Sisters: Catholic Nuns and the Making of America

by John J. Fialka

Overview

In the 1800s, nuns moved west with the frontier, building hospitals and schools in immigrant communities. They provided aid during the Chicago fire, cared for orphans and prostitutes during the California Gold Rush, and brought professional nursing skills to field hospitals on both sides of the Civil War.

In the 1900s, nuns built the nation's largest private school and hospital systems, and brought the Catholic Church into the Civil Rights movement. As their numbers began to decline in the 1970s, many sisters were forced to take professional jobs as lawyers, probation workers, and hospital executives because their salaries were needed to support older nuns, many of whom lacked a pension system. Currently there are about 65,000 sisters in America, down from 204,000 in 1968. Their median age is sixty-nine.

Nuns became the nation's first cadre of independent, professional women. Some nursed, some taught, and many created and managed new charitable organizations, including large hospitals and colleges. Sweeping in its scope and insight, Sisters reveals the spiritual wealth that these women invested in America.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312325961
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/19/2004
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	682,795
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.86(d)

About the Author

John J. Fialka is a reporter with the Wall Street Journal's Washington bureau. He lives in McLean Virginia.

Editorial Reviews

Fialka recovers . . . those thrilling days of yesteryear when flocks of sisters, many of them, like the men who laid the intercontinental railroad tracks, Irish immigrants, pushed beyond the settled boundaries of the 19th-century America to aid in the civilizing of a continent . . . These earlier nuns were mobile, risk-taking, entrepreneurial women who eventually established the largest private hospital network in the nation and the most extensive private school system in the world.” —Kenneth L. Woodward, The New York Times Book Review

From the Publisher

When Wall Street Journal reporter Fialka set out to tell the story of America's Catholic nuns, he knew he faced a daunting challenge. Church histories contained little about the women he calls "America's first feminists," though they built 800 hospitals and more than 10,000 private schools. Since doing them justice would require volumes, Fialka decided to use one large order, the Sisters of Mercy, as a model, mentioning some of the other 400 communities where appropriate. The approach makes for a well-told history of these remarkable women from the time of their arrival in America in 1790 to the present, when their numbers have dwindled considerably. Fialka's account is rich with anecdotes, many told by the sisters themselves; however, his reporting makes this more than a sentimental history. The author ferrets out statistics and interviews experts to find out why these women have begun to disappear from Catholic life. In his look toward a seemingly bleak future, he includes several hopeful notes, including a chapter about a community in Nashville that is flourishing with its traditional approach to religious life. The product of a Catholic school in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Fialka sprinkles his account with personal recollections and writes sympathetically of a group that often has been maligned and caricatured. Nuns will appreciate his treatment of their lives, as will Catholics pondering a church with diminishing numbers of the women who helped shape it. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

Wall Street Journal reporter Fialka quickly removes stereotypical impressions of Catholic sisters (not monastic "nuns") who played important roles in the development of the United States, largely through unsung service to ordinary people of all backgrounds. Focusing mainly on the Irish-founded Sisters of Mercy, he highlights work with the poor in the New World and the building of major social institutions, generally under extreme duress, in the last two centuries. Thousands of schools and hospitals established by sisters provided much-needed free service and civilizing order within cities and on the frontier. They nursed both North and South during the Civil War and made college students of children others would not teach, all in the face of poverty, bigotry, imperious prelates, racism, and often impossible living conditions. Fialka skillfully and entertainingly balances historical fact with journalistic prose in narrating these dramatic accounts of individual heroines and communities. These stories are finally beginning to be better known through works such as this and the recent Dominicans at Home in a Young Nation, 1785-1865. The documentation here is comprehensive but not overly academic or intrusive. Suitable for public and academic libraries.-Anna M. Donnelly, St. John's Univ., Jamaica, NY Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Wall Street Journal reporter Fialka examines the role played in American society by nuns, who built the nation’s largest private-school and nonprofit-hospital systems.

Focusing primarily on the Sisters of Mercy, Fialka begins his tale in 1780s Dublin with the order’s founder, Catherine McAuley. At age 42, McAuley inherited a fortune from her employer and established a parochial school and a home for servant girls in the best part of Dublin, and, with a small army of volunteers, spent ten years working for the church. At the age of 52, she asked to be accepted into a convent, a move that Fialka notes, "was the equivalent of an army general submitting to marine boot camp." The Mercies, as the order was known, were famous for their humility and vows of poverty. They prayed in the open (a practice previously forbidden) and started schools where there hadn’t been any for generations. In 1843, two years after McAuley’s death, the order was approached by Pittsburgh’s first Catholic bishop, who asked that some of the sisters consider a hardship post on the American frontier. So began the history of the Sisters of Mercy in Chicago, New Orleans, Little Rock, and San Francisco. The author deftly shows the staggering level of involvement of the nuns throughout the fields of education and health care. In a very readable history of the order, the author also covers the current state of the myriad orders. In 1968 there were approximately 180,000 nuns--an all-time high. Today there are fewer than 81,000 nuns in the US, and their average age is 69. Many left their orders during the turbulent 1960s and ’70s, a time when the orders failed to actively recruit new members. The remaining, aging populationhas no retirement fund; traditionally, the younger sisters took care of the older ones. The narrative stumbles a bit at the end, when the reader is introduced to a whirlwind of nuns--all very interesting women, but the necessarily brief profiles begin to blend together.

Overall, though, a bit of good press during the church’s current woes.

Kirkus Reviews