Called to Serve

A History of Nuns in America

Margaret M. McGuinness

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780814789261
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Christianisme

Winner, Conference on the History of Women Religious (CHWR) Distinguished Book Award Winner, 2014 Catholic Book Award in History presented by the Catholic Press Association For manyAmericans, nuns and sisters are the face of the Catholic Church. Far morevisible than priests, Catholic women religious teach at schools, foundhospitals, offer food to the poor, and minister to those in need. Their workhas shaped the American Catholic Church throughout its history. Yet despitetheir high profile, a concise history of American Catholic sisters and nuns hasyet to be published. In Called to Serve, MargaretM. McGuinness provides the reader with an overview of the history of Catholicwomen religious in American life, from the colonial period to the present. The earlyyears of religious life in the United States found women religious in immigrantcommunities and on the frontier, teaching, nursing, and caring for marginalizedgroups. In the second half of the twentieth century, however, the role of womenreligious began to change. They have fewer members than ever, and theirpopulation is aging rapidly. And the method of their ministry is changing aswell: rather than merely feeding and clothing the poor, religious sisters arenow working to address the social structures that contribute to poverty,fighting what one nun calls “social sin.” In the face of a changing world and shifting priorities, women religiousmust also struggle to strike a balance between the responsibilities of theirfaith and the limitations imposed upon them by their church. Rigorouslyresearched and engagingly written, Calledto Serve offers a compelling portrait of Catholic women religiousthroughout American history.

1
Organizing to Serve

THE LIVES OF Jerusha Booth Barber and her husband, Episcopal priest Virgil Barber, changed dramatically when they decided that the Catholic Church was indeed the true path to salvation. In February 1817, Jerusha and Virgil, parents of five children, received their First Communion from Father Benedict Fenwick, who would be named Bishop of Boston in 1825.¹ Virgil, of course, now had to find another career; as a Catholic he could no longer serve a Protestant parish. With Fenwick’s encouragement, Barber announced that he intended to begin a course of study that would lead to his ordination as a Catholic priest. Shortly after making this decision, the Barber family moved to Washington, D.C., where Baltimore Archbishop Leonard Neale (1815–1817) “pronounced the separation of Mr. and Mrs. Barber,” essentially granting the couple an annulment. Virgil then left to study for the priesthood in Rome, and Jerusha entered the Visitation Convent in Georgetown.² She struggled with her husband’s decision, but eventually concluded that it was God’s will. Toward the end of Jerusha’s life, when her youngest daughter reportedly asked why she had allowed Virgil to study for the priesthood, she replied, “I felt … that I must make the sacrifice to God; and that if I would refuse He would deprive me of my husband and children both in this world and the next.”³

Jerusha had a far more difficult time adapting to a celibate, single life than her husband, finding it hard to live separately from Virgil and at least some of her children. Shortly after beginning her religious training in Georgetown, Jerusha left the community for a few months because she thought she was pregnant, returning to the convent when it was clear she was not going to have another child. Josephine, who was only ten months old when her parents decided to enter religious life, was too young to live in a convent, and was cared for by Fenwick’s mother. The three daughters remaining with Jerusha had to be fed, educated, and clothed, placing a considerable burden on a religious community with limited financial resources.

The Barbers encountered numerous difficulties as they attempted to raise five children—all of whom entered religious life—and embrace their vocations. One of the more serious challenges involved determining who was responsible for financially supporting the children, especially the four girls housed at the Georgetown Visitation convent. The community’s spiritual director, Father Joseph Picot de Clorivière, believed that since Virgil Barber had entered the Jesuits, responsibility for the young women’s financial upkeep rested on that community. He apparently told Jerusha, now called Sister Mary Augustine, that the Jesuits should place her husband in a paying job and allow him to contribute to the children’s support.⁴ Baltimore Archbishop Ambrose Maréchal (1817–1826) seemed to share de Clorivière’s views, writing to the Archbishop of Quebec: “The Jesuit father [Fenwick] who converted Mr. Barber and his family has certainly done a good work. But the device of his confrères in relieving themselves of the onerous burden that was the consequence thereof is by no means deserving of praise. It is yet an unsolvable problem to me how they could have succeeded in putting my poor Visitandines to the expense of entertaining and feeding five persons.”⁵ Despite these issues, on February 23, 1820, Jerusha Barber pronounced her vows as a Visitandine; her husband took his vows as a member of the Society of Jesus on the same day.

