RIVERHEAD, N.Y. (CNS) -- Sister Margaret Smyth knew at age 15 that she wanted to become a nun. Today, at 75, Sister Margaret remains happy with her decision to answer the call to consecrated life.

"It's always been what I had hoped it would be," said Sister Margaret, who, as a member of the Sisters of St. Dominic of Amityville, ministers to Latino immigrants on the East End of Long Island.

With Pope Francis proclaiming 2015 a Year of Consecrated Life, Catholic News Service asked Sister Margaret to reflect on her vocation, which has spanned nearly six decades and positioned her to serve people in many ways.

Sister Margaret cited her family, which included an uncle who was a Salesian priest, and the nuns who taught her in high school as having the biggest influence on her. Notably, three of her first cousins also became nuns.

One of three children born to parents who immigrated to the U.S. from Ireland, Sister Margaret was raised in the Irish enclave of Woodside in Queens and attended St. Sebastian parish school. Her father, Michael, drove an armored car for Wells Fargo and was the head of the Broadway theater ticket-takers and ushers union. Her mother, Margaret, was a homemaker.

"My parents were great role models," Sister Margaret said. "They never went to bed at night without saying the rosary. I can remember learning my first prayers from my parents. We had a picture of Our Lady on the wall and my mother had us all kneeling down and taught us the different prayers in front of the picture."

As a young girl, Sister Margaret often accompanied her father to the city to attend Broadway shows, where she would meet the actors backstage. The experience prompted her to dream about a career in theater. She had a change of heart, however, after enrolling at St. Agnes High School in College Point, also in the borough of Queens. The Amityville Dominicans who administered and taught at the school made a strong impression on her.

"The sisters were always happy," Sister Margaret recalled. "They were always present to the girls. That was an attraction."

"They got me involved in ministry in high school," she added. "I was a member of the Legion of Mary. I would visit the hospital at Rikers Island (jail) on Sunday mornings and wheel patients to Mass. When the Hungarian Revolution took place (in 1956), me and a few of my classmates taught English to Hungarian refugees."

Sister Margaret entered the convent a few months after her high school graduation in 1957, marking the beginning of an interesting and exhilarating life in ministry. She was a teacher, principal and director of religious education at Catholic schools and parishes in the Diocese of Brooklyn.

Sister Margaret also volunteered as a community organizer in Brooklyn and helped spearhead an interfaith initiative that replaced dilapidated structures, many occupied by drug dealers, with affordable housing.

Outside New York, Sister Margaret taught at and co-directed a language institute in Puerto Rico that offered advanced Spanish classes for priests and religious from the Brooklyn and Rockville Centre dioceses and the New York Archdiocese.

Sister Margaret -- who holds a bachelor's degree in Spanish education from St. John's University and a master's in urban education and religious studies from Fordham University -- said the seeds of her current ministry were planted about 40 years ago, when she spent part of a summer living among the poor in the Dominican Republic.

Her "epiphany" occurred when she and a companion were dining at a small restaurant.

"There were people right under our window begging for food," she said. "We kept ordering food, wrapping it up and passing it out the window. We eventually got thrown out of the restaurant. After we got thrown out, the people were on the street waiting for us.

"You start to think ... I can go inside and order a meal, and the people outside can't. What's my responsibility? Do I feed myself and walk away from people who don't have it? No. Can't do that. So it propels you out."

For the past 18 years, Sister Margaret has been director of the North Fork Spanish Apostolate in Riverhead. The ministry allows her to care for the spiritual and material needs of immigrants from Latin America.

Sister Margaret was one of 76 women who entered the Amityville Dominicans' novitiate in 1957. More than 30 of them later left religious life and at least six have died, according to Sister Margaret's estimate.

By comparison, in the past 10 years, only one sister has joined the congregation.

As numbers in most religious communities continue to decrease, Sister Margaret said it's vital for women and men religious to share the gifts of their ministry with the laity, to teach them to carry on their legacy.

"If you take the negative point of view, you're going to say, 'We're all going to be evaporating soon,'" Sister Margaret said. "When I get together with other sisters, you never get that sense. We talk about mission, how can we do it? How can we pass it on to other people, so that the last sister standing can see that everything is still flourishing."