The Ursulines have a long history in the city of New Orleans, Louisiana.
As early as 1726, King Louis XV of France decided that three Ursuline nuns from Rouen should go to New Orleans to establish a hospital for poor sick people and to provide education for young girls of wealthy families.
At the request of Governor Étienne Perier, fourteen nuns took part in the long journey to New Orleans. The names of seven are known:
There were two postulant sisters: Sister le Massif from Tours and Marie-Madeleine Hachard from Rouen.
There were also two nuns from Ploërmel and one from Hennebont in Brittany. [1]
Marie-Madeleine Hachard described their travel and their arrival at New Orleans in letters sent to her father who stayed in Rouen, and were published in 1728 by Antoine le Prévost from the same city. [2] The trip lasted for five months, instead of three. [3] They arrived at New Orleans in July 1727, and were temporarily housed in one of the larger houses of the young city.
Convinced that the education of women was essential to the development of a civilized, spiritual, and just society, the Ursuline sisters influenced culture and learning in New Orleans by providing an exceptional education for girls and women. They founded the Ursuline Academy in 1727. [4] It was the first boarding school in Louisiana, educating a number of Catholic Hispanic girls and women from socially privileged families in central and South American countries. During the War of 1812 the Ursulines turned the classrooms into infirmaries for the sick and wounded of both the British and American armies. It is one of three academies sponsored by the Ursuline Sisters of the Roman Union, Central Province. [4] The Ursulines also began the first school of music in New Orleans.
The Ursulines established an orphanage in the convent and one of the first hospitals in New Orleans. They worked in health care, and treated malaria and yellow fever among the slave population. The hospital usually had from thirty to forty patients, most of them soldiers. [5] The first pharmacist in the United States was an Ursuline woman, Sister Francis Xavier, who practiced in New Orleans in the early 1700s.
In 1734 their first building, the three-story half-timber structure, was completed. The unprotected timbers of the colombage construction, however, proved impractical in the humid semi-tropical climate of south Louisiana, with deterioration apparent a dozen years after the building was completed.
In 1745 plans for a new building were laid out, to be constructed adjacent to the existing structure. The first convent was dismantled as the newer one was built, with some of the material reused. This second building was completed in 1751.
It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1966.
The nuns moved to the Ursuline Convent in the 9th Ward of New Orleans in 1823, giving the old French Quarter structure to the city's bishop. The convent premises in the 9th Ward were in turn sold to the city in the 1910s, and the land was used as part of the route for the Industrial Canal. The nuns moved to newer quarters on Nashville Avenue in Uptown New Orleans, where they are still located.
The Ursulines, also known as the Order of Saint Ursula, is an enclosed religious order of women that branched off from the Angelines, also known as the Company of Saint Ursula, in 1572. Like the Angelines, they trace their origins to their foundress Angela Merici and place themselves under the patronage of Saint Ursula. While the Ursulines took up a monastic way of life under the Rule of Saint Augustine, the Angelines operate as a secular institute. The largest group within the Ursulines is the Ursulines of the Roman Union.
Marguerite Bourgeoys, CND, was a French nun and founder of the Congregation of Notre Dame of Montreal in the colony of New France, now part of Québec, Canada.
Ursuline Academy of Dallas is a Catholic college preparatory school for girls located on Walnut Hill Lane, in the area around Preston Hollow in Dallas, Texas, USA. It is not a member of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Dallas since it was founded in 1874, before the foundation of the Diocese of Dallas, making it the oldest school in the city of Dallas.
The Ursuline Monastery of Quebec City was founded by a missionary group of Ursuline nuns in 1639 under the leadership of Mother Marie of the Incarnation, O.S.U. It is the oldest institution of learning for women in North America. Today, the monastery serves as the General Motherhouse of the Ursuline Sisters of the Canadian Union. The community there also operates an historical museum and continues to serve as a teaching centre.
A casquette girl but also known historically as a casket girl or a Pelican girl, was a woman brought from France to the French colonies of Louisiana to marry. The name derives from the small chests, known as casquettes, in which they carried their clothes.
Our Lady of Prompt Succor is a Roman Catholic title of the Blessed Virgin Mary associated with a wooden devotional image of the Madonna and Child enshrined in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States of America. The image is closely associated with Mother Saint Michel, the Superior of the New Orleans Ursulines.
