CCHA, Historical Studies, 66 (2000), 9-33
Sisters of Service: Breaking Free
of the Monastic Tradition To Serve the Abandoned Ones
Jeanne
R. Beck
As a particular field within
the discipline of Canadian history, women’s organizations have only recently
been accepted as a topic of major research importance. Even more rare was any
extensive study of women’s work within the structures of the major religious
denominations. As Ruth Compton Brouwer has pointed out, even historians who
were committed to women’s history gave these women little attention, unless
their involvement with religion served “as a way-station on the road to
feminist consciousness. Personal spirituality and transcendent concerns have
been largely overlooked along with forms of religious activism that did not
necessarily bear fruit in a larger sphere for women.”1
Until
recently, this neglect has been particularly apparent in the study of women in
Roman Catholic religious orders in Canada. Again, Brouwer’s analysis can be
applied for she has also noted that in a period when feminist historians have
associated organized religion with patriarchal and repressive structures of
authority, little encouragement was given to the historian who wanted to
investigate the role and personnel of women’s religious orders.
An equally important reason
for the dearth of these studies has been the inaccessibility of the extensive
and valuable resources in the archives which are privately controlled by
Catholic dioceses and religious orders. In Canada, the orders themselves have
not until very recently, examined their records as sources of information which
could reveal their relationship with the secular world. Yet, when access to
their archives was granted to a few secular historians, new information and new
casts of characters have emerged which have resulted in fuller and more
accurate explanations not only regarding religious history, but also in the
fields of Canadian social, political, and educational history.2
It is within this context that
I, as a secular historian whose previous research was focused on the origins of
Canadian Catholic social thought and action, welcomed the opportunity to write
the biography of Sister Catherine Donnelly, S.O.S., a farm girl from Alliston,
Ontario and the founder in 1922 of the Sisters of Service, the first
English-speaking Canadian Catholic women’s religious order. She has recently
been cited as one of “the Top Ten people who helped shape the church in
Canada,” who was inspired to found an order that would “break the mould [which]
required religious women to wear distinctive habits and live removed from
society under a strict rule.”3
The majority of the sources
for this paper were located during research for my recent biography of
Catherine Donnelly. Her papers and related documents are in the private
archives of the Sisters of Service, to which I was given full access. Members
of the order were privately interviewed, and several sisters wrote revealing
memoirs of their novitiates and of their subsequent personal encounters with
Catherine Donnelly. Relevant papers were also secured from the private archives
of several other religious orders and dioceses. Altogether, these hitherto
private sources provided information on previously unrecognized people and
events in twentieth-century Canadian religious and secular history.
Many of Catherine Donnelly’s
private papers were lost during her long life of ninety-nine years. She appears
not to have kept a formal journal; thus the most important information
concerning her youth and career must be gleaned from her casual references in
letters recovered from her friends, both secular and religious, her family, and
from the several short essays on her early life and career which she wrote
following her retirement in 1956. Her handwritten charts which listed in detail
all of the schools where she taught between 1902 and 1956, and Ecumenism
Blossoms, her eighty-seven page memoir on her purpose and role in founding
the Sisters of Service, have survived. Catherine never lost her remarkable
memory nor her professional teacher’s concern for accuracy and careful punctuation.
Her lively narratives contain no contradictions or ambiguities, and her factual
details of her family, her teaching career, school inspectors, and priests she
encountered are confirmed by the public records.
