really creating the airport.

It was brand new, so we worked on the airport itself, how it would be built.

Then under that group, I did, I brought in artists and we had art exhibits.

It was amazing to me that this Sister, would be asked to be on that committee.

Her talent in the art world was recognized not just in our community, not just in schools in which she taught, but in the wider Denver and Colorado community.

So, Sister Lydia lives at the bridge community, and one thing I will say that she talks about all of the time is how she has always lived in community and how that's so important to her.

Um, at the Bridge community, there is women there with developmental delays that she lives with.

It's a wonderful place where women learned self-sufficiency, how to relate to one another.

They learned the importance of community and of course the faith element.

They really can tell you about God.

They really can tell you about Jesus, and it's because of the environment that they live in.

She really has a family there.

I know that that's really important to her and that community, whether it's at the Bridge House or wherever she is, is, is really important value to her and something she's deeply grateful for.

But as a matter of fact, I am going to be leaving Denver to live in Loretto, Kentucky where I started.

That's where she started her commitment to her life of faith.

That's where Sister Lydia was when she took her vows.

I think in a way it's, she's very excited to go be back with the other sisters of Loretto And she's looking forward to it, but I think she's going to miss her life in Denver.

I think she will miss her friends greatly.

I'm grateful for her friendship.

I'm just grateful for her presence in my life.

For Sister Lydia's 90th birthday party, we knew we had to have a celebration.

What I saw was people who were excited to support, excited to help, excited to come celebrate this amazing woman on her birthday.

My daughter and grandson and I went to her birthday party here in Denver and she had a great time.

Everyone was just so happy to celebrate.

So it was, it was really fun and it was really beautiful.

She's always been very active and I think she is a woman who has always believed in taking care of your, your health, your physical health, your mental health, your spiritual health, Her structure, her discipline, and her commitment to herself and her health is why at 90, she's as healthy as she is.

At my age now, I'm in very good health and I think it's because of the good food that I was raised on and I continue to enjoy throughout my life.

I think there's so many accomplishments.

It's hard to pick one, but I guess just living a life truly committed to your values and your principles and your faith, and really practicing that day in and day out without wavering her faith is what guides her towards the volunteer work she does.

It definitely brings a sense of peace to her that is ever present in a way, no matter what is going on in the world, My faith is key in my life, and I talk with God all day long.

I say, I surrender myself to you, take care of everything, and he's doing it.

I really have that belief.

Yes, Sister Lydia talks a lot about her greatest accomplishment of being kind and her relationship she's built.

What is important for each of us human beings to realize is that we change daily and we choose how we change.

We can become better people, kinder people every day.