Catholic sisters and nuns in the United States

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Catholic sisters and nuns in the United States have played a major role in American religion, education, nursing and social work since the early 19th century. In Catholic Europe, convents were heavily endowed over the centuries, and were sponsored by the aristocracy. Religious orders were founded by entrepreneurial women who saw a need and an opportunity, and were staffed by devout women from poor families. The number of Catholic nuns grew exponentially from about 900 in the year 1840, to a maximum of nearly 200,000 in 1965, falling to 56,000 in 2010. According to an article posted on CatholicPhilly.com, the website of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in October 2018, National Religious Retirement Office statistics showed that number as 47,160 in 2016, adding that “about 77 percent of women religious are older than 70.” [1] In March 2022, the NRRO was reporting statistics from 2018, citing the number of professed sisters as 45,100. [2] The network of Catholic institutions provided high status lifetime careers as nuns in parochial schools, hospitals, and orphanages. They were part of an international Catholic network, with considerable movement back and forth from Britain, France, Germany and Canada. [3]

Contents

Some American Catholics came to the defense of American sisters when the Vatican initiated an investigation into what it viewed as unorthodox leanings among the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. The controversial investigation, which was viewed by many U.S. Catholics as a "vexing and unjust inquisition of the sisters who ran the church's schools, hospitals and charities" was ultimately closed in 2015 in meeting with Pope Francis. [4]

History

The first women religious in what would become the United States, were fourteen French Ursuline nuns who arrived in New Orleans in July 1727, [5] and opened Ursuline Academy, which continues in operation and is the oldest continuously operating school for girls in the United States. [6]

The Sisters of Saint Anne are a Roman Catholic religious institute, founded in 1850 in Vaudreuil, Quebec, Canada, by the Blessed Marie Anne Blondin, S.S.A. The Sisters arrived in the United States in September 1867 at the request of the Bishop of Buffalo, opening a school in Oswego, New York. [7] Between 1840 and 1930 approximately 900,000 Quebec residents, [8] most of them French Canadian left for the United States. Textile manufacturing centers and other industrial towns such as Lewiston, Maine, Fall River, Massachusetts, Woonsocket, Rhode Island and Manchester, New Hampshire attracted significant French-Canadian populations. The Sisters went on to expand throughout northern New York and New England, staffing many schools of French-speaking parishes. [7]

American communities

Expansion before 1860

Historian Joseph Mannard has suggested that there was a "convent revolution" in Antebellum America. The number of orders and sisters grew rapidly. In 1830 there were only 10 orders in the U.S, with under 500 sisters. By 1860 45 orders had been added and there were over 5,000 sisters. In 1830 there were only 20 Catholic female academies in the U.S., by 1860 there were 201. In 1830 there was one sister-founded hospital in the U.S.. By 1860 there were 35. This increase in numbers was accompanied by an increasing public awareness of Catholic women religious. [15]

Civil War

The male doctors of the Civil War era were generally dubious about. the civilian women volunteering to be nurses. However, they were generally appreciative of the Catholic orders of sisters that operated their own hospitals, and sent cadres to Army hospitals to help after bloody battles. [16] [17] [18]

Other communities who assisted the sick and wounded include: the Sisters of St. Joseph, Carmelites, Dominican Order, Ursulines, Sisters of Mercy, Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy, Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, Sisters of Charity of Nazareth, and the Congregation of Divine Providence. [21]

Hospitals

The majority of these women followed an active apostolate; the number of contemplative communities being relatively small. About sixty percent were primarily involved with teaching, while the rest were engaged in nursing and administration in hospitals. [22]

American hospitals in the 19th century were largely designed for poor people in the larger cities. There were no paying patients. Very small proprietary hospitals were operated by practicing physicians and surgeons to take care of their own paying patients in better facilities than the charity hospitals offered. By the 1840s, the major religious denominations, especially the Catholics and Methodists, began opening hospitals in major cities. [23] In the 1840s–1880s era, Catholics in Philadelphia founded two hospitals, for the Irish and German Catholic immigrants. They depended on revenues from the paying sick, and became important health and welfare institutions in the Catholic community. [24] By 1900 the Catholics had set up hospitals in most major cities. In New York the Dominicans, Franciscans, Sisters of Charity, and other orders set up hospitals to care primarily for their own ethnic group. By the 1920s they were serving everyone in the neighborhood. [25]

In smaller cities too the Catholics set up hospitals, such as St. Patrick Hospital in Missoula, Montana. The Sisters of Providence opened it in 1873. It was in part funded by the county contract to care for the poor, and also operated a day school and a boarding school. The nuns provided nursing care especially for infectious diseases and traumatic injuries. They also proselytized the patients to attract converts and restore lapsed Catholics back into the Church. They built a larger hospital in 1890. [26] Catholic hospitals were largely owned and staffed by orders of nuns (who took oaths of poverty), as well as unpaid nursing students. When the population of nuns dropped sharply after the 1960s, the hospitals were sold. The Catholic Hospital Association formed in 1915. [27] [28]