Catherine Donnelly’s story
begins with the emigration in 1846 from Armagh, Ireland to Canada of her
grandfather Hugh, his wife Mary Ann, and infant son Hugh. They settled on a
fifty-acre farm in a small Irish Catholic enclave in Adjala Township, Simcoe
County, fifty miles north of Toronto and four miles west of Alliston, where the
first Irish settlers in the district had arrived in 1820. By the 1880s the
local population was almost evenly split between Catholics and Protestants. The
Adjala population was unique in that unlike many Ontario settlements, walls of
suspicion and hostility had not divided the two Christian groups into
antagonistic factions. Although religious affiliation was an important personal
identifying factor, Catholics and Protestants mingled socially, cooperated in
local civic and farming projects, and were mutually supportive in hard times.4
Catherine later declared that this harmony was an important and lasting
influence on her spiritual development, and convinced her never to confine her
social and professional life only to the Catholic community. Nettie and Amy
Wright, daughters of the local Anglican rector, “were at the Alliston School
with me and were my best friends. ... They were truly Christians of a very
noble type.”5 She
concluded that “this positive approach to society” resulted in “a big share of
kindness from such God-fearing lovable Characters provided by my Creator. In my
childhood neighbors who were Methodists or Orangemen, had been the best mutual
co-workers for good.”6
Money was scarce in the
Donnelly family for father Hugh was the sole support of his aged mother, his
wife, and their seven children, as well as his niece and nephew. Catherine was
born on 18 February 1884, and only she and her two younger sisters, Teresa
(Tess) and Mary (Mamie), survived childhood. The girls learned domestic skills
from their mother, but Catherine, the fun-loving tomboy who loved animals,
preferred the gardening work outdoors. Her father “very strictly” taught her
to ride and to care for and train horses, skills for which he was locally
highly regarded.7 The
three sisters were also taught their religion by their “strong-minded, deeply
religious and self-less mother.”8 “Our
country church at North Adjula had a priest who came faithfully for Sunday low
Mass and that was it. There was no choir, no contact with religious Orders.
They were all in far-away Toronto.”9
There was no separate school
in the district and Catherine and her sisters attended Meadowvale, a one-room
public elementary school one mile from the farm. One teacher taught every
subject to the eight grades of children, who were of several religious
denominations. Catherine always maintained that this lack of religious
segregation throughout her schooling was a great advantage to her. She was a
sociable child who made friends easily and learned at an early age to fit in
comfortably with groups outside the Catholic milieu.10 The religious harmony among her own friends and in the
community life around Alliston provided the spiritual grounding for her
life-long support of ecumenism, which she believed should be based on a mutual
respect for others’ beliefs without the pressure of seeking a formal structural
union of separate religious groups. Catherine’s personal spirituality was not
fueled by an abstract mysticism; it was the beauty of the natural world, and
the love and faithfulness she experienced in people and animals that confirmed
her belief in the transcendent.11
In the nineteenth century,
few farm children were able to obtain secondary education. Catherine was
fortunate in that her parents supported her early ambition to be a
teacher and arranged for her to board in Alliston to attend high school until
she received her grade XI leaving certificate. This qualified her to attend the
fourteen-week course at the Bradford Model School which earned her a three-year
interim elementary certificate. Her recommendation from the principal stated,
“Seldom have I met a student as diligent and attentive as Miss Donnelly. Her
work in every respect is eminently satisfactory. In teaching she is diligent,
pains-taking intelligent and thorough. ... It is with the greatest pleasure
and confidence I recommend her to the favorable consideration of School
Trustees.”12
In 1902 at age seventeen she
was hired by the nearby Bandon Board to teach in their one room school at an
annual salary of $375. Two years later, encouraged by the good reports of her
inspector Rev. Thomas McKee, she enrolled in the one-year Normal School course
in Toronto to qualify for her permanent teaching certificate. She was recalled
home by her father in May 1905 to a disastrous crisis. Her mother who had been
ailing for many months, had been diagnosed with tuberculosis, and was not
expected to live long. In the emergency, William Scott, the principal of the
Normal School, waved her final examinations, and granted the teaching
certificate on her excellent year’s work.13
Career plans were in abeyance
as Catherine nursed her mother and kept the house and the farm going for her
father and two sisters. Before her mother’s death in November, Catherine
promised her she would see that her sisters were educated so that they could
support themselves. The heavily mortgaged farm was sold and the family moved
to Alliston in April so that Tess and Mamie could attend high school. With the
farm gone, twenty-one year old Catherine became the family’s main support as
her father, now aged sixty, did not work permanently again.
For the next twelve years
Catherine taught in fifteen public schools in rural central Ontario,14 often replacing teachers who left mid-year. She moved
frequently, always seeking a larger salary as even an extra payment of
twenty-five dollars a year was needed for the family. Her own employment charts
for Ontario listed two schools in Adjala township, Galt, Apto, Forester’s
Falls, Killarney, Heidelberg, Belmore, Chepstow, Manley, Creemore, New
Liskeard, Merriton, Caledon, and Penetanguishene. She rarely worked for
Separate School Boards as their salaries were considerably less than the Public
School Boards, and they preferred to hire teaching sisters whom they paid even
less than their female lay teachers.
