Those Lovely Ladies, the American Nuns (and why is the Vatican so worried?)

I want to find my way back to the topic of the American Civil War so that I can do a blog on the nursing Sisters who played such an important role in winning the confidence of Americans towards the Catholic Church in the middle of the nineteenth century.  Before I treat of the sisters who nursed the wounded and sick soldiers of both the North and the South, however, I really need to give a brief history of the American Sisters of Charity as they played such a major role in this work and so this brings us back to the series “Let’s Hear It For the Ladies” where we have been treating of American Religious women in light of the “Vatican Investigation of American Nuns.”

At the time of our independence from Britain, there were no convents for women Religious in the original thirteen States.  If a woman wanted to pursue a religious vocation, she had to go to Europe and enter a monastery there—as approximately thirty-five colonial Americans had, all from Maryland, in the approximately century and a half between the Catholic settling of Maryland and our Revolution.  It was in 1790 that Bishop John Carroll brought four Carmelite nuns, three Americans and an Englishwoman, from the Netherlands and settled them on an estate in Port Tobacco, Maryland—not far from modern Washington DC.  This was the heart of Catholic Maryland and three of these women were related to each other and to many of the local plantation owning families.  We are not going to focus on this monastery however as they were “nuns”—that is cloistered religious—and we are focusing on “sisters”—that is women religious who are not monastics and enclosed.  (We will do a blog on these women at a later time—I am fascinated by their story.)

With few clergy and no religious women—other than the small monastery of cloistered Carmelite nuns—Bishop Carroll was well used to depending on the laity to take an active and collaborative role in the necessary ministries of the Church.  Meanwhile, a widowed convert to the Catholic Church, Mrs. Elizabeth Ann Seton, had met the Rev. Louis Dubourg, SS, an émigré from the French Revolution.  The Abbé Dubourg was one of those brilliant souls who travels fast through life proving the axiom “still waters run deep.”  In other words, Dubourg razzle-dazzled  his contemporaries with his accomplishments without laying good foundations for his work.  He was better at starting projects than following through on them.    

Seton came from a socially prominent family in upper-crust Manhattan society, but her husband had gone bankrupt shortly before his death and her conversion to Catholicism lost her the support and friendship of most of her relatives and practically all of her social set.  In an effort to support herself and her five children, she had opened a hospital in New York but it failed—in great part due to her being ostracized from New York Society for her becoming a Catholic.  She heard Dubourg preach in New York and was deeply impressed and at his suggestion she moved with her family to Baltimore where Dubourg had established a seminary for Archbishop Carroll.  Mrs. Seton opened a small school and was joined by five other women whom Dubourg thought should be organized into a sisterhood based on the model of the Daughters of Charity, the community founded by Saints Vincent DePaul and Louise de Marillac.  Dubourg guided the small group along the paths of the Vincentian spiritual life and on March 25, 1809, Elizabeth Seton professed her vows—renewable annually on the Vincentian model—to Bishop Carroll.  The Sisters—like their French counterparts—did not adopt the guimpe and veil of nuns but wore the black dress and bonnet typical to widows.  (The French Daughters of Charity had originally worn the highly starched bonnets of serving-women of their day.)  Several months later the Sisters relocated to Emmitsburg Maryland where a benefactor had donated 269 acres for the establishment of a school.  The school, St. Joseph’s, opened the following February and the Sisterhood itself grew remarkably fast despite the hardship and consequent illness and early deaths of some of the Sisters.  By 1814 Mother Seton was able to send sisters to Philadelphia to open an orphan’s home.  In 1817 Sisters went to New York at the invitation of Bishop Connolly to make a foundation and take care of orphans.   In 1829 a foundation was made in Cincinnati.

