Caring for Chicago's women and girls: the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, 1859-1911.(Special Issue: Women and the City)

In September 1889, one week after Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr opened the doors of Hull-House, the Sisters of the Good Shepherd established the Chicago Industrial School for Girls. This was their second charitable institution in the Windy City. Thirty years earlier, four Irish-born sisters had opened the House of the Good Shepherd. The purpose of the "Magdalen Asylum" or House of the Good Shepherd--its name when incorporated in March 1867--was to reform "abandoned women." Over time the sisters extended their care from women accused of prostitution or disorderly conduct to delinquent and dependent girls.(1)

Although little known outside Catholic circles, the record of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd should not be lost or overshadowed by the achievements of the settlement-house movement. The Sisters of the Good Shepherd, who today shelter battered women with children, built the House of the Good Shepherd to minister to the most despised of Chicago's immigrant poor, while the founders of Hull-House were still only girls themselves. In 1909, when the sisters celebrated a half century of service in Chicago, they took pride in their achievements. The Chicago Industrial School had survived a tumultuous beginning in the 1880s and now prospered on the city's South Side at 49th and Indiana, where 19 sisters cared for about 210 girls. On Chicago's North Side, at the corner of Grace and Racine, 41 sisters provided for over 375 women at the older House of the Good Shepherd.(2) Although change was in the air by 1909, the routines and concerns of those who lived in these two Catholic charities remained firmly rooted in nineteenth-century origins.

BEGINNINGS

The Sisters of the Good Shepherd began their unique ministry on May 20, 1859. Four Irish sisters arrived from their motherhouse in St. Louis and took up residence near St. Patrick's Church on Chicago's West Side in a small frame house, the city's first Magdalen Asylum. Irish-born Father John McMullen earlier had persuaded the Sisters of Mercy, another group of Irish nuns, to open this shelter for "unfortunate females" he had met at the county jail. The Mercy Sisters agreed on condition that within a year they could hand over the Magdalen Asylum to "specialists." The Good Shepherd Sisters took the usual vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, but committed themselves to a fourth vow of zeal, through which they dedicated themselves specifically to the care of wayward, abandoned, and unfortunate girls and women. This vow removed artificial barriers from their work: the sisters could go wherever needed and serve whomever asked for help. The vow of zeal made them both missionaries and caregivers.(3)

The Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd were a semicloistered order with origins in seventeenth-century Prance. There, as in Ireland and later the United States, religious congregations proved especially attractive to young women who sought "a real vocation in life" apart from motherhood. Middle-class, serious women, with ability and ambition, became nuns primarily to serve people in need. Despite their French beginnings, by 1895 the Good Shepherds had 185 convents, most of them in the United States, Ireland, and Britain.(4)

The Chicago Sisters of the Good Shepherd were almost exclusively Irish and Irish American. With few exceptions, a large majority of the professed sisters had Irish parents. The four sisters who came to Chicago in 1859 were Irish-born; in 1910, thirty-three of the forty-one nuns at the House of the Good Shepherd had Irish parents, four had one Irish parent, and ten had been born in Ireland; only one sister had parents both born in the United States. Across town at the Chicago Industrial School, fifteen of nineteen sisters had Irish parents; five of them had been born in Ireland. None had parents who were both born in the United States.(5)

It is common belief that Irish bishops and priests built the Catholic Church in American cities during the nineteenth century. In Chicago, for example, Irish bishops dominated the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century church. From the first bishop, William Quarter, until the death of Archbishop James Quigley in 1915, "all the bishops of Chicago were either Irish-born or of Irish parentage . . . [except] Bishop James Van De Velde, a Belgian who briefly presided over the diocese from 1849 to 1854." Parish priests of Irish heritage were less dominant, but in 1902 they headed 63 of 132 parishes in Chicago.(6) Only recently has it been recognized that the growth of the American Catholic Church relied heavily on the dedicated labors of thousands of nuns, many of whom were also Irish.(7)

It is impossible to know exactly how many Irish women came to the United States during the nineteenth century as sisters or intending to become sisters; it does seem safe to say a minimum of 4,000 or 5,000. It is certain that they all came in groups at the invitation of a bishop, priest, or nun, almost all of whom were Irish. Not all Irish nuns were recruited as adults in Ireland. Many immigrated as children and subsequently entered religious congregations; others joined orders in France or elsewhere in Europe and later found themselves assigned to American missions. Still others, daughters of Irish immigrants, were born in the United States and attended parochial schools often staffed by Irish-born nuns. At some point these young women decided to enter the religious communities that they knew best--those of aunts and cousins, teachers, sodality sponsors, or favorite charities. Despite their different journeys to America and to religious life, these nuns shared an Irish, Catholic heritage.(8)

The first Sisters of the Good Shepherd came to the United States in December 1842 at the invitation of Bishop Benedict Flaget, the first bishop of Kentucky who periodically traveled to France to recruit priests and nuns for his diocese that stretched from the Mississippi to the Alleghenies. Only one was Irish: Sister Mary of St. Joseph Looney, born in County Tipperary and the first English-speaking postulant accepted by the Good Shepherd Sisters at Angers. All five were young, between twenty-four and twenty-nine, and each had responded enthusiastically to the opportunity to become missionaries in America.(9) In 1845, Bishop Flaget welcomed two more sisters from Angers. One, Mother Mary of St. Andrew Corsini O'Rourke, was a native of County Clare, Ireland. Four years later, Bishop Peter Kenrick of St. Louis, Missouri, a Maynooth-educated Dubliner who had come to America from Ireland in 1833, asked Mother St. Andrew to send a small contingent of nuns to his city. In his diocese this "French" community of nuns grew under the leadership of another Irish woman, Mother Mary of St. Francis of Assisi Dwyer. Born in County Tipperary in 1817, she entered the Sisters of the Good Shepherd in London in 1843 and spent two years training in Angers. In 1852 she became superior of the St. Louis convent, which was designated a "provincial house" three years later.(10)

