Covington’s Church of Our Savior anticipated a large turnout for Sunday mass, Aug. 24: church leaders taped a handwritten note to the sanctuary door advising people that mass would be held next door in the social hall.
By the time mass began at 9:30, approximately 75 congregants and visitors filled the hall to celebrate the long career of Sister Janet Bucher, who retired in July as the church’s pastoral administrator.
A Covington native, Bucher, 84, spent 33 years at Our Savior. The weekend before she retired, church leaders and officials from the Kentucky Historical Society unveiled a newly placed historical marker. Bucher spearheaded the marker project, and it’s as much a monument to Northern Kentucky’s first Black Catholic School as it is to Bucher’s contributions to the church and to Covington history.
“We wanted to celebrate an amazing life of service,” Parish Council Chair Philip Stowers told people seated inside the hall before Father Robert Ross, SJ, began the mass.
Stowers was one of several former students, congregants and colleagues who spoke during the event, which included musical interludes by the Northern Kentucky Brotherhood of Singers and percussionist James Penman and a potluck lunch.
“She was my grade school teacher,” says Penman while warming up for the program. The 71-year-old attended All Savior school between 1961 and 1963, the year it closed. He fondly remembers camping trips Bucher organized for neighborhood children and how she was a fixture in the historically Black Eastside neighborhood.
“She’s the only one I know that actually walks around the neighborhood and try to get people to come to church here,” Penman says. “I always call her my, my warrior, you know, because she, she gets out here and she does whatever it takes to get a lot of people to come to church.”
Covington’s Eastside could have been on the other side of the world instead of the opposite side of town when Bucher was growing up.
Her father, Arthur, worked as a lithographer for a printing Newport business and her mother, Hilda, who did clerical work before getting married, took care of the house and growing family, which included Bucher’s two brothers and a sister. They lived in a 2-story brick house on York Street one block west of Main Street.
Though Covington historically had one of northern Kentucky’s largest Black populations, Bucher doesn’t remember engaging with Black people until she was an adult. “Madison Avenue, or possibly Scott Street, was kind of the limits … I saw them, but, you know, you just didn’t have any contact.”
Bucher smiles when she describes life as a child on York Street. “I was pretty much a tomboy. I ran the streets and played with the boys, and we played baseball and touch football in the street or in the alley,” Bucher says. “We often hid up in the Mittendorf’s Funeral Home yard.”
The funeral home was on Main Street, and it had garages that fronted on York Street across from the Bucher home. “We’d hide up in the Mittendorf property there. We’ve been known to go in that garage and hide inside these coffin boxes,” Bucher sheepishly admits.
Bucher’s family attended St. Aloysius Catholic Church a few blocks away, and she went to St. Aloysius school. The church burned down in 1985, but the school building’s still there, converted into apartments.
In the 7th grade, Bucher, then known as Carol Ann Bucher, got to know some of the sisters in the church and she began helping them around the school and with shopping.
“I became friends with one of the sisters, and I guess decided that I liked their lifestyle and I wanted to be a teacher,” Bucher says. “In those days, in the Catholic schools, there were only sisters. There were no lay teachers back in those days in the Catholic schools. So it was almost if I wanted to be a teacher, I had to be a sister.”
Bucher knew some girls who had entered St. Anne’s convent near Melbourne. At 15, she entered the convent as a sister candidate. “My parents were okay with it,” she said.
St. Anne’s occupies a sprawling campus that includes a large wooded area with trails and wetlands now owned by the Campbell County Conservation District and a cemetery. The convent’s main brick Jacobethan-style buildings occupy a hill with expansive Ohio River valley views.
The Sisters of Divine Providence arrived in Northern Kentucky in 1889. The order that traces its roots to 18th-century France completed the convent in 1930 after spending its first few decades in Newport.
It became their home and hub for their work throughout the region. In its heyday, says Bucher, the convent once housed more than 500 nuns.
Bucher finished her primary and secondary education there and progressed from candidate to novitiate.
“At the end of our novitiate is a time when sisters … we profess our vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience for one year,” Bucher explains. “At that profession ceremony, as a symbol of our changing our lifestyle and giving our life to God, to the church, to Jesus, we make the vows. And then, as part of that, at that time, our names were changed.”
Carol Ann Bucher became Sister Janet Marie Bucher. She took the name of a cousin who died from cancer at age 17.
Bucher left the convent and began her service while trying to pick up college classes to complete an undergraduate degree from Thomas More College in education. It took 12 years. She then got a master’s in education and theology from Xavier University.
After postings around the world, Bucher returned to the Cincinnati area. Back home, she taught at Bishop Howard School and other area Catholic schools before becoming Our Savior’s parish administrator in 1991.
“When I worked at the Diocese, I was aware and worked with Sister Janet in her ministry here,” says Anthony Depenbrock, former chief financial officer for the Covington Diocese. “She’s been here a long, long time, and this is her family.”
Ric Jennings, a founder of the nationally acclaimed Northern Kentucky Brotherhood Singers, has known Bucher since she arrived at Our Savior.
“She can go to any part of the neighborhood, no particular time of day or night, and get the total respect,” Jennings said. “That’s the effect that she’s had on this community, and that’s something that we need right now to feed the hearts and minds of those around us.”
Before retiring, Bucher lived in a modest Diocese-owned home next door to the church. Last month, she moved into a nearby apartment. That’s where LINK nky met up with her as she was adjusting to her new life, one that includes noisy refrigerators and coin-operated laundry machines.
“We heard that in her new building, the laundry takes quarters, so we’ve got her a sufficient supply of quarters and a card,” parish council leader Sowers said at the end of mass. He handed Bucher a shopping bag filled with quarters and a card he got at a museum.
“This is a special card,” Stowers said. “It’s a Fannie Lou Hamer, and it talks about her life. If you don’t know about Fannie Lou Hamer, she was one of the great women leaders of the civil rights movement who became famous for her saying, ‘I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.’”
Stowers, who had Bucher as a second-grade teacher, added, “Sister Janet has lived that. She has been sick and tired and has fought for all different types of organizations in this community. Thank you, Sister Janet.”
Other gifts included a plaque presented by Roger Bedford.
“Our Savior church has changed. It has evolved. But throughout all the change, through the evolution, Sister Janet has always tried to make sure and ensure that the roots of this church were not forgotten,” Bedford told the church before handing the plaque to Bucher. “She has always, always made sure that the roots, the flavor of the Afro-American culture was somehow expressed in this church.”
He attended Our Savior school, and his entire family was baptized in the church. He’s retired and living in California. “I come back here, these are my roots,” Bedford told LINK nky afterwards.
Bucher is a diminutive woman who leaves large shoes to fill.
“She has continued to make sure that the Eastside community, especially the historically African American community, has been represented in city decisions when things were going on,” said Stowers. “She got the message out. She was always in the mix so that we knew that if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu. And Sister Janet always kept us at the table.”
Jennings, the musician, summed it up best: “That’s what the world needs, some more of Sister Janet.”