Catherine enjoyed her roving
life for she was ambitious and adventurous and enjoyed the challenge of new
schools and towns. Some of her family responsibility was lifted in January 1907
when her sister Tess, whom she had enrolled in St. Joseph’s Academy in Toronto,
ran away to New York City where she entered Mount Sinai Hospital to fulfill her
ambition to become a nurse.15 A few years later Catherine paid for Mamie to attend St.
Joseph’s Academy where she graduated with her senior high school certificate,
and the following year she boarded her there while she attended Normal School.
Thus Mamie had completed her permanent teaching certification before she began
to teach in a Toronto Separate school in 1915.
Catherine reached the apex of
her career in Ontario in 1916 when she was appointed teaching principal of the
nine-room, 350-student Penetanguishene elementary school. Her salary was $850
per annum. This town was one of the few places in Ontario where the Education
Act declared that the Public School was the Roman Catholic school because the
majority of the town ratepayers were of that faith. By 1918 Catherine’s salary
had been raised to $925 annually, making her one of the highest paid women
teachers in Ontario, well above the average wage of $580 earned by female
teachers in rural areas, where male teachers earned $686 per annum. She found
it a professional challenge to be in charge of a large school and she liked the
picturesque town with its magnificent St. Ann’s Catholic church, which she
attended faithfully every Sunday. Her strict no nonsense form of discipline was
lightened with a merry sense of humour, and a sincere love of children. Her
inspector had declared her to be “one of the best teachers in North Simcoe.”16
It all ended abruptly on May
20th 1918 when Archbishop McNeil requested the Community of St.
Joseph in Toronto to send four sisters to take charge of the Penetanguishene
Public (Catholic) School in the coming September. The Community’s Council
agreed provided the following conditions were met:
1. Each Sister to receive
$500.00 per annum.
2. The Community to be
provided with a furnished home free of charge.
3. That the house be put
in a state of good repair, the heating made satisfactory, and two additional
rooms built at the rear to do service as Kitchen and laundry. The house is to
be only an arrangement for a year or so until a suitable residence can be
built, 17
Thus, although the Sisters of St. Joseph would work for lower wages, the
Order insisted on living quarters which enabled them to live a semi-cloistered
life of strictly controlled privacy as stipulated in their Constitutions.18
Catherine was disappointed at
being displaced and handed in her resignation, accepting the Board’s action as
one of the ever-present disadvantages for laywomen who worked for Catholic
School Boards. She considered her next move. Although her father was still
dependent on her support, her sisters were now settled in their own careers. In
1917 Mamie had entered the Community of St. Joseph and was now Sister Justina
CSJ. In temperament she had always been markedly different from Catherine; a
gentle, reflective, passive, and earnestly religious little girl, who during
her adolescence had yearned to join a religious order. Adventurous Tess had
joined the nursing staff at Sinai Hospital after graduation, and having
recently joined the American Medical Corps, was now nursing the wounded in
France.
The school inspector, Mr.
Garvin, told Catherine that she was not likely to get as good a school anywhere
in Ontario as Penetanguishene.19 Teachers were needed in the rural areas of Western
Canada where in the decade before the war, thousands of Central Europeans had
arrived to take up land in the three prairie provinces. The dearth of teachers
was particularly acute in the isolated rural districts away from the conveniences
of the cities. The western public school boards would welcome an experienced
teacher; and they often paid higher salaries. Catherine’s friend Mary O’Connor,
who had also been displaced by the arrival of the St. Joseph teachers, decided
to join her in seeking work in the west.
