Women of Faith
eBook - ePub

Women of Faith

The Chicago Sisters of Mercy and the Evolution of a Religious Community

Mary Beth Fraser Connolly

Share book
  1. 372 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Women of Faith

The Chicago Sisters of Mercy and the Evolution of a Religious Community

Mary Beth Fraser Connolly

Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

When the Sisters of Mercy lost their foundress Sister Catherine McAuley in 1841, stories of Mother Catherine passed from one generation of sisters to the next. McAuley's Rule and Constitutions along with her spiritual writings and correspondence communicated the Mercys' founding charism. Each generation of Sisters of Mercy who succeeded her took these words and her spirit with them as they established new communities or foundations across the United States and around the world. In Women of Faith, Mary Beth Fraser Connolly traces the paths of the women who dedicated their lives to the Sisters of Mercy Chicago Regional Community, the first Congregation of Catholic Sisters in Chicago.More than the story of the institutions that defined the territory and ministries of the women of this Midwestern region, Women of Faith presents a history of the women who made this regional community, whether as foundresses of individual communities in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Illinois in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries or as the teachers, nurses, and pastoral ministers who cared for and educated generations of Midwestern American Catholics. Though they had no immediate connection with McAuley, these women inherited her spirit and vision for religious life.Focusing on how the Chicago Mercys formed a community, lived their spiritual lives, and served within the institutional Catholic Church, this three-part perspective addresses community, spirituality, and ministry, providing a means by which we can trace the evolution of these women of faith as the world around them changed. The first part of this study focuses on the origins of the Sisters of Mercy in the Midwest from the founding of the Chicago South Side community in 1846 through the amalgamation and creation of the Chicago Province in 1929. The second part examines how the Mercys came together as one province through the changes of Vatican II from 1929 to the 1980s. Part III examines life after the dramatic changes of Vatican II in the 1990s and 2000s.Presenting rich examples of how faith cannot be separated from identity, Women of Faith provides an important new contribution to the scholarship that is shaping our collective understanding of women religious.

