Sr Lynette Pearce

Died 19 November 2022

Lynette Pearce was born in Tamworth on 15 October 1938 to Allan Pearce and Evelyn McNamara into a family of ten children – six sons and four daughters.  As the family moved around the state because her father was a policeman, Lynette attended public schools before meeting the Sisters of St Joseph at the parish school in Cardiff when she was in fourth class.  Lynette completed her schooling as a boarder at St Joseph’s College Lochinvar.

Following her call to dedicate her life to God, Lynette entered the Novitiate at Lochinvar on the first day of January in 1957.  There she was given the name of Sr Mary Richard and was professed as a Sister of St Joseph on 4 August 1959. 

For the next two decades, she taught in secondary schools: first at Belmont, then as a founding staff member at St Mary’s Gateshead, and at Taree for much of the 1970s.

In 1981, Sr Lynette returned to Lochinvar, where, for the next ten years, she cared for teenaged girls in the Boarding School.  

When the Boarding School closed, she pursued studies in Theology, Scripture and Christian Spirituality, which led to the ministries of parish pastoral associate, Adult Faith Formation in the Tenison Woods Education Centre and Spiritual Direction.  She was central to the establishment of a four-year course for training Spiritual Directors in the Newcastle area.  This was one of the many ecumenical ventures in which she was involved.

Though Sr Lynette had a long-term heart condition, her death came suddenly and unexpectedly while in hospital on 19 November 2022.  Very Rev Brian Mascord, Bishop of Wollongong, a relative of the Pearce family presided at the Mass of Christian Burial on 28 November 2022 in St Joseph’s Chapel. He was joined by a number of the clergy who had worked with Sr Lynette over the years.

At the conclusion of the Mass, the funeral cortege moved through a guard of honour made by the College students that lined the route from the chapel, along the highway to the Lochinvar cemetery. There in the Sisters’ section, Sr Lynette Pearce was laid to rest while she awaits the resurrection.