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Good Hearts

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Chapter One

"Do you think I shall ever be good enough for you to send me away?" an Irish girl asked Sister Mary Eustace Eaton, a Sister of Charity and moderator of the Children of Mary Sodality at Our Lady's Hospice, Harold's Cross, in Dublin. For thirty-eight years, from 1868 to 1906, Sister Mary Eustace had heard the same question from hundreds of "pure hearted young girls" who, upon receiving the sodality's medal and blue ribbon, pledged to turn "from worldly pleasures to give themselves to God." Most of these Children of Mary were in their early teens and came from the homes of Dublin's working class. As they grew older and expressed a desire to become nuns, Sister Mary Eustace successfully placed them in convents outside Ireland-ones willing to accept a young woman with little or no dowry. These were located largely in foreign, English-speaking countries to which millions of Irish had fled after the Great Famine (1845-51). By 1905, Sister Mary Eustace had found places for approximately seven hundred women from Harold's Cross, several of whom later bore the name Sister Mary Eustace. About four hundred of these Childrenof Mary became nuns in the United States.

Sister Mary Eustace's work at Harold Cross is only one example of what had become by 1900 an almost routine pattern of migration-young Irish women going out to the New World as nuns (professed sisters, novices, postulants, or aspirants). The pattern began in the spring of 1812 when three Ursuline nuns traveled from Cork to New York, where they established the first foundation of Irish women in the United States. They remained only three years, but they initiated a practice that would become commonplace by the end of the nineteenth century. They also represented the first wave of Irish emigrant women who would come to the United States at the invitation of bishops and priests, often Irish, to establish new convents.

The first wave lasted from 1812 to 1881. It consisted of the establishment of sixteen foundations that did endure, ending with the 1881 arrival in Watervliet, New York, of a small group of Presentation Sisters from Fermoy, County Cork. But a second wave, which began in earnest during the late 1860s (and overlapped with the first wave during the 1870s) continued into the twentieth century. Young women, usually not professed sisters or even novices, were recruited by nuns from the United States who regularly launched "major drives" to acquire new members during visits to Ireland in the spring and summer months. In this way, several thousand women journeyed to the United States, where they entered religious orders as postulants and received training for their lifelong work.

Those recruited in the second wave, for the most part, became teachers in the United States' rapidly developing parochial school system. By the 1880s, the needs of the Catholic Church, as defined by its bishops, centered on classroom instruction, and nuns were sought for that purpose. The diverse ministries begun by the pioneers of the first wave-nursing the sick, caring for orphans, housing working women and unwed mothers, and educating adult immigrants-simply lost out to the task of staffing new schools. But over the years the women of both waves, united more by their fortitude and resourcefulness than by their professional work, grew into a capable community of American Catholic women that extended over several generations.

Once the schools were built, bishops and pastors tended to leave day-to-day affairs to the nuns, who from the beginning served as principals and teachers. In both roles, these emigrants became "heroes of their own lives." This was no small achievement for women, especially of the second wave, who once seemed trapped in the deprived and constrained circumstances that were repercussions of the Great Famine. By recruiting, educating, and sustaining one another in religious communities, most of them succeeded in gaining control over their personal lives. Thus, for these emigrants, "the nineteenth century was often a period of triumph rather than subjection."

It is probably not surprising that the story of these Irish women is largely untold. Their journey out is an exceedingly difficult one to trace, for a variety of reasons. During most of the nineteenth century, nuns traveling from Ireland wore secular clothes and used their surnames, as they had during penal times, so as not to call attention to themselves. As members of a church governed entirely by men, nuns experienced the same disregard as other groups of women. Frequently taken for granted, nuns were expected to provide the services to which they had committed their lives in a spirit of meekness, humility, and detachment. Obscurity and invisibility, though not uncommon in the study of women's lives in general, are particularly troublesome when they are sought after and considered measures of success. Because nineteenth-century nuns believed that their good work would be recognized in the hereafter by an all-knowing God, they made little or no effort to preserve records of their comings and goings or the reasons for them. But they did leave traces both in Ireland and the United States, and these help explain how and why the "scattering" of Irish religious women occurred during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The First Wave