Parochial schools

By the middle of the 19th century, the Catholics in larger cities started building their own parochial school system. The main impetus was fear that exposure to Protestant teachers in the public schools, and Protestant fellow students, would lead to a loss of faith. Protestants reacted by strong opposition to any public funding of parochial schools. The Catholics nevertheless built their elementary schools, parish by parish, using very low paid sisters as teachers. [29] They created the world's largest network of religious schools. [30]

In the classrooms, the highest priorities were piety, orthodoxy, and strict discipline. Knowledge of the subject matter was a minor concern. The sisters came from numerous denominations, and there was no effort to provide joint teachers training programs. The bishops were indifferent. Around 1911, led by The Catholic University of America, Catholic colleges began summer institutes to train the sisters in pedagogical techniques. Dolan notes that in the early 20th century a majority young nuns who became teachers had not attended high school. They taught for a half-century or more and long past World War II, the Catholic schools were noted for inferior conditions compared to the public schools, and less well-trained teachers. [31] The rapid growth of the Catholic population continued, and after 1945 it started to pour into the suburbs. At the peak in 1960, 13,000 schools served over 5 million students. [32]

By the 1960s there was a growing lack of teaching sisters. The solution was to hire much more expensive lay teachers, who grew from 4% of the elementary teachers in the Chicago archdiocese in 1950 to 38% by 1965. [33]

Numbers

The numbers grew rapidly, from 900 sisters in 15 communities in 1840, 50,000 in 170 orders in 1900, and 135,000 in 300 different orders by 1930. Starting in 1820, the sisters always outnumbered the priests and brothers. [34] Young women entered after elementary school, and spent one year at a novitiate training program before entering full-time roles. [35] Their total number peaked in 1965 at 180,000 then plunged to 56,000 in 2010. Most simply left their orders. [36] [37] There were very few replacements. In the early 1960s, 7000 young women a year joined the orders; by 1990 there were only 100 a year. [38]

SistersChangeOrdersChange
17200000
173014+141+1
1840900+88615+14
190050,000+49,100170+155
1930135,000+85,000300+130
1965180,000+45,000300++
1970161,000-19,000300+n/a
1975135,000-26,000300+n/a
1980127,000-8,000300+n/a
1985115,000-12,000300+n/a
1990103,000-12,000300+n/a
199591,000-12,000300+n/a
200080,000-11,000300*n/a
200569,000-11,000250+n/a
201058,000-11,000250*n/a
201450,000-8,000200+n/a

*estimate

Know Nothing attacks

In the period before the American Civil War, it was common for anti-Catholic Protestants to sponsor semi-pornographic lectures by ex-Catholic nuns. Ugly rumors spread to the effect that convents and nunneries were organized for the sexual pleasure of the male priests, with the corpses of dead babies buried underneath. The Know-Nothing movement of the 1850s was especially focused on these allegations. Winning control of the Massachusetts state legislature in 1854, the Know Nothings set up a legislative investigation to try and substantiate the rumors. The press had a field day following the story, especially when it was discovered that the key reformer was using committee funds to pay for a prostitute in Boston. The legislature shut down its committee, ejected the reformer, and saw its investigation become a laughing stock. [39] [40] [41] [42]

Religious role versus professional role

The tension between the sisters' religious commitment and their professional role emerged in the 19th century and grew more serious over time. In the 19th century the women generally saw the religious role as paramount, with their service to God expressed through their nursing or teaching or other activities. The bishops put little emphasis on advanced training or education. In hospitals, the sisters were prohibited from working in obstetric units, or venereal disease care. By the 20th century, however, the demands for professionalism in nursing grew stronger; many Catholic hospitals opened nursing schools, and the students did much of the routine nursing care for patients. In 1948 the Conference of Catholic Schools of Nursing was formed to promote college education for the nursing sisters. Before the 1940s the Catholic educators held that sisters who had not graduated from high school could learn to teach from their elders and by experience, while the public schools were requiring much stronger credentials. The goal was to quickly open as many schools as possible. [43] The 90,000 teaching sisters were served by 150 collegiate centers designed to provide them a bachelor's degree before they taught. [44]

Language and race

Chapel (1936) of the Felician Sisters in Livonia, Michigan. FelicianSistersLivoniaChapel.jpg
Chapel (1936) of the Felician Sisters in Livonia, Michigan.

Bishop Jean-Marie Odin (1800–1870), rebuilt the Catholic Church in antebellum Texas. Odin vigorously recruited priests and religious workers from the Eastern states, Quebec, England, and France. He reached the Hispanic, Irish, German and Polish children by bringing in the Ursuline teaching order of sisters and the Missionary Oblate priests of Mary Immaculate. [45]

In German districts, the Catholic parochial schools were taught entirely in German until World War I, despite the protests of Yankees and Irish Catholics who tried to Anglicize those schools through the Bennett Law of 1890 in Wisconsin.