The Congrégation de Notre Dame (CND) is a religious community for women founded in 1658 in Ville Marie (Montreal), in the colony of New France, now part of Canada. It was established by Marguerite Bourgeoys, who was recruited in France to create a religious community in Ville Marie. She developed a congregation for women that was not cloistered; the sisters were allowed to live and work outside the convent. The congregation held an important role in the development of New France, as it supported women and girls in the colony and offered roles for them outside the home.
Ursuline Academy is a private, Catholic, all-girls high school and elementary school in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States. It is located within the Archdiocese of New Orleans and under the trusteeship of the Ursuline Sisters of the New Orleans Community, part of the Ursuline Central Province of North America. Founded in 1727, the Academy is the oldest Catholic school and the oldest school for women in the United States.
Marie-Madeleine de Chauvigny de la Peltrie was a French woman who started the Order of Ursulines of Quebec.
Marie of the Incarnation was an Ursuline nun of the French order. As part of a group of nuns sent to New France to establish the Ursuline Order, Marie was crucial in the spread of Catholicism in New France. She was a religious author and has been credited with founding the first girls’ school in the New World. Due to her work, the Catholic Church declared her a saint, and the Anglican Church of Canada celebrates her with a feast day.
Ursuline Convent was a series of historic Ursuline convents in New Orleans, Louisiana. In 1727, at the request of Governor Étienne Perier, nuns from the Ursuline Convent of Rouen (Normandy) went to New Orleans to found a convent, run a hospital, and take care of educating young girls.
The Madelonnettes Convent was a Paris convent in the 3rd arrondissement of Paris. It was located in what is now a rectangle between 6 rue des Fontaines du Temple, rue Volta and rue du Vertbois, and part of its site is now occupied by the Lycée Turgot. As the Madelonnettes Prison during the French Revolution, its prisoners included the writers the Marquis de Sade and Nicolas Chamfort, the politician Jean-Baptiste de Machault d'Arnouville and the actor Dazincourt.
Rose Philippine Duchesne, RCSJ, was a French religious sister and educator whom Pope John Paul II canonized in 1988. She is the only fully canonized female Roman Catholic saint to share a feast day with the Dedication of Saints Peter and Paul on November 18th. A native of France, she immigrated as a missionary to America, and is recognized for her care and education of Indigenous American survivors of the United States Indian removal programs. Along with the founder, Madeleine-Sophie Barat, she was an early member of the Society of the Sacred Heart, and established the congregation's first communities in the United States. She spent the last half of her life teaching and serving the people of the Midwestern United States, which was at that time considered the western frontier of the nation.
Women letter writers in early modern Europe created lengthy correspondences, where they expressed their intellect and their creativity; in the process, they also left a rich historical legacy.
Ignace François Broutin was a French Chevalier of the Order of St. Louis military officer, commander of Fort Rosalie among the Natchez people, and later an architect and Captain of Engineers of the King in the Province in colonial Louisiana. He is chiefly remembered for designing the Ursuline Convent, completed by 1753 and the oldest and only surviving French colonial building in New Orleans.
Catholic sisters and nuns in Canada have been an important presence since the 17th century.
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.” In March 2022, the NRRO was reporting statistics from 2018, citing the number of professed sisters as 45,100. 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.
Marie-Madeleine Hachard née Hennebont was a French letter writer and abbess of the Ursuline order. She was one of the first members of the first Ursuline Convent in New Orleans in French Louisiana in 1727. Her letters home to her father in France have been preserved, published, and are valued as a source of historical documentation.
Esther Wheelwright, also known as Mère Marie-Joseph de l'Enfant-Jésus, was born in Wells, Massachusetts. Wheelwright was captured during an attack of her village during Queen Anne's War in 1703 by a group of French-Canadians and Wabanaki Indians, or First Nations Peoples. For five years, Wheelwright was raised by the French-allied Catholic Wabanaki, and then was brought to Québec where she was placed in the school of the Ursulines of Québec. She remained there the rest of her life, becoming a choir nun and eventually the Mother Superior of the convent in the immediate aftermath of the 1759 British conquest of Québec. She is notable not only for having lived in three major North American cultures, but also because she was and remains the only foreign-born Mother Superior the Ursulines of Québec have ever elected.
Marie Tranchepain, also known as Marie St. Augustin, was a French woman of the Order of St. Ursula and in 1727 sailed to New Orleans where she became the first Mother Superior of the Old Ursuline Convent. At that time, New Orleans was part of French Louisiana. She established the first school for girls in what is now the United States.