In 1834, Bishop John England of Charleston, South Carolina, succeeded in persuading three Ursuline Sisters and a postulant from his native Cork to establish a school for girls in Charleston. His success, however, had not come easily. Two years before, in a letter written from Dublin, he had mentioned that "a colony of Ursuline Nuns" would return with him to Charleston. But, despite the fact that "His Lordship ... [seemed] determined that our Superiors should not sleep over his petition," the Ursulines responded slowly to the bishop's imperious pleas. They remembered all too well the difficulties encountered by an earlier group of Ursulines who attempted to found an academy for young women in New York in 1812, only to return disillusioned three years later. Their experience had provided these nuns with "a lesson ... too dearly purchased to be either forgotten or neglected."

The Ursulines finally agreed to accept Bishop England's invitation, but only after he traveled to make several personal visits to them. His "ardent zeal & insatiable desire for the extension of the Kingdom of Christ" finally convinced them. Although there is no record of the exact "arguments" the persistent bishop used to make his case, the sisters were eventually satisfied of "the large field which such a Mission would open to Ursuline zeal." Bishop England most likely explained the special needs of his diocese, one that he considered "the poorest, the largest, and the most insalubrious." And he probably made known his strong views on the disquieting condition of the church in the United States. In a widely circulated statement in 1836, Bishop England asserted that the loss of faith among Catholic immigrants and their children was "exceedingly great" (over three million in the previous fifty years). Although his assessment has been proven incorrect, he and others believed it and saw in it the tremendous need for priests and nuns. Nearly a million Irish had gone to North American in the half-century before the famine, and a majority had settled in the United States. Thus in the 1830s, following the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, the Irish Catholic Church began concentrating its major missionary efforts on this diaspora. Irish clergy-followed by Irish nuns-left family, friends, and country to bring the faith to Irish immigrants in their new homes.

In October 1843, when another Cork-born bishop, Michael O'Connor, invited the Sisters of Mercy in Carlow to Pittsburgh, they responded more expeditiously (and more typically) than the Ursulines. The Carlow nuns were not burdened with memories of a mission that had not endured, nor did they feel uncomfortable with Bishop O'Connor. When he visited St. Leo's convent, the nuns greeted him warmly, accompanied as he was by Father James Maher, a longtime friend of theirs and their founder, Mother Catherine McAuley. Not only had Father Maher been administrator of the parish when the nuns arrived in Carlow in 1837, but he was also the cousin of Mother Frances Xavier Warde, who founded St. Leo's, and the uncle of Father Paul Cullen, then rector of the Irish College in Rome and later Ireland's first cardinal.

All twenty-three sisters at St. Leo's volunteered for the Pittsburgh mission. Mother Frances Warde, who was appointed superior, and six other nuns (among them was Sister Agatha O'Brien, later to become superior of the first group of Catholic sisters in Chicago) left Carlow for Dublin on November 2, 1843-two days short of a month after Bishop O'Connor's last visit. The sisters wore secular clothes (black cashmere dresses) and traveled first-class. Although Bishop O'Connor mingled with other passengers, the nuns kept their own company, especially during the first week, when they became terribly seasick from "the constant rocking & heaving of the good ship," Queen of the West. Upon recovery, they "acted as Sisters of Mercy" and visited passengers in steerage and second-class. As much as possible, the nuns followed their regular routine. They prayed, read, sewed, and walked the decks of their "floating convent," remembering St. Leo's.

The Sisters of Mercy, who left St. Catherine's convent in Dublin for New York City on April 13, 1846, in response to a personal appeal from Bishop John Hughes (also Irish-born), had similar experiences aboard the Montezuma. The bishop had returned home, but he sent his priest-secretary to accompany Mother Agnes O'Connor and her party of six nuns, a novice, and a postulant across the Atlantic. They started their trip not long after agreeing to accept the bishop's invitation, they traveled first-class, and they became very sick during the first week at sea. Sister Monica O'Doherty wrote that it was "a real purgatory"; there was "so much sickness and sorrow," she said, as they "parted from all that was dear ... on earth" and sailed "towards the country of independence and Yankeeism!"