In 1847 Bishop John Hughes of New York—a bishop noted for his autocracy as you might remember from earlier blogs—insisted that the Sisters of Charity in his diocese become independent of Emmitsburg and he named his sister, Mother Angela Hughes, their superior.  Other bishops followed suit, either breaking the sisters in their various dioceses off from the jurisdiction of groups in other dioceses or, as in the case of the Sisters in New Jersey, recruiting candidates from their own dioceses, sending them to an established group for their formation, and then bringing them home to establish a new Congregation.  Today autonomous congregations of Sisters of Charity in New York, Convent Station NJ, Halifax NS, Cincinnati, and Greensburg PA, all trace their origins back to the Seton heritage. The original community at Emmitsburg, affiliated themselves with the French Daughters of Charity, in 1850, at which time they traded Mother Seton’s widows’ bonnet for the starched cornette of the French Daughters of Charity.  In 1964 that was exchanged for a simple modern habit designed by Christian Dior.  Meanwhile, some of the daughter congregations had traded the bonnet for a more traditional veil. 

Mother Seton was not the only foundress of a congregation of Sisters of Charity.   Only three years after her taking vows, Catherine Spalding, the daughter of a prominent Catholic family from Charles County, Maryland and two friends were encouraged by Father (later Bishop) Jean-Baptiste Marie David, another émigré priest, to form a Sisterhood near Bardstown Kentucky—a Catholic stronghold in the Ohio Valley to which settlers were streaming in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.  Spalding was only nineteen when she undertook this project, but she, like Seton, modeled her Institute on the French Daughters of Charity.  Their original outreach was education, but they soon took on the care of orphans and nursing.  Like Seton’s Charities, the Kentucky women, known as the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth, did not adopts nun’s habits but a plain black dress and bonnet. 

In the midst of an 1829 cholera epidemic, Irish born Bishop John England of Charleston, South Carolina—one of the most progressive prelates in the history of the Catholic Church in the United States—established a congregation of sisters, also based on the Vincentian model, and known originally as the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy. (In the twentieth century they changed their names to the Sisters of Charity of Our Lady of Mercy.) 

The same year as Bishop Ireland established the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy, Father James Nicholas Joubert, like Fathers Dubourg and David, a Sulpician, encouraged an Afro-Caribbean resident of Baltimore, Ms. Elisabeth Lange and a companion, Maria Balas, who were teaching Haitian children in Baltimore to establish a religious community for women of African descent to minister to children of African heritage.  Thus began the Oblate Sisters of Providence.  These sisters too originally wore the black dress and white bonnet common to African-American women servants.  Only later in their history did they adopt a monastic style habit with wimple and veil.  Their original convent was a rented house in Baltimore; their first motherhouse, a row-house so typical of the Baltimore neighborhoods.     Their work traditionally focused on the education of African-American children but they undertook whatever work the Church needed at the time, including domestic service at the Baltimore seminary. 

The Vincentan Rule adopted by the various congregations of American Sisters of Charity was particularly well adapted to American life as it was decidedly and deliberately non-monastic with Vincent dePaul’s   famous admonition to the Sisters: for a monastery, only the houses of the sick, for cell, a rented room, for chapel, the parish hurch, for cloister, the streets of the city, for enclosure, obedience, for grill, the fear of God, for veil, holy modesty.  This gave the sisters a freedom of movement to respond to the needs of their neighbors and it would come in very handy during the American Civil War
The image today is Mother Catherine Spalding, foundress of the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth. 

