Education, evangelization, ecumenism traits of Pax Christi winner14 min read

Lee Ann Niebuhr poses with Bishop James P. Powers, who randomly from women nominated for the honor, selected her as the 2025 winner of the Superior Diocesan Council of Catholic Women’s Pax Christi Award. The organization’s top honor was presented during the August convention at Niebuhr’s home parish, Holy Family in Woodruff. (Catholic Herald photo)

Jenny Snarski
Catholic Herald Staff

The Superior Diocesan Council of Catholic Women’s Pax Christi Award is the organization’s highest honor. Women are not required to be part of the organization in order to be nominated and many are hesitant to receive recognition; this was the case for the East Deanery’s nominee, Lee Ann Niebuhr of Holy Family Parish in Woodruff, who was selected as the 2025 winner.

In the dossier for her nomination, Niebuhr is described as “faith-filled, always seeking God’s will, with humility at her core … Although mobility challenges have slowed her down (to 75 miles per hour), this candidate has worked tirelessly to uplift and walk with her parish family.”

The older sister of two brothers, Niebuhr was raised in Milwaukee by a devout Catholic mother and a non-religious German immigrant father. When the couple’s daughter expressed a desire to enter the convent after grade school, they denied her request but said they would support her in that path if it was what she chose after high school graduation. While she did not continue feeling the called towards a religious vocation, she had already begun her missionary “career,” inviting and encouraging her father to convert to Catholicism. She was in high school when he decided to join the family in their faith.

Contracting polio at the age of 4, Niebuhr stayed at the children’s hospital in Milwaukee while she was paralyzed from the waist down. She recalls seeing fully paralyzed children the iron lung machines, with only “their little heads sticking out of this big thing.” These experiences were formative in developing her lifelong sense of compassion and desire to help those in need.

Her parents were eventually allowed to visit, but they not given permission to hold her until her recovery progressed. Once home, with her mother’s commitment to the necessary physical exercises and her father’s purchase of a jukebox to encourage the use of her legs through dance, Niebuhr would fully recover. She was very athletic into adulthood, enjoying downhill skiing and water skiing but has experienced long-terms effects of the illness in her later years.

With a teaching degree, and later a master’s degree in education, Niebuhr spent her entire 34 year teaching career at Lakeland Union High School in Minoqua.

“I feel in love with my high school students,” Niebuhr shared, admitting she wasn’t the typical strict and serious teacher. “I taught and enjoyed real life with my high school students,” sharing pranks and building close but respectful relationships.

After retiring from teaching, Niebuhr served 10 years and as the parish’s director of evangelization, immersing herself in outreach. The nomination describes her as offering “a listening ear, smile of hope to those in need” and a willingness to “step in with both feet” wherever her efforts and energy might be needed.

Having lived through a difficult marriage for 19 years, her children then raised and in college, she obtained a divorce with prayer and support of her priest and was later granted an annulment.

Niebuhr has offered support and mentorship to other couples, including a Chinese couple wanting to get married for whom she found a bridal gown and later hosted a reception for the baptism of their child. She has also ministered to two former students needing to leave abusive marriages.

Another primary role Niebuhr has served in stemmed from her call to be a lay Franciscan. She described the calling she receiving while leading a student tour to Italy in 1988. In Assisi to visit sites related to St. Francis, whom she thought of as that nice, animal-loving saint, Niebuhr had a profound movement of the heart before the tomb of the 13th-century saint.

Unable to move for a time, she attended Mass while her students continued sightseeing. After “being fed from Francis’ church with the Eucharist, I knew I had to become Franciscan,” she said.

Back in Wisconsin, she discovered a local fraternity was started; she professed in 1992 and has “never looked back.”

Through this vocation, participation in regional Franciscan events and friendships, particularly with Fr. Lester Bach, OFM Cap., Niebuhr became a pioneer of lay leadership in the congregation. She was appointed a spiritual assistant for the Wisconsin and Upper Michigan region, representing a shift for the order, which began relying on lay people when vocations dwindled.

For 30 years, Niebuhr was key in this role and also helped the Secular Franciscans to become more visible regionally and nationally, boost their membership and shape the formation of aspiring members. When Fr. Bach died in 2020, Niebuhr offer the eulogy at her friend’s funeral.

Religious education, evangelization and ecumenical outreach have also characterized Niebuhr’s dedication to the faith. Under the guidance of former pastor, Fr. Aaron Devett, she studied the Liturgy of the Hours and designed a curriculum for RCIA (now OCIA) that would imbue the conversion process with “heart and passion,” offering information and inspiration.

Her heart for young people is a constant. She has been involved with Confirmation candidates, providing them with prayer shawls originally coming from a blind woman in Milwaukee. The shawls are blessed with holy water by each student so that the sign of prayer and comfort they each receive is “filled with the blessings of their classmates.” Many parents have told Niebuhr that students take them to college.

Saying that hers is “a ministry of the small gesture,” Niebuhr confessed, “the least, last and lost is where my heart is.” Through her ecumenical efforts, free meals are offered as a joint project of local churches for more than 12 years. “It’s just lovely to have people from different faiths sit down and talk to each other,” she said.

Through these ecumenical connections and seasonal parishioners, Niebuhr was able to bring prayer shawls—now an ongoing ministry of Holy Family Parish—to a Muslim Women’s Center in Milwaukee. The group gifted prayer shawls individually to more than 50 women.

“They were giggling like little girls,” she described, recounting how these women “wrapped themselves in the knitted shawls and danced around” for the unexpected act of kindness and comfort.

Niebuhr mentors parishioners training for outreach ministry to the homebound and those in nursing homes. She organized clothing drives for Afghan refugees in Wisconsin and ecumenical services to pray for amid war and political unrest in Ukraine, Afghanistan and Haiti.

When the Pax Christ Award winner was announced in August 2025 at the SDCCW’s Convention, coincidentally at her home parish in Woodruff, Niebuhr shared her surprise. She believed the other finalists were “more deserving” but accepted the award with both “surprise and honor.”

As her nomination papers concluded, “In serving her church, [Niehbuhr] seeks the Lord’s presence in everyone she encounters … Both the heart and home of this candidate reflect an open door. Her service to others on so many levels reaffirms her hope and belief in the coming of Christ’s kingdom.”