The North Fork is mourning the loss of Sister Margaret Smyth, 83, who died in her sleep Monday at her Riverhead home.
For more than two decades, Sr. Margaret ran the North Fork Spanish Apostolate, an organization that, among other things, provides religious services, food, clean water, advocacy and support to the local Latino community and farm workers in particular. She was even known for appearing in town Justice Court to help workers recoup unpaid wages.
“Where she first came here, there was no priest that spoke Spanish on the North Fork,” said Father Larry Duncklee, the Pastor of St. John the Evangelist RC Church in Riverhead. “She did a ton of stuff,” Father Larry said. “She worked tirelessly to help the Hispanic community in the town.”
Sister Margaret was born in Woodside, Queens to Irish immigrant parents and holds a bachelor’s degree in Spanish from St. John’s University and two master’s degrees from Fordham in spiritual studies and urban education. She was 17 years old when she decided to begin her journey as a nun.
She was the principal of two major elementary schools and for 11 years and served as an associate pastor of St. Cantius parish in East New York, one of the most violent sections of New York City. “We used to go to bed every night to the sound of gunfire in the streets,” Sr. Margaret told The News-Review in 2006, when she was named the newspaper’s Person of the Year.
Sr. Margaret worked in El Salvador and Guatemala, living in places without running water or access to bathrooms, where people cooked on the floor over open fires. When she returned to Long Island in the late 1990s, a nun suggested she look for work to do on the North Fork.
“The first place I went to was Mattituck,” she told a reporter in 2017. “I went to a farm at lunchtime. The guys invited me to share their tortillas. I was so touched. I said, ‘I will come here.’ ”
She moved into a convent in Cutchogue in January 1997 and immediately began reaching out to the Hispanic community as a member of the Sisters of St. Dominic of Amityville.
Rosendo Herrera first met Sister Margaret Smyth in 1999, working with a youth group in the community.
“At that time there was no [North Fork Spanish Apostolate], she was the impulse behind that, she started it all,” he said in Spanish.
Under Sr. Margaret’s guidance, Mr. Herrera has since become one of many leaders in the growing ministry of the North Fork Spanish Apostolate and helps organize many events for the Spanish-speaking Catholic community.
He said she taught him how to become a leader.
“That was her biggest worry, to create leaders to work in the community, and she built that for years,” Mr. Herrera said.
In 2017, Sr. Margaret was honored for some 60 years of service to the local community at a packed, standing-room-only mass at St. Agnes Roman Catholic Church in Greenport. Fellow religious leaders and community members extolled her work and Monsignor Joe Staudt, pastor of Sacred Heart Parish in Cutchogue, said she’s been “Our version of St. Mother Teresa.”
In an interview Monday afternoon, Mr. Herrera recalled how he was expecting a phone call from her earlier today. He called her twice because he was working on a future event with her.
“When she didn’t answer, we had to go and see what was going on,” he said.
Another member of the community went to check on her and through a phone call, Mr. Herrera found out she had passed.
Her said her legacy will be her tirelessness to creating leaders and working to provide as much as she could for the community.
“I think she left her footprint deep in the entire community and many other areas, with her character and the way she worked, she has left her mark on the Hispanic community,” Mr. Herrera said. “Sister Margaret never got tired of working and never got tired of helping us — I say us because she helped us all. We’ll miss her very much.”
Father Larry said funeral arrangements are still pending and will be handled by Chapey Funeral Home in West Islip.
“We may have to hire two people to replace her,” he said. “One is not going to do it.”
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