Remembering Sister Jean Thuerauf

The recent death of 85-year-old Sister Jean Thuerauf brought together a large number of mourners to a visitation at St. Anthony of Padua Chapel in Northeast Minneapolis. The people who knew her in life described someone filled with energy, compassion and joy.
She was born Dorothy Jean Thuerauf, and as a nun of the Order of the Sisters of Mercy, she took the name Sister Mary John. But to anyone who had the good fortune to be her friend, she was Sister Jean.
She grew up near Solon, Iowa, and entered the Sisters of Mercy Convent in Cedar Rapids. She taught elementary school at St. Joseph’s in Marion, St. Matthews in Cedar Rapids and Sacred Heart in Oelwein, Iowa. Later she worked as a teacher and adult religious educator at Our Lady of Grace Church in Edina.
In 1973 Sister Jean contracted a meningitis virus, incapacitating her for over two years and leaving her temporarily blind. She eventually recovered and later described a vision she had in 1976, when, she said, ”the Lord told me to move to North Minneapolis and leave my purse and driver’s license behind.”
She moved to the first of four houses on the Northside, intending to work with neighborhood teens. She knew that crime, gangs and violence of the streets put neighborhood youth at serious risk, and set out to get them to engage in safe and useful activities. In 1985, Sister Jean founded her own religious order, the Mercy Missionaries.
She began inviting local children and teens into her home and into an unlikely combination of religious study, homework help and cookie-baking. Using a small cart, the young bakers sold the cookies they made out on those same streets, and made a little money as well. By 1987, cookie production had overwhelmed the space of Sister Jean’s modest kitchen, and Cookie Cart was formed as a non-profit bakery. Its first space was on Emerson Ave. N., and later it moved to its present location on West Broadway. A new outlet will open in St. Paul this year. Cookie Cart’s non-profit bakery program expects that 200 teens will be engaged in 30,000 hours of job experience and classroom job readiness training in 2016.
Cookie Cart’s current executive director, Matt Halley, described the day he joined the company 13 years ago:  “My first day was a long walk around the neighborhood with Sister Jean. We went to her house, and we looked through her many photo albums while she told stories about the children she had encountered. I noticed that a number of the faces in the photos had circles around them. She said that those were young people who had since died, long before their times.”
A long-time friend, Beverly Mooney, said, “Sister Jean was a loving and caring missionary to the Northside. Her heart gave her strength, and she was never afraid.”