The message below was written by Mr. Robert Marchand, Principal of Fountain Academy of the Sacred Heart, about the retirement of a colleague.
My colleague, Pauline Scott, was honoured this past week on the occasion of her retirement. It was a beautiful event full of heartfelt tributes from her students and colleagues. To say that Pauline is an institution at Sacred Heart would be stating the obvious for most, but I’m sure there are a few of you who may not know the extent of the impact she has had.
St Philippine Duchesne, another great Sacred Heart educator, was known by the Potawatomi tribe in the upper Mississippi region as “the woman who always prays”. Pauline is known here as “the woman who always works”. I arrive at school earlier than most almost every day, and some days I have arrived very early indeed, but I have never arrived before Pauline. Similarly I am often in the building quite late for one event or another, but never later that Pauline. Her stamina is legendary.
But it’s not simply her indefatigability that sets her apart from any other educators I have had the privilege to work with. It is her other virtues that truly set her apart, and in fact they are many of the same virtues that I talk about with the boys of Fountain Academy. Pauline is steadfastly loyal, uncommonly compassionate, pathologically humble, and a woman of great faith. But the virtue that stands out the most is her integrity. She is a woman whose great strength is derived from an understanding that one’s word is central to one’s worth, and that while flexibility is important, one’s core values should never be compromised. That is what I admire most about her, and why she inspires such loyalty from those around her.
On Friday night, Pauline came to the microphone to speak after an outpouring of love and admiration for her, and she stated in her characteristically humble fashion that the evening had turned into more of a canonization than a tribute. She was right, it had. But I can’t imagine that the evening could have gone any other way. It’s not a stretch to say that in the years to come Pauline will be spoken of in the same tones we reserve for Madeline Sophie Barat and Janet Erskine Stuart; all are women of exceptional commitment and remarkable impact.
While I listened to her speak that night, surrounded by hundreds of people whose lives she had touched, I was distinctly aware that there were more than a thousand women somewhere else in the world who had the trajectory of their lives altered by her and who were in turn affecting the trajectory of thousands more. Who could ask more from a career than that?