Let's hear it for the Ladies II

One of the first religious women to successfully avoid the canon law requiring vowed women to be enclosed (cloistered) was Mary Ward (1585-1645). Mary was raised in a devout Recusant family in Ripon and at the age of fourteen went to live in the home of a wealthy gentleman, Sir Ralph Babthorpe, and his family. This was a common practice at the time when a young woman or man of the gentry learned the responsibilities of their class in a socially prominent household. It was often where marriage connections were made and there was a strong network of Recusant (Catholic) families that helped Catholics marry within the faith. Yorkshire, particularly rural Yorkshire, being far from Protestant London, had a relatively strong Catholic community among its populace. Mary, however, did not find herself interested in a husband but felt drawn to the religious life, and for that she had to leave England as the open practicing of the Catholic faith was prohibited by law and thus there were no monasteries or convents. She crossed the channel in 1606 to the Spanish Netherlands to become a lay sister in the Poor Clares at St.Omer. The following year, using her dowry, she established a Poor Clare monastery at Gravelines in what is today the very northern edge of France. The monastic live was particularly severe. The nuns wore habits made of rough wool, were meatless except at Christmastime, slept on straw mattresses and practiced other disciplines common to the reformed orders of the time. None of that unsettled Mary, but the enclosure did. She felt very drawn to the religious life, but recognized the need for an apostolic community based on the spirituality and mission of the Society of Jesus. She left the monastery she had founded and gathered a group of like-minded women around her and formed the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Mary Ward recognized that one of the primary needs in early modern Europe, and the Church in early modern Europe, was the education of women. English Recusant experience showed her that the survival of Catholicism depended on women knowing their faith. In England, among the Catholics of means, the husband and father of the family often had to “conform” to the Church of England to avoid the legal and monetary disabilities imposed on Catholics by the royal government, leaving the practice and handing-on of the faith to the wife and mother. This made it imperative that Catholic women be educated in a Catholic environment, something quite impossible to do publically in England. What was needed was a religious community of women, independent and self-governing like male religious orders, without religious habits or other public marks of identity, who were themselves educated and independent-minded ladies. Their religious practices had to be discreet and simple, forgoing the elaborate choir ceremonial typical to enclosed orders of both men and women. The Ignatian influence on her own spiritual development—and so much recusant spirituality was formed by the Jesuits—stressed the interior life and mental prayer. But this created a very different model of religious life—like the Jesuits, totally non-monastic.
There were no formal ties between Mary’s group and the Jesuits—the Jesuits have always, following Ignatius’ explicit mandate—rejected a female branch of their congregation. Nevertheless, there were strong spiritual bonds. That was often to the detriment of the Sisters however as many in the Church resented the Jesuits for their non-iconic ways and were even more alarmed when women showed such independence. Bishops were often particularly put out as they expected religious, especially women religious, to be dependent on their authority and under their control. Consequently Mary Ward and her Institute attracted quite a bit of negative attention.
The new Institute worked not only covertly in England, but spread from Flanders into the Austrian Empire and Italy and Catholic regions of Germany. Its educational work among women won it many admirers from the upper classes and the nobility—and even the Holy Roman Emperor. In addition several popes expressed their admiration. Nevertheless, the Institute was suppressed by a commission of Cardinals in 1630 when asked by the Pope to evaluate the new community. Curiously enough, and somewhat inexplicably to moderns with a canonical mindset, the Pope (Urban VIII), an admirer of Mary Ward and her work, invited her to Rome where she and a community of her sisters lived and worked under his protection. In 1639 the pope wrote a letter of introduction for Mary Ward to England’s Catholic Queen Consort, Henrietta Marie, wife of Charles I. In 1642, just as the English Civil War was beginning, Mary returned to England and established a community at Heworth in Yorkshire. She died three years later and was buried in the Anglican churchyard at Osbaldwick, Yorkshire.
The Institute survived—initially and for a long time without canonical approval. In 1703 Pope Clement XI approved their Rule of Life and the Institute itself was given papal approbation in 1877 by Pope Pius IX. It leaves us with this question—why do we think that “nuns,” or actually apostolic communities of women—have to wear habits, live in convents, spend long periods of time at formal prayers in their chapels? No one is saying that monastic life—for women or for men—is not a valid form of religious life, but is it the only form? Perhaps the real issue, now as in Mary Ward’s day, is how much can women religious (or lay, for that matter) be trusted to make decisions for themselves? On the othe hand, Pope Benedict did name her Venerable. Prophets are not recognized in their own day.

The image today is a painting of the seventeenth-century religous founder, Venerable Mary Ward.