Virginia Rose was born the oldest of four children, three girls and one boy, to Grace Anna Doody and Stanley William Sandhoff, in Detroit, Michigan, on January 20, 1918. As a child she was raised a German Lutheran, as her grandparents had come from Germany. In her autobiography she wrote, “When I was about twelve years old, I found out that my mother’s father Dennis Doody had been an Irish Catholic who died when my mother was two years old. I determined at this early age to someday become a Catholic and studied the Faith from books I found in the high school and public libraries.”

After graduating from high school in 1935, she went to the priests at St. Mary’s Catholic Church and, after taking formal instructions for three months, was baptized conditionally, taking the name of Virginia Rose Therese, since she had a special devotion to the Little Flower. This was one month before her eighteenth birthday. After graduation, she secured a good position with the Detroit Edison Company, where she worked until she entered the convent.

Even before her reception into the Catholic Church, Virginia Rose felt drawn to the religious life and to a life of prayer. She had a special love for the Blessed Sacrament and to Our Lady, and knew that entering a teaching order was not for her. In August 1938 she made a trip with two friends to New York, vising several different communities. 

In October of the same year she accompanied the same two friends on a trip to Chicago, and while there they went to visit our monastery in Mundelein. Feeling that she had found the type of life she wanted, she spoke to the superior, who at that time was Sr, Edith Marie Kraus. The following April she made a trip to Clyde, and the next month she entered the postulancy. She made her first monastic profession on February 8, 1941, receiving the name Sr. Mary Margaret. Years later she would return to her baptismal name, Virginia Marie.

During her early years, Sister Virginia Marie worked in the Correspondence Department, filling the many orders that came in for leaflets and booklets. She wrote, “During the war years, 1944-1946, I rose early to go to the barn, hauling the milk over to the milk-house and running the separator. Not being used to such hard work it was hard for me.” She made her final profession on February 10, 1946. None of her family were present for the ceremony, as her mother had died just three months before.

In 1948 Sister Virginia Marie went to our monastery in Kansas City and remained for six years as portress and procuratrix in the newly built monastery. In 1955, she returned to Clyde and  went to the Correspondence Department. She also spent some years in San Diego, making communion veils, and then returned to Kansas City where she worked first in the sewing room and then at the altar bread department. One of her favorite hobbies was the making and repairing of rosaries. When our Kansas City Monastery was closed, Sister Virginia Marie went to Clyde, before Parkinson’s Disease caused her to become a member of the St. Benedict Health Care Center. 

With the closure of St. Louis, she was among those who made the move to our new Our Lady of Rickenbach in Clyde where she died on  December 12, 2001. Hers was the first wake and funeral to be celebrated in the Our Lady of Rickenbach chapel. The Mass of Christian burial was celebrated on December 14, 2001 with burial in Mt. Calvary Cemetery.