There were offered several
positions and by August they had selected two one-room rural schools five
miles apart near the town of Stettler, Alberta, in the beautiful ranch country
east of Red Deer. Catherine was delighted to board at the Claey ranch where
the owner kindly loaned her a horse for her transportation to school and the
nearest hamlet, Erskine, seven miles away. Mary also found a room at a ranch
house near her school. They were taken on tours of the area and soon observed
that most of the well-established farmers and ranchers nearby were Protestant
immigrants from Britain, but there were enclaves further away from these
settlements where recent immigrants from the Ukraine, Poland, and Germany were
struggling to establish homesteads. The majority of these had been nominally Catholic
but there was no Catholic church or Separate School in the district. An
itinerant priest on his infrequent visits to the area would say Mass at the
private chapel in the house of a local French Canadian rancher. Catherine and
Mary were invited, and did attend, but they noticed that no aid, spiritual,
medical, or social was available from the diocese for the poor immigrants. They
were told that this was typical of many of the rural districts, and it
disturbed them that “few of the Catholics got to mass regularly and many had
become quite indifferent ... .It was easy for us to notice the dearth of
religious knowledge among the children and youth in general.”20
Both women had settled well
into their schools and were making friends with their hospitable employers
when, at the end of November 1918, all schools were abruptly ordered closed by
the Alberta government. Soldiers returning from the trenches in France after
the Armistice had brought the Spanish Influenza into Alberta. So lethal that it
could kill within three days, it had spread like a prairie wildfire from the
cities to the countryside. “The young couple who had the private church on
their ranch both died after a few days illness, also a stock buyer whom we knew
well and whose wife was a nurse.”21 The government requested the teachers in the farming
districts to volunteer to aid the stricken farm families who lived far from
medical aid and neighbors. Catherine and Mary, who had both taken a St. John’s
Ambulance course, spent the next two months nursing the sick at their farms. It
was a frightening, exhausting, soul-shaking experience. “In the homes of the
Flu victims the utter lack of religion, the regard for material things only
shocked us. All that fall we faced the possibility of death for our patients
and for ourselves too. ... I came to wonder if mere teaching gave me a full
enough life. I looked back on what seemed to me years lacking in seriousness.”22 Their observations of the crushing poverty of the poor
settlers and of others who were indifferent to their religion under any
circumstances made them conclude that “the spiritual condition in the homes was
like a barren place, a Godless foreign country.”23
Catherine did not blame the
people for their obsession with their material prosperity. She blamed her
church for having concentrated its resources on the urban population with the
result that “although the cities had many priests and many different kinds of
religious communities, there were none for the country places.”24 She could not help but contrast her church’s policy with
that of the major Protestant denominations which in the same period of high
immigration had spent millions on missionary and social work in rural Western
Canada.
Catherine’s second major
concern was the scarcity of educational facilities for rural children of any
religious persuasion. The Catholic immigrants were too poor to fund Separate
schools and unlike Ontario, the western provinces did not give grants for
Separate elementary education. The few teachers who did venture into the public
schools in the isolated areas did not stay long; they were defeated by the
poverty, the loneliness, and the harsh living conditions in the immigrant
settlements. Catherine recognized that these were future Canadian citizens who
were in danger of becoming an illiterate generation, who would have no knowledge
of Canadian history and political traditions, or the Christian sources of their
society’s moral values. She was very patriotic and believed that both of these
were the essential foundation stones on which to build an enduring Canada. As she
pondered this situation her disquiet increased. Was it her duty as a Catholic
to try to remedy the situation? How effective could one person be when many
workers were needed? Should she join a religious order and persuade its members
to undertake teaching in the isolated rural schools of western Public School
systems? Teaching Sisters do not leave their schools because of
discouragement or marriage and this would bring stability to a community’s
school. Did she even have a vocation? If she did, who would look after her
father, whose health was failing and who still required moral and financial
support? She decided to seek the advice of a priest.
She left Erskine for Calgary
in January 1919 and was hired by the Calgary Separate School Board as principal
of the Sacred Heart School. She soon became acquainted with Fr. William
Cameron, a brilliant and popular fellow principal to whom she confided her
dilemma. Her sincerity and zeal to help relieve the spiritual and physical
poverty she had seen convinced him that she had a vocation, and he advised her
to join an established teaching order, such as the Community of St. Joseph at
Peterborough, Ontario. He had heard that they might come to Calgary to teach
and perhaps they might be persuaded to support her plans for a new type of
rural ministry.
After her father’s death in
December 1919, Catherine, free of family obligations for the first time in
fourteen years, sought an interview with the Mother General of the Peterborough
Community. It was a disaster. After listening to her plans the Mother General
stated that “she did not think I should be accepted into their Community.”25
Catherine had never
considered entering any religious order because she had had little direct
contact with them. She was not cognizant of their theology of obedience; she
only knew that the sisters’ dress, deportment, and lifestyle were strictly
controlled. She had always planned her own career, and as she was a sociable
person with many friends, male and female, she enjoyed the freedom to attend
social affairs in the communities where she worked. She did not understand why
her vision of being part of the solution to the immigrant’s problems was
rejected. Considerably deflated “tired and discouraged I was in tears the whole
way back to Toronto.”26
She decided to consult Fr.