Portrait of Elizabeth Seton. She apparently gave a portrait of herself to the Filicchi family. They had it redone to portray her wearing the black cap and habit of the Sisters of Charity. Courtesy of Sisters of Charity of Cincinnati.

According to her youngest daughter, Sister Josephine Barber, who later entered the Visitation community, taking vows as a woman religious did not prevent Jerusha Barber from loving and worrying about her children. Sister Josephine later reflected on what she had known of her mother’s life as a woman religious when she was a child: “I know nothing more of this part of Sister M. Augustine’s life,” she wrote, “except that she continued to suffer inexpressibly on account of her children; feeling them to be a burden on the community in its state of poverty, and knowing the opposition of some of the Sisters to their [the children] remaining, we were necessarily poorly clad; and she had told me that many a time she has sat up nearly half the night patching the children’s clothes … and knitting stockings for them.”⁶ Sister Mary Augustine played an important role in developing the academy administered by the community in Georgetown, as well as helping to establish convents in Kaskaskia, Illinois (1833), and St. Louis, Missouri (1844), until her death in 1860.

Although there are other cases of married couples converting to Catholicism and entering the priesthood and religious life, Sister Mary Augustine Barber’s biography is not representative of the history of women religious in the United States. Her story is important, however, because it reminds us that American religious communities—both those transplanted from Europe and those founded in the United States—were confronted with situations and challenges unique to a country that had recently severed its ties with England. The creation and development of a civil government without a monarch, combined with the ratification of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, whose provisions included religious freedom and the separation of church and state, meant that the Catholic Church was able to increase both in size and significance as immigrants began to leave Europe for the United States. Priests were few and far between, and lay Catholics often had neither the resources nor the education to create the complex network of institutions needed to minister to this population. But Jerusha Barber and thousands of other women religious took responsibility for this work, and their willingness to make great sacrifices to provide education, health care, and social services to those in need is an important part of the church’s story in the United States.

Catholic Sisters in the New World

The history of women religious in the United States does not begin with the thirteen English colonies, but in the territory of Louisiana. The first French colonists settled in 1699 in Biloxi, Mississippi, but New Orleans, founded in 1718, quickly evolved into the territory’s principal settlement. Within five years of its founding, Commissioner Jacques Delachaise expressed a desire for French women religious willing to help establish some sort of order in the city. Citing the poor condition of the public hospital, Delachaise hoped the sisters would have some training as nurses. In addition to administering the hospital, they could care for orphans and perhaps try to reform the prostitutes who had found their way to the colony. Because they were primarily involved in nursing, Delachaise hoped the Filles de la Charité (Daughters of Charity) would respond to his pleas for assistance. The women were in high demand in their native France, however, and had no desire to undertake a new mission in Louisiana. Leaders of the Ursuline community were intrigued by the proposal of French colonists and investors, and agreed to send six sisters to Louisiana. Most would be involved in hospital work; one would have responsibility for teaching.⁷

The country’s leaders believed the Ursulines’ ministry of teaching was helping to win back those who had left the church during the Reformation, and was preventing France from drifting further toward Protestantism. As we have seen, the Council of Trent reiterated the rules governing women religious, and decreed that nuns were to remain cloistered unless they received special dispensation from a bishop. In addition to the traditional vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, the Ursulines took a fourth vow to provide Christian education, which allowed them to open their convents to students on a daily basis.⁸ In 1639, a widow from Alençon, Mme. de la Peltrie, recruited three other French Ursulines, including Marie Guyart (1599–1672), whose religious name was Marie de l’Incarnation, to serve the Canadian missions.⁹ Upon arrival in the “new world,” the missionaries attempted to keep “the rule of enclosure.” In the rough world of French Canada the traditional sturdy walls were replaced by cedar fences, but the sisters continued to follow a lifestyle governed by the cloister. The only time Marie de l’Incarnation ever left the enclosed convent was to flee from a fire in 1650.¹⁰

The original plan called for the women to teach the native people catechism, and Marie de l’Incarnation hoped that young native women would be called to enter the community. Native parents often abandoned their daughters when they left for the winter hunt, and some of these girls sought shelter among the Ursulines, who “competed for the humble task of scrubbing off the grease with which the Indians warded off the cold and the lice that fed on it.”¹¹ They cared for their charges while instructing French novices in the languages of the native groups. The daughters of French settlers originally lived, ate, and studied with the native girls, but financial hardships eventually required the Ursulines to bring in more and more young women whose families could afford to pay tuition, room, and board.

