Sister Stephanie Baliga, a nun living and working at Chicago’s Mission of Our Lady of the Angels, was almost an Olympian.
“I started running when I was 9, and running became my life,” Baliga told WTTW, a local PBS station. “It was how I defined myself and who I was.”
Baliga was the sixth-fastest freshman runner in the nation when she was a student athlete at the University of Illinois, training hours a day, and preparing for a professional career.
As a sophomore, however, she fractured her foot. She traded her hours on the track for prayer, which resulted in the realization that she wanted to devote her life to God.
“Jesus saw me for who I was,” Baliga told WGN 9 News. “He was not looking for my straight A’s or my fast running times; he was just seeking to love me wherever I was at.”
Now, she uses her passion for running to fuel her faith. For the last 15 years, she has run the Chicago Marathon, raising funds to support the MOLA food pantry.
“Right now, this area has many, many non-Catholics living in it, and yet there are still people that have great need,” Father Bob Lombardo, who opened MOLA, told WTTW. “As we like to say, we do what we do because we’re Catholic, not because the people we serve are Catholic.”
That unwavering mission is what has inspired Baliga to lace up her shoes, even encouraging other young people to join her on the Team OLA marathon team every year in Chicago.
According to the MOLA website, this team has “sacrificed thousands of hours training” between 2011 and 2025, and has raised over $2.6 million in the process.
“We serve about 400 to 500 families in person every Tuesday and we send about 300 deliveries to senior citizens between Monday and Tuesday each week,” Baliga said about the food pantry. “It totally changed the way I live my life.”
And her running has been integral to ensuring the people in need in her community have a meal on the table.
“The marathon funding was key to expanding the pantry in 2018, 2019, and 2020,” she told WGN 9 News, “and was very key to us sustaining an extremely large pantry during the pandemic.”
She isn’t slowing down any time soon.
This fall, Baliga and nearly 200 members of the Team OLA charity team will run the Chicago Marathon for the 16th consecutive year, with a goal of raising $500,000 this year alone.
Baliga and team just ran the city’s half marathon on June 10 to prepare — and brought in $16,000 in the practice round. The full marathon team has raised over $184,000 so far.
On the sidelines, other nuns and supporters came in droves, carrying a Pope Leo cardboard cutout and signs with phrases like, “You vati-CAN do it,” and “May God have mercy on your soles.”
On the MOLA website, the marathon team’s mission is described as follows: “Raise awareness of Mission of Our Lady of the Angels; offer up sacrifices of time, energy, and physical discomfort for the Mission and those it serves; raise funds for the Mission of Our Lady of the Angels; and have fun.”
For Baliga, it’s the faith that carries her.
“You’re like, ‘Woah, look at all those zeros! That’s a lot of zeros,’” she said about the 15-year fundraising total.
“The Lord provides,” she added to WGN 9 News. “God’s will is whatever is in front of you right now.”
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Header image courtesy of Mission of Our Lady of Angels/Facebook
