PROVIDENCE — At the end of a tour of the all-girls’ school that she founded in Providence, Sister Mary Reilly picked up a copy of the “Hear Us Roar 2020” women’s suffrage centennial calendar.
“My theme is: ‘I am woman, hear me roar,’ ” she said with a broad smile and a quick Helen Reddy reference. “My major thing is empowerment. We need the empowerment of women and the empowerment of girls.”
Reilly, who turned 90 years old on Dec. 18, founded Sophia Academy in 2001 with the help of the Sisters’ Collaborative. Since then, more than 240 students have graduated from the independent nondenominational school, which stands in the South Providence neighborhood where Reilly was born and where she helped launch a wide range of programs to combat hunger, poverty, and illiteracy.
Sophia Academy has chosen Reilly as its 2020 “Woman of Wisdom” and will honor her at a gala on May 4 at Providence’s WaterFire Arts Center.
“She is a Rhode Island treasure,” Sophia Academy board president Alison Eichler said Monday. “She doesn’t take ‘no’ for an answer. She just says, ‘This is going to happen’ and does it — and people follow her.”
During 71 years as a Sister of Mercy, Reilly has led the way in cofounding the Good Friday Walk for Hunger, helping to build McAuley Ministries to provide food and services for the poor, and cofounding Dorcas Place as a nonprofit literacy and learning program for low-income adults. (It later merged to become the Dorcas International Institute of Rhode Island.)
She also was part of the first group in Network, the Catholic social justice lobby known for its “Nuns on the Bus” campaigns.
“If we had more people like her, we’d be much better off,” Governor Gina M. Raimondo said in a recent interview. “She’s an outstanding human being. I love her.”
Raimondo said she and Reilly discovered that they are both “thinkers” on the Myers-Briggs personality test, so she calls her “Sister T” and Reilly calls her “Governor T.”
“She has been a source of great strength and friendship for me,” Raimondo said. “I look to her as a guide on so many issues. If I am in a tough spot, I call on her.”
Reilly was born on Dudley Street, in South Providence, one of eight children, and graduated from St. Xavier Academy in 1947. After graduation, she worked at Coro jewelry for a short while, but she had already decided she wanted to be a missionary.
In 1948, Reilly joined the Religious Sisters of Mercy, and she went on to serve as a teacher and principal for six years in Honduras and Belize.
“I came back from Central America with a feminist consciousness,” she said. “I saw the poverty — it was incredible. But I also saw the role of women and girls.”
In 1970, Reilly joined the ministry team at St. Michael the Archangel Roman Catholic Church in South Providence.
“I came back here to find that we had created an underclass of young, illiterate mothers,” she said.
Reilly recalled getting calls for baptisms and doing home visits with teenage mothers. “The stories I heard during that time,” she said. “There were no dreams. I said, ‘They are too young not to have dreams.’ ”
So she and Deborah Thompson, a Sister of Mercy who has since died, developed a literacy program for single parents, and that blossomed into Dorcas Place.
Reilly said the 1995 World Conference on Women, in Beijing, helped her focus on the importance of reaching girls during “the age of idealism.” And in 2001, she founded Sophia Academy for students in fifth through eighth grades.
She said she wanted a powerful, non-religious name for the nondenominational school, so she chose Sophia “because it means wisdom in Greek, and in women’s religious circles, it’s a word for God.”
Reilly, who now lives in Bristol, said she counts Sophia Academy as her proudest accomplishment.
“I would say this place is the culmination of it all,” she said during an interview at the school. “All the experiences that you have had and impacted on your life are put into here.”
Also, Reilly said she is proud to call herself a feminist. “If I can help that part of humanity, I’d be happy,” she said. And, she added, “God is not a ‘he.’ ”
Melissa C. Moniz, Sophia Academy’s director of middle school, said Reilly has the ability to identify talents in others and to help them put those talents to use.
“She makes me believe, she makes our students believe, that anything is possible — it’s not easy, it won’t happen overnight — but anything is possible,” Moniz said.
Maura L. Farrell, Sophia Academy’s head of school, described Reilly as “the quintessential social entrepreneur who identifies a need and is relentless in the pursuit of finding positive and equitable solutions.”
She said Reilly remains committed to finding solutions to problems such as climate change and human trafficking. And she said Reilly remains committed to making a difference for women and girls.
“She is so passionate about it that she doesn’t let anything stop her,” Farrell said. “Roar is what she does, but she does it with the deepest humility.”
Edward Fitzpatrick can be reached at edward.fitzpatrick@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter at @FitzProv.