Marie de l’Incarnation eventually concluded that the education of French girls was at least as important as converting the native peoples to Catholicism. The work of her community, she believed, was as vital as that of the women religious responsible for the sick in Quebec’s hospital. “Great care is taken in this country,” she wrote, “with the instruction of the French girls, and I can assure you that if there were no Ursulines they would be in continual danger for their salvation.”¹² By the time of her death in 1667, Marie de l’Incarnation had concluded that the lifestyle of native women was incompatible with Ursuline life, writing, “They cannot endure the cloister for they have a melancholy nature and their habits of liberty augment it.”¹³ She continued to insist, however, that the primary mission of the community was twofold: to convert native people—who would help spread Christianity when they returned to their villages to marry and start a family—and to ensure that French Canadian women were able to transmit Catholicism to their children. Despite her commitment to both phases of this mission, the rule of enclosure prevented the Ursulines from leaving their convent to minister among the people, and forced them to focus their attention primarily on the wives and daughters of European colonial settlers.

The Ursulines who arrived in New Orleans in 1727, like their sisters who settled in Canada, were enthusiastic about the opportunity to serve as missionaries in a place far from the world of eighteenth-century Europe. Marie Tranchepain (1680?–1733), superior for the Ursulines traveling to Louisiana, agreed to a contract that required the community to serve in areas outside their usual ministries because she was convinced they were called to this new mission by a higher power. Although the women were told that their primary responsibility was not teaching but nursing—the convent was located adjacent to the hospital so the rule of enclosure would not be violated—Tranchepain and her eleven sisters, six more than were called for in the original contract, were involved in a ministry of education almost from the beginning, and managed to avoid hospital work for nearly seven years.

The colonists were apparently as eager for teachers as they were for nurses. Tranchepain explained that “All the inhabitants try their best to make us feel the joy which they experience to have us for the education of their children.”¹⁴ Within three months of establishing a convent in the Crescent City, the first boarding students arrived, and they were soon joined by day students, including African Americans and Native Americans who attended catechism classes.¹⁵ Six additional Ursulines joined the original twelve in New Orleans between 1727 and 1736. Four died and four others either returned to France or left religious life, but by 1757, twenty women religious were ministering in the city. When the Natchez Indians launched a surprise attack on a military outpost and settlement at Fort Rosalie, killing most of the men stationed there, the Ursulines willingly expanded their ministry and took in thirty girls who had been orphaned as a result of the battle.¹⁶

Although the women offered catechetical instruction to African and Native Americans, the Ursulines owned slaves. Unlike other slaveholders in the American South, however, all slaves were kept within their nuclear families. This policy may have been viewed by some as more enlightened or humane than the actions of other slaveholders, but the sisters made no effort to work toward the abolition of slavery in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They owned as many slaves as they thought necessary to maintain their school, and are not known to have spoken against the evils of a system that held human beings in bondage.¹⁷ Women religious owning slaves did not surprise many American Catholics of this era. Pope Gregory XVI (1831–1846) condemned the slave trade in 1838, but never spoke against slavery itself, and no American Catholic bishop outwardly supported the abolition of slavery prior to the Civil War. Catholics tended to endorse the practices of the region in which they lived; New Orleans residents would have been shocked—and angry—if the Ursulines had worked for the abolition of what has been called the “peculiar institution.”¹⁸

When the United States acquired New Orleans from France as part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the Ursulines came under the jurisdiction of Bishop John Carroll (1789–1815), whose vast diocese was defined as “all the faithful living in communion with the Catholic Church … so long as they are subject to the government of the Republic, whether they dwell in the provinces of the Federated America, or in the neighboring regions.”¹⁹ Not only were the sisters afraid of losing their property as a result of Louisiana becoming part of the United States, they worried that their work might be hindered by a government whose attitude toward established religion was very different from what they had experienced in Catholic France prior to the 1789 revolution. On November 1, 1803, superior Mother Thérèse de St. Xavier Farjon wrote to Carroll expressing her concern, and the bishop forwarded her letter to Secretary of State James Madison. After showing Carroll’s letter to President Thomas Jefferson, Madison was able to assure the bishop of the president’s desire to promote educational and charitable activities in the newly acquired territory.

Several months later the community wrote directly to Jeffer...