The Sisters of St. Joseph are all about connection: connections between people, between humanity and the earth, between God and the created.

“Our mission is unity,” said Sister of St. Joseph Pat Bergen. “Uniting neighbor with neighbor and neighbors with God so that all may be one.”

For 125 years, members of the community have been weaving those connections in the La Grange area, much as the founders of the Sisters of St. Joseph in Le Puys, France, wove thread into lace.

A large piece of Le Puys lace hangs in the ground floor of the sisters’ motherhouse at 1515 Ogden Ave., La Grange Park, a nod to the past in a LEED-certified building that boasts energy efficient construction, including solar panels, and a monitor in that same ground-floor lobby showing how much electricity the panels have generated.

Next door is Nazareth Academy, founded the same year the sisters arrived in La Grange, home to a near-capacity enrollment of 800 students who hail from 50 ZIP codes and 100 elementary schools.

Many of the parochial schools were founded and once staffed by Sisters of St. Joseph.

“The sisters were invited to start the schools all along the Burlington Northern railroad,” said Sister Pat, a 1963 graduate of Nazareth Academy who has held multiple positions of leadership in both the community and in the school. “They shaped the western suburbs. We influenced this area by teaching their kids, and starting the social justice outreaches in the western suburbs.”

The school, founded as a boarding and secondary day school for girls, is the only current Catholic high school in the Archdiocese of Chicago that began as a girls school and became coed by taking in boys. With an enrollment now almost evenly divided between boys and girls, leaders say it has succeeded by focusing on the sisters’ mission.

When the community that became known as the Sisters of St. Joseph of La Grange arrived in the Chicago area, they were a group of six women under the leadership of Mother Stanislaus Leary. They had successfully started Catholic school systems in upstate New York and in Kansas, but Mother Stanislaus was a charismatic and strong-willed leader, and the bishops in those dioceses invited her to move on and find new projects once their schools were up and running.

Archbishop James Quigley invited members of the community to Chicago to start a school, but when they arrived, they found another congregation had already started there. They were at a loss, until someone from St. Francis Xavier Parish in La Grange invited them to the suburban parish.

“They had a house across from the rectory where they could live,” Sister Pat said. “It was then that they started looking around to see what they could do.”

The sisters found that Lyons Township High School was doing a fine job educating boys, said Sister Pat. So they decided to build a school to educate girls, near the parish at Brainard and Ogden avenues.

“They had 33 cents when they started,” Sister Pat said.

But start they did, and when the bricklayers walked off the job because they hadn’t been paid, the sisters in their habits started laying bricks. The bricklayers came back, and were eventually paid, according to community lore.

By then, Mother Stanislaus had died, and one of the sisters who came with her became Mother Alexine Gosselin and led the congregation.

Mother Alexine was an artist, Sister Pat said, not a businesswoman. Fortunately, her sister, Sister Bernard, also a member of the community, had a mind for business and helped keep the fledgling congregation on solid footing.

Over the years, that wasn’t easy. Mother Alexine, now honored as a co-founder of the community with Mother Stanislaus, attracted other artists. They sold their newspaper, the Chimes, all over the country, and they relied on the generosity of their neighbors, including the members of St. Francis Xavier, who in 1927 held a bazaar to help support the sisters.

As the population of the area grew, the sisters bought a working farm further west on Ogden Avenue, and that became the site of the motherhouse and St. Joseph Military Academy for boys and Our Lady of Bethlehem Academy for girls.

In the 1970s, the sisters had combined those schools into the Alexine Learning Center, hoping to sell some of the property. The local public school district wanted to purchase land, but they wanted the site of the first school, Nazareth Academy.

“That was a hard decision,” Sister Pat said. “It was the first school.”

The sisters did sell the land, and with the help of parents and other community members, moved the school’s furnishings and equipment down Ogden Avenue. It was a decision, Sister Pat said, that would turn out to be providential, as Nazareth Academy enjoys a modern campus with room for athletic fields and other amenities, just across a parking lot from the sisters’ motherhouse.

It sits on busy Ogden Avenue, and is accessible by commuter rail and close to expressways and major roads, forming a node in a regional transportation network.

For its entire history, students at Nazareth Academy have been invited to be involved in the mission and charism of the sisters who founded it. That includes an emphasis on the arts, both performing arts and visual arts, which ties into the Congregation of St. Joseph’s Ministry of the Arts.

“The arts remain very important to Nazareth Academy, in a different way I think than to other Catholic schools,” said Deborah Tracy, the school’s president and a 1982 graduate now in her 30th year working at the school.

The school also lives the sisters’ mission of connection and unity, according to Tracy and Bergen, something that stands in contrast to what is going on in the world.

The congregation joined six other congregations of Sisters of St. Joseph in 2007, becoming the Congregation of St. Joseph. That had led to closer collaboration with two other high schools sponsored by the congregation, one in Cleveland and one in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Tracy said that this year, as the 125th anniversary of both the sisters’ community and the school is celebrated, Nazareth Academy will pay special attention to “lifting up” the sisters and their contributions.

One, Sister Terry Middendorf, has been on the faculty for 53 years. Others, like Sister Pat, get to know the students through clubs and more informal activities, including talking to the students who on their own initiative began tending the gardens in the motherhouse courtyard.

“We want our students to excel in a lot of different areas,” Tracy said, noting that alumni have gone on to flourish in college and in their chosen careers. “But we want them to be kind, to be people of service, to be rooted in care for the dear neighbor.”