The Americanization of new immigrants was a major role for the teaching sisters especially with the arrival of the Italians, Poles and others from Eastern and Southern Europe in the late 19th century, and the arrival of Hispanics after 1960. The Felician Sisters originated in Poland and came to the United States in 1874, which became its main base. The sisters provided social mobility for young Polish women. Although the congregation was involved in the care of orphans, the aged, and the sick, teaching remained its primary concern. [46] In Toledo, Ohio, in the early 20th century Polish nuns were used to assist the assimilation of Polish children. The sisters deemphasized the children's Polish heritage and taught in English, making frequent reference to Polish words. [47]

In Chicago, some of the black children arriving from Louisiana were already Catholic, and were taught by Catholic sisters. The primarily Irish American Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Colored People, the mostly German-American Franciscan Sisters, and the Polish-American Sisters of the Holy Family lived in the all-black segregated neighborhoods, where they learned about the pervasiveness of racism in America. [48]

Organization

In April 1956, the Holy See's Congregation of the Affairs of Religious requested that religious sisters in the U.S. form a national conference. In November of that year, the committee of sisters in the U.S. called a meeting in Chicago of general and provincial superiors of pontifical communities to consider the formation of a national conference. They voted unanimously to establish the Conference of Major Superiors of Women (CMSW) to "promote the spiritual welfare" of the country's women religious, "ensure increasing effectiveness of their apostolate," and "foster closer fraternal cooperation with all religious of the United States, the hierarchy, the clergy, and Catholic associations." [49] In 1971, the name was changed to the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. As of 2015, the conference includes over 1500 members, encompassing approximately 80 percent of the 57,000 women religious in the United States. The conference describes its charter as assisting its members to "collaboratively carry out their service of leadership to further the mission of the Gospel in today's world." The canonically-approved organization collaborates in the Catholic church and in society to "influence systemic change, studying significant trends and issues within the church and society, utilizing our corporate voice in solidarity with people who experience any form of violence or oppression, and creating and offering resource materials on religious leadership skills." The conference serves as a resource both to its members and to the public who may be seeking resources on leadership for religious life. [49]