Frequently asked questions

How do I cancel my subscription?
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Women of Faith an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Women of Faith by Mary Beth Fraser Connolly in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & Social History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Year
2014
ISBN
9780823254743
I
“Charity Embraces Those Who Abound”
The Spirit of Mercy Comes to America, 1846–1929
Figure 1. Irish-born biological sisters, Sisters Mary Monica, Mary Leo, Mary Catherine, and Mary Gabriel Fanning, who entered the Sisters of Mercy in Iowa City in the 1910s and 1920s.
Charity embraces those who abound, as well as those who are in need; but mercy finds exercise only in proportion to the necessity of its objects. In this spirit our Institute has been raised up and blessed by God, and propagated in no ordinary way to “devote” its members to the “service of the poor, sick, and ignorant.” Hence, by our profession, we become for life the vowed and consecrated servants, not of the affluent, but of the “poor, sick and ignorant.”1
Important Dates in the History of the Early Sisters of Mercy
1846:Sisters of Mercy arrive in Chicago, open Saint Xavier Academy.
1848:Galena, Illinois mission is established.
1852:Mercy Hospital, Chicago opens.
1854:Agatha O’Brien, first superior of Chicago’s South Side, dies from cholera.
1859:Ottawa, Illinois foundation is established.
1863:Six Sisters of Mercy serve on Union hospital ships in the Civil War; Ottawa becomes an independent house of Chicago Motherhouse.
1867:DeWitt/Davenport, Iowa foundation begins.
1868:Mercy Hospital, Davenport is established.
1870:Janesville, Wisconsin foundation is established from Sterling, Illinois.
1871:Chicago Fire.
1873:Mercy Hospital, Iowa City opens.
1874:St. Xavier Academy for girls in Ottawa is established.
1876:Mother Agatha Looby brings sisters from Janesville to Fond du Lac, Wisconsin.
1883:Sisters from Nashville, led by Sister Catharine Feehan, arrive in Chicago, establish Chicago West Side, and open St. Patrick Academy and Motherhouse.
1885:Mother Mary Evangelist Holcomb and two sisters establish Milwaukee foundation from Fond du Lac, and some Sisters of Mercy return to Janesville.
1894:Mercy Home for Women (St. Catherine Residence) and Our Lady of Mercy Academy in Milwaukee are established.
1907:Mercy Hospital, Janesville is established.
1910:Aurora, Illinois foundation from Council Bluffs, Iowa is established.
1911:St. Joseph Mercy Hospital, Aurora opens.
1912:Saint Xavier College is officially incorporated as a college in the state of Illinois.
1921:Misericordia South in Chicago, a maternity home for women, opens.
1924:Mercy High School Chicago opens on Chicago’s South Side.
1926:Our Lady of Mercy Academy becomes Mercy High School, Milwaukee, Illinois.
1927:Iowa City foundation votes to join with the Davenport Sisters of Mercy becoming one community.
1929:Amalgamation: Creation of the Sisters of Mercy of the Union. The Chicago Province is formed from Chicago’s South Side and West Side, Ottawa, Davenport, Janesville, and Milwaukee.
1937:Aurora joins the Chicago Province and Union.
1
“The spirit of our Institute is mercy, as its name denotes”
The Nature of Mercy in Nineteenth-Century America
The spirit of mercy, then, should guide and govern all our actions; all our hope of happiness must depend not only on the love of Jesus Christ but likewise on His mercy. In our intercourse with mankind let us be mindful for it is the principal path pointed out by Jesus Christ to who are desirous of following Him.1
According to a nineteenth-century Directory for Novices,2 any “hope of happiness” for Sisters of Mercy came from the love of Jesus Christ and “His mercy” bestowed upon them. Images of Sisters of Mercy from the nineteenth century often do not show this joy, but they do convey directly that they were religious women. They committed their lives fully to God; they cloaked themselves in their belief, and they lived their religion. Posed photographs of women religious, or sisters, reveal serene countenances, though their faces often possessed serious and determined expressions. Their religious garb, or habit, envelops and conceals their feminine frames. If the voluminous garments and veil did not speak plainly to their identity, then large crucifixes or rosaries provided further evidence to their commitment. If pictures show sisters’ hands, they are usually folded holding prayer books.3
A portrait of Mary Ann and Catherine McGirr, two biological sisters who became Sisters Mary Vincent and Mary Francis Xavier in the Chicago South Side community, exemplifies this image of women religious (see Figure 2). The photograph of the McGirr sisters shows two Mercys with similar countenances (the family resemblance is apparent), staring intently forward as they held their pose for the camera, their hands folded in a prayerful clasp. Their faces reveal little of their personality or the breadth of their religious life. Who were these women, sisters both by blood and in religion? Posed together in their religious habits, little distinguishes the two. The photograph does not divulge that Sister Mary Vincent, standing on the right, was one of the first pioneers to Chicago in 1846, nor that she was a musician who took on the operation of an orphanage in 1849, followed by the first Mercy Hospital in 1852. It does not show that she was the Mother Superior of the Chicago community in 1855. The portrait, furthermore, does not disclose any information about Sister Mary Francis Xavier, on the left, who led the group that established a foundation in Ottawa, Illinois, in 1859, which launched schools for both boys and girls.4
Figure 2. Biological sisters, Sisters Mary Francis Xavier McGirr, founder of the Ottawa Community, 1859, and Mary Vincent McGirr, one of the original five sisters to begin the Chicago Foundation and the first Superior and Administrator of Mercy Hospital, Chicago.