Yet there were aspects of their life on ship that proved pleasurable. These sisters, like those from Carlow, enjoyed their walks on deck, where they made their meditations and said their rosaries. The captain and other passengers treated them with "respect and attention," willing to provide "everything [they wished] for." Although the famine that would send millions of Irish to North America had not yet reached its full force, the nuns did not see a hint of it on their English ship. Food was plentiful, and few hotels could have given them more variety. "We have only to say whether we will have fowl or mutton, beef, etc., after which we always have a very nice pie or pudding," wrote Sister Monica. In another letter, she described the "scented soap of a superior kind" and a large "looking glass in which you can have almost a full length view of your extensive perfections." She wondered if their "spirit of mortification" would "suffer shipwreck in the midst of so many delicacies."

They had little to fear in this regard. Once the first wave of Irish nuns reached the New World, ample hardships and challenges awaited them. Almost all would find the weather troublesome. Mother Agnes O'Connor, who felt New York City's "intense [summer] heat very much," anticipated winter so she could "bask in the frost." The Sisters of Mercy, who arrived in Pittsburgh in December 1843, shivered in the cold and snow; the Dominicans from Cabra in Dublin, who settled in New Orleans in 1860, suffered each year from the "scorching sun," the unrelenting humidity, and the pertinacious mosquitoes. Only the Mercy and Presentation nuns, who traveled to San Francisco from Kinsale and Midleton in 1854, considered the climate a blessing. It may have been their unexpected reward for enduring an extremely arduous trip to San Francisco, one that included crossing Panama on the backs of mules.

In the summer of 1854 the Spanish-born archbishop of San Francisco, Joseph Alemany, had sent an Irish priest, Hugh P. Gallagher, to Ireland in search of nuns. Father Gallagher, who thought it would be easier and cheaper to approach the Mercy Sisters in Pittsburgh, was instructed instead to go to the fountainhead. Thus he began his assignment in Dublin, at the Mercy convent on Baggot Street, and successfully completed his mission at the Mercy convent in Kinsale and the Presentation convent in Midleton. Eight Mercy and five Presentation Sisters journeyed from Cork to California, one of the world's most rough-edged frontiers.

Whether on the frontier or in a city, these pioneer sisters experienced physical hardships unequaled by those who would follow in the second wave. The nuns of the first wave lived and worked in convents and schools that were especially unattractive and often unhealthy. Bad weather-excessive heat or bitter cold-simply heightened their loneliness and discomfort; it also contributed to "the dreadful mortality" among them. In Pittsburgh, three Sisters of Mercy died "in one week and two shortly before" as a result of the change of climate, long hours of hard work, and poor living conditions.

In San Francisco, where a mining-camp mentality unsettled both minds and mores, Sister Mary Clare Duggan became mentally ill and Mother Mary Joseph Cronin physically sick. They and Mother Augustine Keane returned to Ireland only two years after their arrival in the United States. These Presentation Sisters had done "much good" among Catholics and Protestants, but Archbishop Alemany knew their convent was then in desperate straits. In March 1857, in a letter to the president of All Hallows College, Archbishop Alemany said the convent needed "a few more subjects (good) not only to do good, but even to secure the existence of the establishment, which has only 2 professed [sisters]! Of whom one may soon die!" The one who remained well and even prospered was Mother Teresa Comerford. She and Mother Frances Warde in Pittsburgh-who also flourished in the United States-were truly arguments for Darwinian survival of the fittest.

The religious women of the first wave, especially their leaders, had strength and vision as well as an abundance of confidence. They tended to be older (usually over twenty when they entered an order) than the young women who journeyed in the second wave. And first-wave nuns often had important family connections, since they frequently came from the most respectable and wealthy Catholic families of Ireland. If not wealthy, they most certainly represented the rural middle class; as daughters of substantial farmers and shopkeepers, they could bring to religious communities sizeable dowries, generally between £200 and £600 depending on time and place.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Good Hearts by SUELLEN HOY Copyright © 2006 by Suellen Hoy. Excerpted by permission.
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