SISTERS: Catholic nuns and the making of America. John J. Fialka
Pub. St. Martin Griffin, New York. 2003. 368 pp.
ISBN 13. 978-0-312-32596-1
Front Cover of Book
No Sister of Mercy will feel she has wasted her time if she reads this wonderfully inspiring and challenging story.
The best introduction to this history is the striking photograph on the book’s cover, one that will be nostalgically familiar to many of us: a formal photo-call of about thirty ‘white-veils’, Mercy Novices as they looked in the 1960s. The next is a short review note from the National Catholic Reporter (NCR): “Sisters’ strength is Fialka’s ability to put flesh and blood into the accounts of the lives and work of Sisters and to show through these lives their immense contribution to American society.”
The author, a Wall Street Journalist, is not a Catholic but was educated by the Sisters of Mercy who, he believes, gave him an invaluable start for life and success. Consequently he dedicates this work to his favourite high school English teacher, Sr. M. Winifred:
They seemed to us mere words on pages.
You helped us find the fun and hear the music.
It is a meticulously researched story – all 368 pages of it. Though presenting the broad history of the great pioneering work of Catholic religious Sisters in the opening of North America, it focuses on the missions of the Sisters of Mercy, from the arrival of Mother Frances Xavier Warde and her companions in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to their spread across the vast new continent to the chaos of the goldfields of California, becoming, by the mid 1900s, the largest congregation of religious women in the United States.
Map of North America
Early Days
The narrative opens with a short fresh and very sympathetic chapter on the life and mission of Catherine Mc Auley (Ch. 2). There follows, two years after Catherine’s death, a request for her sisters for Pittsburgh, a ‘hardship post’ on the [then] American frontier. From that first pioneering journey into the New World, the Mercy Sisters never turned back. They were feisty women, taking on all manner of challenges: domineering Bishops (especially when ‘abandonment to Divine Providence’ ran the idealistic Sisters into debt!), Wild West gun-slingers, Know Nothing terrorists, the Klug Klux Klan and, in time, the more sophisticated authorities of the States and nation, ever fearless in their goals of education for the poor and downtrodden, the care of the sick, the homeless, the abandoned and the dying. Thousands of primary schools and hospitals were built and eventually medical schools, colleges and universities. Hundreds of young women enthusiastically joined in the forward march, attracted not only by the personalities, the dedication and the prayerful lifestyle of the Sisters, but also the attraction of community life and mutual support, and their confidence in their commitment to the imitation of Christ in the cause of ‘the poor, the sick and the ignorant’.
The story is carried with lightness and humour where appropriate. Amazing personal stories and adventures are recounted. The author himself said that his work of research was easy: “There was so much rich material in the archives of American convents that this book practically wrote itself”. What first grasped my attention were the stories of the Mercy Sisters involved with the great American Civil War of the mid 1800’s. Their total dedication to the care of hundreds of wounded and dying soldiers, be they Confederates or Unionists (cf. Ch. 8), is a story of great heroism; later their struggles for the victims of the recurring plagues (e.g. Yellow Fever which periodically swept through the population of New Orleans) and of the great fires of Chicago.
Twentieth Century
Time moved on and other congregations were also responding equally generously to the challenges of the New Continent. All around developments in education and healthcare and provisions for the poor and destitute multiplied. But life and values in the twentieth century were changing and in the Catholic Church the world of religious men and women, in particular in the US, was moving towards profound upheaval.
Fialda describes, very methodically and objectively I think, the great changes of attitudes and consequent reactions that swept through the US at this time (the 1960’s). There were mass defections of personnel from convents and religious congregations to an individual lifestyle and choice of career by those who now felt that ‘religious life’ and its traditions had not moved with the times (e.g. the IHM Sisters story, Ch. 18). In the 1960’s young women were leaving the convent (including Mercy convents) in droves. “After more than a century of steady growth, between 1965 and 1980, fifty thousand nuns – 30 per cent of the Sisters in the US – departed religious life. It was a crippling blow to the school system, hospitals and other Catholic institutions that were geared to run on an ever-growing supply of young Sisters. Meanwhile, the numbers of Catholics…continued to grow.” (Fialka, p. 227). The consequences? 23 per cent decline in Catholic schools, 15 per cent drop in Catholic universities and 42 per cent rate of closure of parochial elementary schools, most of them in poor, inner-city neighbourhoods (Fialka, p. 230).
