Irish-born religious sister’s joyful witness endures 10 years after her death in Ecuador quake

(OSV News) — Ten years after her death in a devastating earthquake in Ecuador, Sister Clare Crockett — a former aspiring actress who once joked she would become “a famous nun” — is now remembered by Catholics around the world as a joyful evangelizer.

Sister Clare, a 33-year-old Irish nun, died April 16, 2016, when an earthquake struck the coastal region of Ecuador, collapsing the school where she was teaching music.

Dramatic conversion experience

Born in Derry, Northern Ireland, Sister Clare had once dreamed of fame in Hollywood. Friends and family recall she showed early promise as an actress and television presenter before a dramatic conversion experience during a Holy Week retreat in Spain at age 17 changed the course of her life.

She entered the Servant Sisters of the Home of the Mother shortly afterward, embracing religious life with the same intensity she once gave to pursuing a career in entertainment.

“The Lord transformed her soul and she no longer longed for anything other than to have Christ as her only love,” Sister Kristen Gardner, postulator of Sister Clare’s cause for sainthood, told OSV News in January 2025.

Sister Kristen emphasized that the cause “is not moved by human reason” but “a desire to give glory to God.”

Cause opened in January 2025

In January 2025, the Diocese of Alcalá de Henares near Madrid formally opened the diocesan phase of Sister Clare’s beatification process, appointing a tribunal to investigate her life and virtues. 

As the 10th anniversary of her death approached, the Servant Sisters of the Home of the Mother launched a YouTube project that showed her path to sainthood was marked by a faith as deep as her sense of humor.

Jacob Wagner, who met Sister Clare when he was preparing for his first Communion in 2006, recalled her unusual combination.

“She would have like this switch … she would be having fun throwing the ball, and then she would flip that switch when we would get into … an area like the church or the adoration chapel,” Wagner said. “And as a child, looking at her and seeing that, you’re like, OK, you know there’s a time for play and there’s a time for prayer.”

Sister Clare’s long-lasting influence

Wagner said her influence endured long after their first meeting and shortly before her death, Sister Clare sent him a video message encouraging him to live in accordance with his Christian calling. 

“At the time when I received it, I honestly needed it,” he said. “You know, I was in a time where … I wasn’t necessarily putting the right things first. So to hear somebody that taught you about Jesus still cared after all those years, it helps.”

Others recall her distinctive way of communicating faith through simple, memorable gestures.

“My main memory of Sister Clare would be at the end of her sentences. She always said: ‘OK,’ or she said: ‘Amen,'” Gracie, who knew Sister Clare as a child in Florida, said in the YouTube video. “And if we wouldn’t respond ‘Amen,’ she would say it louder … and we would have to respond with ‘Amen.'”

‘Amen is: So be it’

“Amen is: ‘So be it,'” she added. “So that I think in itself perfectly describes Sister Clare. … She was just the prime example of so be it.”

The last song she was playing before the earthquake was, in fact, “Let all the people say Amen.”

Sister Clare had a rare ability to speak about difficult moral issues in a way that resonated with young people, said Father Fred Parke, who served as pastor of the Church of the Assumption in Jacksonville, Florida. SIster Clare lived in the Servant Sisters’ community in Jacksonville for a time.

‘They wanted to hear more from her’

“You knew that … she talked about respect for life and, and abortion and morality,” Father Parke said. “But she did it in such a way that they didn’t dismiss her … they wanted to hear more from her.”

Friends also pointed to her discernment in balancing joy and seriousness in ministry.

According to her congregation, her death in the earthquake led her to “the long-awaited final encounter with the Lord.”

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