Blog

In 1846, encouraged by Lord Shrewsbury and Bishop Wiseman, Sister Cornelia established the first house of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus.

On November 1, 1930, a stocky, black-bearded young man entered St. Vincent Hospital in Billings, Montana. He was in agony, holding his left arm, shattered in a car crash. Soon, he found himself being charmed by his nurse, a young shy nun, Sister Florence Cloonan.

As a coach maker’s daughter who learned carpentry at an early age, Mother Joseph prowled construction sites with a saw in her hand and a hammer dangling from her belt. She used her skills and talents to help build the first hospitals and schools in the Northwest.

Archbishop Peter Richard Kenrick invited the Mercies to work with the French, Spanish, Irish and German immigrants along the Mississippi River. They were led by Mother Magdalene dePazzi Bentley.

Sister Frances Cabrini and seven other sisters arrived in New York in the spring of 1889 bearing a letter from Archbishop Michael Corrigan, who had invited them to come from Italy and start an orphanage in Manhattan.

Refused permission to start her order of religious sisters in California, Mother Dolores and her small community found their way to Reno in 1877, where she went on to found Saint Mary’s Regional Medical Center, which is still operating today.

In 1883 after a funnel-shaped cloud touched down and devastated Rochester, Minnesota. Dr. W. W. Mayo took charge of the thirty-four injured victims. Mother Alfred took over the nursing functions. Afterwards, she took the good doctor aside and confided something to him. She had this dream about how the two of them might build a hospital.

For four nights and three days, 85 year-old Sister Margaret (Peg) Geary was trapped inside a broken-down elevator.

This first vignette in our “Catholic Nuns and the Making of America” series highlights the influence of a sister on one of SOAR!’s founders, John Fialka, in high school.

This is an excerpt from a letter to SOAR! from Sister Katie McNamara, O.C.S.O., from the Mount Saint Mary’s Abbey in Wrentham, Massachusetts – a monastic community of some 50 Trappistine nuns.