The Sisters of the Good Shepherd ministered to "fallen" or "penitent" women who wished to redeem themselves. In St. Louis, as elsewhere, they neither restricted their efforts to Catholics (although most penitents were) nor limited the length of time or the number of times a woman might seek refuge with them. During the early years of the nuns' ministry in the United States, women came to them voluntarily or were recommended by priests or family members. The majority of the sisters' "children," not surprisingly, were among the most scorned and desolate of Irish immigrants (or later their daughters) who fled to American cities in the wake of the Great Famine during the 1840s and 1850s. Because of them, the nuns knew well the tight link between poverty and prostitution.(11)

As a provincial house, or motherhouse, the Good Shepherd Sisters in St. Louis attracted women who wanted to enter religious life as a kind of "rescue worker." In most instances, these women were Irish immigrants from working-class families, but they were not as destitute as the penitents and certainly not defiled. The Good Shepherds never accepted anyone into the order who had been in their care. These recruits embraced their vocations and created lives of useful service to women less fortunate than themselves. Among them were Margaret and Jane Jackson, siblings born in County Tipperary and nieces of Mother St. Francis, the provincial superior. In 1859, at age twenty-one, Margaret, known as Sister Mary of St. John the Baptist, led three Irish companions to Chicago. Her assistant, Sister Mary of St. Philomene (Mary Kavanaugh), had emigrated from County Carlow when she was ten and,would spend the rest of her life in Chicago.(12)

On the eve of the Civil War, Chicago was less than thirty years old, still in many respects "a cow town knee deep in mud." But it was handsomely situated at the head of Lake Michigan, and a boomtown with promise and prospects to rival St. Louis. During the 1850s its population tripled, pulling people from the eastern United States and immigrants from Ireland, Germany, England, and Scandinavia. Some were skilled, but many were not. The Irish, largely unschooled and unskilled, took jobs where they could get them and made homes for themselves in an endless chain of low, wooden shanties on the city's West Side.(13)

Chicago may have been new and oozing with vitality, but the Irish peasants who came to American cities in the mid-nineteenth century were desperately poor. Driven from their homes, debilitated by disease, and humiliated by the rags on their backs, they arrived without money, contacts, even without shoes. In Chicago, jobs for men were "irregular, seasonal, dangerous, unhealthy, and often badly paid." Women had an even harder time. The unemployed, widowed, and sick filled poorhouses and prisons. During the spring of 1859, the matron of the City Bridewell reported that there were "between forty and fifty women in the prison" and that thirty-seven of them were Irish and Catholic.(14) It was for these unfortunates that the Sisters of the Good

Shepherd came to Chicago. Unlike New York City where the indomitable Archbishop "Dagger John" Hughes initially refused to allow them to open a Magdalen Asylum, Bishop James Duggan welcomed them and contributed financially to their ministry. Although he had studied in Ireland, he was ordained in St. Louis in 1847 and twelve years later installed as the fourth bishop of Chicago. He knew this "devoted sisterhood" and their "heroic charity" from St. Louis, and during the spring and summer of 1859 Bishop Duggan encouraged Father McMullen's fund-raising effort, "An Appeal to the Citizens of Chicago, in Behalf of the Magdalen Asylum."(15)

Prior to this citywide appeal, Father McMullen had literally begged door to door for food and other necessities. Chicagoans responded generously, but the small house occupied by the nuns and their charges was embarrassingly crowded. The Chicago Tribune granted that "providing a place of residence for a class of unfortunates and erring women" was a "worthy" cause, but the editors criticized the "sectarian" nature of the charity--one "wholly under the care of a particular denomination." Nevertheless, Mayor John C. Haines and city father William B. Ogden (neither one a Catholic) each donated $100, matching Bishop Duggan's generous gift. Duggan told Mother St. John the Baptist to select a site on which to build, and she chose the corner of Market and Hill streets (north of downtown, near today's Cabrini Green public housing project).(16)

It is not clear why Mother St. John the Baptist chose to move the House of the Good Shepherd away from downtown. She may have been looking for a quieter, cleaner, and more secluded place. Between 1850 and 1870, a number of Chicago's churches separated themselves from the downtown commercial development. In 1859 Bishop Duggan designated Holy Name Church, on the north side of the Chicago River, as the cathedral. Perhaps because the Magdalen Asylum did not belong to any one parish, Mother St. John the Baptist also hoped to strengthen the position of the House of the Good Shepherd in Chicago.(17)

These prospects went up in smoke the morning of August 15, 1859, when a fire completely destroyed the frame building under construction. Father McMullen suspected arson, having received complaints and threats from North Siders opposed to the location of the Magdalen Asylum. Their objections that depraved women did not deserve special care, nor should it be given in their neighborhood resembled those registered against the asylum when it first …