For antebellum America, images like these of nuns and sisters were foreign and mysterious sights. For many Protestants, debate over Catholic women’s choice of and commitment to religious congregations centered on the belief that they were forcibly held captives by priests, thanks to the escaped-nun stories like that of Maria Monk, who claimed to have escaped captivity within a French Canadian convent in Montreal. Her story of sexual exploitation and the horrors of convent life were published in the book Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, or, The Hidden Secrets of a Nun’s Life in a Convent Exposed, in 1836. This book joined the 1835 publication of Rebecca Reed’s Six Months in a Convent, which was published on the heels of the Charleston, Massachusetts Ursuline Convent burning in 1834. Many Protestant Americans, already convinced that Catholicism was antithetical to the U.S. political system, quickly believed that dangers lay behind convent walls for naïve young women.5
The early American Catholic Church, however, did not question the motives of women religious in the first congregations established in the United States, like the Sister of Charity, Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, Sisters of Loretto, and Ursulines. Church hierarchy saw nuns and sisters as sources of education, health care, and welfare for the minority Catholic population. These women, while pious and devoted “Brides of Christ,” were often free labor and a means of building and strengthening devout Catholics in defense against the Protestant threat. When the Sisters of Mercy arrived in antebellum America in 1843, Catholic women religious were still strange and exotic sights. By 1840, there were only a little more than 900 sisters and nuns in the United States, and the Irish Sisters of Mercy were a welcome arrival for the fledgling American clergy, who hoped they would expand the Catholic faith of the growing immigrant population. The laity, for its part, saw the sisters as an opportunity to preserve culture.6
Neither photographs of sisters and nuns nor lurid (and false) tales of convent life provide a complete and accurate picture of religious life. Why did women like the McGirr sisters want to enter religious life? What led these young women specifically to the Sisters of Mercy? Before Mother Frances Xavier Warde and the other Sisters of Mercy established a congregation at Pittsburgh, women could choose from only twelve religious congregations that existed in the United States. The establishment of an Irish community dedicated to serving the poor not only fit with the agenda of the larger Catholic hierarchy, which was faced with an increasing number of impoverished Irish immigrants, but also provided an opportunity for young women inspired by their faith to make a life-long commitment to serving God and those in need.7
The McGirr sisters were born in Youngstown, Pennsylvania, in the mid-1820s. They came from an Irish immigrant family, but one with a degree of financial stability. Their father, Patrick McGirr, was a physician, as was their brother, John. Both young women waited until they were twenty to enter religious life. Sister Mary Vincent entered first in 1845 at Pittsburgh, which made it possible to join the group that came to Chicago in 1846. She arrived in Chicago a novice and made her first profession of vows in December 1847. Her younger sister by two years, Sister Francis Xavier, chose to follow her sister to Chicago when she entered the congregation two years later, making her first profession in December 1850.8
The McGirrs’ story begins before the large wave of Irish immigrants during the Great Famine. The McGirrs were an upwardly mobile family, with daughters entering religious life and a son following his father into the medical profession. Women like the McGirrs who helped establish religious communities in antebellum America, like their Irish counterparts, often came from middling or merchant classes. They had sufficient education, including religious training, to develop, expand, and administer congregations’ schools, hospitals, and other institutions. The future of their ministerial work provided the foundation for generations of Catholics and inspired vocations among countless young women. Sisters Mary Vincent and Mary Francis Xavier, furthermore, entered the Sisters of Mercy during a period of increased Irish immigration, a period when anti-Catholic and anti-immigration sentiments by the native-born population along the East Coast were heightened. They chose a new Irish community devoted to alleviating the burdens of poverty, who were invited to the United States to serve an Irish immigrant population. This was also a period of increased religious piety regardless of denomination. While evangelical Protestant revivalism gripped much of the East Coast, Catholic clergy pushed to foster religious sentiments among the laity through devotional or spiritual activities, such as parish missions and sodalities, which placed the parish at the center of their religious life. During this dramatic confluence of religious and cultural events, the McGirrs and thousands of other young women entered religious life.9
The Sisters of Mercy throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries offered young women an opportunity to devote their lives to God and to lead a religious life guided by both the works of mercy and deep spiritual foundation. By joining a religious congregation, women like Sisters Mary Vincent and Mary Francis Xavier also found community with others who had the same faith and purpose. These sisters did not have to enter religious life. As daughters of a professional, they had the potential for marriage and family. They could have emulated their Protestant neighbors and participated in benevolent societies to aid immigrants and the poor. Instead, they chose a life-long commitment as Sisters of Mercy. What did this life offer that they could not find as Catholic laywomen in the nineteenth century? To answer this question, we must look at the expectations for Catholic women during this period and examine the nature of religious life in a congregation like the Sisters of Mercy.