The exodus of younger and middle-aged Sisters had a drastic impact on the Sisters who remained in traditional communities. These were mainly the elderly and for them there had been no pension schemes when they were working in the schools and hospitals and only minimum salaries while employed (precluding savings for retirement) with the consequence that some Orders were facing a severe financial crisis. Sale of now vacant properties did not make up the shortfall. The gap between the available retirement funds that the Sisters had and what they would need to meet their financial and medical needs was $2 billion and growing rapidly (Arthur Anderson & Co., accounting survey, 1980’s). A New York congregation of Sisters was in debt to its undertakers because it was unable to pay for the frequent funerals of its members.
When this information became public one Archbishop responded: “Look, they brought this on themselves. They [the nuns] are the ones who abandoned the habit and went off to live in apartments”. However, when people with financial resources, in parishes and businesses, became aware through the press of the dire circumstances of the Sisters who had served so generously, they rose to the occasion and funding and accounting bodies were organised to help deal with the situation.
Serious Challenges
How Congregation Leaders dealt with these intimidating burdens thrust upon them showed heroic generosity and initiative. As regards the older Sisters there were some very painful and heartrending decisions to make. Besides, there were ‘clashes’ of values and expectations between the younger and older Sisters. The 1980’s saw the continuations of the struggle for Sisters who had been fighting for reforms in the 1960’s and 1970’s. There was still a tension between the old ways and the new freedoms that were emerging. In addition, in the late 1970’s, “The guns of gender war in the Catholic Church [especially in the US] were roaring.” (Fialka, p. 270). Many religious congregations, including the Mercies, went down a by now familiar path, adopting reforms and abandoning time-honoured customs including the habit and community life for individual apartments and apostolates. So be it, for those who felt there was a need for total reform. Meanwhile, there were other responses to the confusion and uncertainties of twentieth century religious life. The Nashville (Tennessee) Dominicans made a decision to ‘return to their sources’ in a ‘radical’ way and found therein a new lease of life and an influx of young women impressed by their lives and charism. Likewise the Alma (Michigan) Mercy community, who opted to follow the original Mercy tradition, as they understood it – again with success. Both these congregations, with the approval of Rome, disengaged from the LCWR to form the CMSWR (Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious).
However, there was another side to the picture. While this ‘downslide’ of structures was going on, the spirit of apostolic religious life was still very much alive. Individual and small groups of Sisters, now working with associates, were taking on heroic missions and commitments to ‘fill the gap’. Accounts of these can be read in our story under review in Chapters 23, 24, 25.
In concluding, in Chapter 27 the author summarises the story he has told and presents the findings of research into the dramatic changes in style and apostolates of apostolic religious life from the 1960’s into the 21st century. I quote: “There is great diversity among the nation (US)’s four hundred orders of Sisters, but members of most of them will see much in the adventures of the Mercies, including in more recent years, that is similar to their own experience”. However, Fialka concludes, “…the current life signs of most orders of [apostolic] religious Sisters [in the US] are not good.” – but he also sees positive visions for the future. As the Nashville Dominican and the Alma Mercy Congregations show, young women are still desirous of answering the call from God to religious life and apostolic service in community. What do others, e.g. the Sisters of Mercy, offer them at this present time? Doris Göttemoeller rsm, a well known and esteemed visionary woman, of thirty years experience in Mercy and LCWR leadership, when the question is posed to her,: “Are the Sisters of Mercy preparing for their organizational death?” makes a daring (and unfashionable?) proposal for their survival: “Under the age of sixty we might have a thousand people [Mercy Sisters]. If we could take those thousand people and deploy them on forty spots across the country, it wouldn’t matter what ministry they did. They’d be visible and we’d be visible. They would be seen as attractive. We have become so diffuse that people don’t have a chance to see who we are. I think this is the kind of thing we have to do.” (Fialka, p. 305)
Mercy Cross
I close with another review from the National Catholic Reporter:
“The stories Fialka tells of these strong and faith-filled women religious are engaging, told in a popular style that holds the attention of the reader… As a journalist, Fialka knows how to tell a story well, and these stories of fearless, dedicated and spirited women, the heart of the book, provide the reader with interesting insights and details about the impact they have had on American culture.” (p. i). I would agree.
[NOTE: SISTERS can be purchased on AMAZON]
Marie Duddy rsm
Northern Province
