Wall Street Journal reporter Fialka quickly removes stereotypical impressions of Catholic sisters (not monastic "nuns") who played important roles in the development of the United States, largely through unsung service to ordinary people of all backgrounds. Focusing mainly on the Irish-founded Sisters of Mercy, he highlights work with the poor in the New World and the building of major social institutions, generally under extreme duress, in the last two centuries. Thousands of schools and hospitals established by sisters provided much-needed free service and civilizing order within cities and on the frontier. They nursed both North and South during the Civil War and made college students of children others would not teach, all in the face of poverty, bigotry, imperious prelates, racism, and often impossible living conditions. Fialka skillfully and entertainingly balances historical fact with journalistic prose in narrating these dramatic accounts of individual heroines and communities. These stories are finally beginning to be better known through works such as this and the recent Dominicans at Home in a Young Nation, 1785-1865. The documentation here is comprehensive but not overly academic or intrusive. Suitable for public and academic libraries.-Anna M. Donnelly, St. John's Univ., Jamaica, NY Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.
Wall Street Journal reporter Fialka examines the role played in American society by nuns, who built the nation’s largest private-school and nonprofit-hospital systems.
Focusing primarily on the Sisters of Mercy, Fialka begins his tale in 1780s Dublin with the order’s founder, Catherine McAuley. At age 42, McAuley inherited a fortune from her employer and established a parochial school and a home for servant girls in the best part of Dublin, and, with a small army of volunteers, spent ten years working for the church. At the age of 52, she asked to be accepted into a convent, a move that Fialka notes, "was the equivalent of an army general submitting to marine boot camp." The Mercies, as the order was known, were famous for their humility and vows of poverty. They prayed in the open (a practice previously forbidden) and started schools where there hadn’t been any for generations. In 1843, two years after McAuley’s death, the order was approached by Pittsburgh’s first Catholic bishop, who asked that some of the sisters consider a hardship post on the American frontier. So began the history of the Sisters of Mercy in Chicago, New Orleans, Little Rock, and San Francisco. The author deftly shows the staggering level of involvement of the nuns throughout the fields of education and health care. In a very readable history of the order, the author also covers the current state of the myriad orders. In 1968 there were approximately 180,000 nuns--an all-time high. Today there are fewer than 81,000 nuns in the US, and their average age is 69. Many left their orders during the turbulent 1960s and ’70s, a time when the orders failed to actively recruit new members. The remaining, aging populationhas no retirement fund; traditionally, the younger sisters took care of the older ones. The narrative stumbles a bit at the end, when the reader is introduced to a whirlwind of nuns--all very interesting women, but the necessarily brief profiles begin to blend together.
Overall, though, a bit of good press during the church’s current woes.
Fialka recovers . . . those thrilling days of yesteryear when flocks of sisters, many of them, like the men who laid the intercontinental railroad tracks, Irish immigrants, pushed beyond the settled boundaries of the 19th-century America to aid in the civilizing of a continent . . . These earlier nuns were mobile, risk-taking, entrepreneurial women who eventually established the largest private hospital network in the nation and the most extensive private school system in the world.” —Kenneth L. Woodward, The New York Times Book Review