Catholic Womanhood
In the nineteenth century, Catholic women had few acceptable options or roles: marriage, religious life, or remaining single and caring for aging parents, unmarried brothers, or other relatives. Furthermore, during most of the nineteenth century, many Catholics had not reached a level of economic stability comparable to that of middle-class Protestants. Employment in and out of the home occupied Catholic women’s daily lives and left little time for non-paid volunteerism. Meanwhile, the religious fervor of the Second Great Awakening had inspired many Protestant single and married middle-class women as early as the 1840s to engage in various reform efforts, including rescuing “fallen women” of the streets into Protestant institutions. Even under the guise of religious faith and church affiliation, women’s public role in reform jarred many observers, male and female alike, particularly when their activities crossed over into the political realm. Despite inroads into public action, middle-class Protestant women rarely engaged in full-time, life-long careers outside of their homes, except possibly as wives of ministers or missionaries. Catholic laywomen faced similar obstacles, but vowed religious women did not.10
For those who opted for life in a religious congregation, faith plus a desire to put that belief toward public service was a central rationale for embracing life as a sister or nun. This choice was also attractive because it offered an alternative to marriage and motherhood, which, while not an end to social engagement, did prevent women from pursuing life-long careers. A life committed to service—to doing good—should not be glossed over as a motive for seeking out religious life, but antebellum women religious, as Joseph Mannard has described them, “were de facto career women. Though their work was a by-product of their primary religious calling—a means to an end rather than an end in itself—nuns nevertheless served as some of the earliest examples of women professionals.”11
Most nineteenth-century women, whether Protestant or Catholic, conformed to the gender expectations of their time. For Catholic women in America, this meant complying with the roles prescribed by the specific cultural or ethnic identity of an immigrant group. For much of the nineteenth century, an Irish or Irish-American standard of femininity informed the dominant Catholic culture. At the same time, Irish-style Catholicism dominated the so-called “American” Catholicism. This was especially true as Irish Americans came to control the church hierarchy and religious communities. Despite German and German-American efforts to challenge the Irish Americans’ hold on positions of authority within the Church, by the late nineteenth century, the latter held sway. Young women such as the McGirr sisters would have recognized the limited roles Irish-American girls could fill in the mid-1840s when they chose life in a religious congregation such as the Sisters of Mercy.12
In contrast to Protestant American roles for women, there was more than one valued path for Catholic womanhood. Protestant Christianity emphasized the home and the family as a center of religious life, and prescriptive literature touted the goals of marriage and motherhood for young women. Within this domestic sphere, they were supposed to exert their cultural and religious influence. According to the pages of popular women’s magazines such as Godey’s Lady’s Book, Protestant women could only find fulfillment in this role. Catholicism, conversely, placed the parish at the center of religious life, despite the importance of home devotions. Home altars, family prayer, and spiritual readings supplemented and bolstered Catholic faith, but these devotions focused Catholics toward the parish church and the reception of the sacraments. As the nineteenth century progressed, Catholic mothers, much like Protestant mothers, increasingly had a duty to impart religious devotions to their children, but they modeled themselves and their families upon the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Holy Family, and Catholic saints. Nineteenth-century Catholic literature directed at women provided instruction on how they could accomplish this.13
The model of middle-class family life espoused by mid-century Protestants elevated a woman’s role and influence in her husband’s and children’s salvation, but only within the home. This “cult of domesticity” resonated in Catholic homes, particularly concerning the emphasis on female self-sacrifice for the good of male relatives. Daughters within Irish immigrant households in this period understood that their brothers’ needs came first, even if they worked just as hard or harder. Catholic diocesan newspapers and national magazines that published articles or entire sections for women often contained stories of mothers’ near martyrdom for their children or their husbands. The larger message was sacrifice for God’s will and their salvation. A Catholic family only had to point to Mary as mother of Jesus Christ and her sacrifices for the salvation of the world to understand what girls and women could accomplish. Mary, however, was not the only woman to emulate. The lives of female saints, particularly those who consecrated themselves to Jesus as Brides of Christ, or nuns and sisters, also served as examples. Catholic women also had the near example u...

Table of contents