See also

Notes

  1. "As number of U.S. women religious decline, they look to future". Catholic Philly. Retrieved 2022-03-13.
  2. "Clergy and Religious | USCCB". www.usccb.org. Retrieved 2022-03-13.
  3. NELSON, SIOBAN. Say Little, Do Much: Nursing, Nuns, and Hospitals in the Nineteenth Century. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. Accessed December 22, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt3fj4g2
  4. Vatican Ends Battle With U.S. Catholic Nuns’ Group NYT, April 16, 2015
  5. Blondeau, Caherine. Étude normande: La vie littéraire à Rouen au 18ème siècle: "Le Mississipy est en cet endroit plus large que n'est la rivière de Seine à Roüen", à propos de la Relation du voyage des dames religieuses Ursulines de Roüen à la Nouvelle Orléans, p. 50.
  6. Robenstine, Clark (Summer 1992). "French Colonial Policy and the Education of Women and Minorities: Louisiana in the Early Eighteenth Century". History of Education Quarterly . 32 (2): 193–211. doi:10.2307/368985. ISSN   0018-2680. JSTOR   368985. S2CID   147109780.
  7. 1 2 "A Glance at our Heritage". Congregation of the Sisters of Saint Anne.
  8. Bélanger, Damien-Claude (23 August 2000). "French Canadian Emigration to the United States, 1840-1930". Québec History, Claude Bélanger, Marianopolis College. Archived from the original on 25 January 2007. Retrieved 2007-01-31.
  9. 1 2 "A Short History of the Sisters of Charity, Emmitsburg Area Historical society". Emmitsburg.net. Retrieved 2014-03-03.
  10. Sisters of Charity of New York Timeline
  11. ""History", New York Foundling". Archived from the original on 2015-09-05. Retrieved 2015-08-20.
  12. Warren, Andrea. "The Orphan Train", The Washington Post, 1998
  13. Creagh, Dianne. "The Baby Trains: Catholic Foster Care and Western Migration, 1873-1929," Journal of Social History (2012) 46#1 pp 197-218
  14. Dominicans at Home in a Young Nation: 1786-1865, >(McGreal, Mary Nona, ed.) Strasbourg, France: Editions du Signe, 2001
  15. Joseph, Mannard (2017). ""Our Dear Houses Are Here, There + Every Where": The Convent Revolution in Antebellum America". American Catholic Studies. 128 (2): 1–27. doi:10.1353/acs.2017.0032. S2CID   148846664.
  16. Judith Metz, "In times of war," in Ursula Stepsis and Dolores Liptak, eds. Pioneer Healers: The History of Women Religious in American Health Care (19890 pp.39–57.
  17. George C. Stewart, Jr. Marvels of Charity: History of American Sisters and Nuns (1994) pp. 185–221.
  18. Mary Denis Maher, To Bind Up the Wounds: Catholic Sister Nurses in the U.S. Civil War (1989) online
  19. Mug, Mary Theodosia (1931). Lest We Forget: The Sisters of Providence of Saint Mary-of-the-Woods in Civil War Service. Providence Press.
  20. "Namesake", The Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War, Sister Anthony O'Connell Auxiliary Archived 2013-09-02 at archive.today
  21. Craig Swain (2008). "Nuns of the Battlefield". Northwest in Washington, District of Columbia — The American Northeast (Mid-Atlantic). The Historical Marker Database. Retrieved 18 December 2010.
  22. The Catholic Church in the United States of America, Catholic Editing Company, New York, 1914
  23. Charles E. Rosenberg, The care of strangers, the rise of America's hospital system (19870. pp.15–141.
  24. Farr Casterline, Gail (1984). "St. Joseph's and St. Mary's: The Origins of Catholic Hospitals in Philadelphia". Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. 108 (3): 289–314. PMID   11617881.
  25. McCauley, Bernadette (1997). "'Sublime Anomalies': Women Religious and Roman Catholic Hospitals in New York City, 1850–1920". Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. 52 (3): 289–309. doi:10.1093/jhmas/52.3.289. PMID   9270230.
  26. Savitt, Todd L.; Willms, Janice (2003). "Sisters' Hospital: The Sisters of Providence and St. Patrick Hospital, Missoula, Montana, 1873–1890". Montana: The Magazine of Western History. 53 (1): 28–43.
  27. Barbra Mann Wall, Unlikely Entrepreneurs: Catholic Sisters and the Hospital Marketplace, 1865–1925 (2005)
  28. Barbra Mann Wall, American Catholic Hospitals: A Century of Changing Markets and Missions (Rutgers University Press; 2014)
  29. Jay P. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience (1985) pp 262-74
  30. "Review," Journal of American History (2014) 100#4:1221
  31. Jay P. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience (1985) pp 286-91
  32. Dominic J. Brewer; Patrick J. McEwan (2010). Economics of Education. Elsevier. pp. 319–20. ISBN   9780080965314.
  33. James W. Sanders, Education of an Urban Minority: Catholics in Chicago, 1833-1965 (1977) pp. 203-4
  34. James M. O'Toole, The Faithful: A History of Catholics in America (2008) p 104
  35. Oates, 1984
  36. Margaret M. McGuinness, Called to Serve (2013), ch 8
  37. Another estimate gives 5000 in 1860, 22,000 in 1880, 90,000 in 1920 and 180,000 in 1950, with a peak in 1965 at 200,000. George C. Stewart, Marvels of Charity: History of American Sisters and Nuns (1994) p 565
  38. Patricia Wittberg, The Rise and Fall of Catholic Religious Orders: A Social Movement Perspective (1994) p. 1
  39. Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery (1992), pp 115, 137
  40. John R. Mulkern, "Scandal Behind the Convent Walls: The Know-Nothing Nunnery Committee of 1855." Historical Journal of Massachusetts 11 (1983): 22-34.
  41. Mary J. Oates, "'Lowell': An Account of Convent Life in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1852-1890." New England Quarterly (1988) pp. 101-118 JSTOR   365222 reveals the actual behavior of the Catholic nuns.
  42. Robert Howard Lord, et al., History of the Archdiocese of Boston in the Various Stages of Development, 1604 to 1943 (1944) pp. 686-99 for more details
  43. Oates, (1984) p 62
  44. Joanne K. McNamara, Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia (1996) pp. 626-29
  45. Patrick Foley, "Builder of the Faith in Nineteenth-Century Texas: A Deeper Look at Bishop Jean-Marie Odin," Catholic Southwest (2008) 19#1 pp. 52-65.
  46. Thaddeus C. Radzialowski, "Reflections on the History of the Felicians in America," Polish American Studies (1975) 21#1 pp 19-28.
  47. Sarah E. Miller, "'Send Sisters, Send Polish Sisters,'" Ohio History (2007) 114#1 pp. 46-56
  48. Suellen Hoy, "Ministering Hope to Chicago,," Chicago History (2002) 31#2 pp 4-23.
  49. 1 2 "LCWR history". lcwr.org. Silver Spring, MD: Leadership Conference of Women Religious. Archived from the original on 2015-04-18. Retrieved 2015-04-17.

Council of Major Superiors of Women Religiou, http://www.cmswr.org, more recently founded.

Further reading

Historiography and memory