Arthur Coughlan CSsR, the Provincial of the Redemptorists, whom she had once
consulted on a personal family problem. His order was working with Ukrainians
in Yorkton Saskatchewan, and he was well acquainted with the problems of the
Catholic Church in Western Canada.27 He too was impressed with Catherine’s energy and
passionate concern for the poor immigrants. He also agreed with Fr. Cameron
that working alone in the west was not the way to alleviate this serious
omission in the Church’s ministry. She should apply to the Community of St.
Joseph in Toronto as they were the most likely of the women’s orders to
consider opening a western rural mission.
When Catherine was received
as a Postulant of the Order in July 1920, she was utterly unprepared for the
type of training she would experience in this probationary period. After
seventeen years as an independent career woman, she undertook to be obedient to
a Holy Rule which would govern forever every aspect of her life. Obedience
meant that “Sisters are obliged under pain of sin to obey when the Superiors
command in virtue of the vow of Holy Obedience.”28 Obedience was defined as the complete surrender of her
will to God as expressed through the orders of her Novice Mistress and Mother
Superior.29 Permission had to be humbly requested for the
slightest deviation from their rigid daily schedule, and designated periods of
silence were to be meticulously observed. “Particular friendships” between
Sisters were “faults opposed to charity” and against the Rule.30
Catherine was not allowed to
see Sister Justina, as Postulants were isolated from the professed sisters as
well as from the world. Removed from their former practices of work, prayer,
and social relations, they were in the process of being re-oriented into
religious life so that in six months they would be worthy to be clothed with
the Holy Habit, and received as Novices into the Community of St. Joseph.
Catherine complied with these
regulations, but she also spoke openly about her own plans to be a teaching
sister in the rural Public Schools in Western Canada. She noted that the
Community’s present religious habit, as described in the Constitutions
must have a black floor length skirt two yards wide, a broad white linen
guimpe, a white cornet joined under the chin, and white band across the
forehead, on top of which were two layers of black veil extending six inches
below the elbow, over the twelve-inch wide black sleeves which extended to the
end of her hand, was an impractical garment for the spartan conditions teachers
presently encountered in the dusty and muddy prairie settlements. She felt too
that its severity would cause a breach between her and the people she hoped to
serve. To express these opinions were serious offenses against the Holy Rule.
Sisters under obedience were forbidden to express their preferences on the
location or the type of work which would be assigned to them by the Mother
Superior, and the Constitutions stated that “it is strictly forbidden to make
any changes in the religious habit without the permission of the Holy See.”31 Despite a severe reprimand, Catherine did not cease her
campaign for a western rural assignment. Six weeks before the end of her postulancy
she was told she was not being accepted into the Order, and to leave
immediately.
It was a bitter, humiliating
blow. In her determination to serve the poor, it had not occurred to her that
she might be found unsuitable to be a St. Joseph Sister. On 20 December 1920,
she tearfully told Fr. Coughlan that she had been rejected. To her surprise he
laughed, and commented, “I guess you talked too much about the West. You ought
to start a community of your own.”32 In her many Memoirs which mention this conversation,
Catherine declared it as the moment of birth for the Sisters of Service. Fr.
Coughlan had perceived that her solution for reaching the immigrant population
of Canada was so revolutionary that none of the women’s religious orders then
working in Canada would be able to consider them.
Fr. Coughlan arranged for a
series of discussions among the Archbishop of Toronto, Neil McNeil, Catherine
Donnelly, and himself, as according to Canon Law new religious orders must
first obtain the approval of the local bishop.33 Catherine presented the ideas which she had now worked
out as a feasible plan for a new order. First, drawing on her experience of
making her own living by teaching in rural Public schools in Ontario and the
West, she declared that, “we could … use the conditions just as they existed
and develop a teaching Order for the rural West of Canada. Like St. Paul, we
could earn our own living and have rural public schools for anchor holds. There
were many with teacherages attached. Thus our living quarters would be
supplied. Father Coughlan and the Archbishop took to this idea
enthusiastically.”34 The Archbishop suggested that some health work be
included as, “People approve of health work even if done by nuns ... Other
rural endeavour could be anything to help families, provide clothing, medicine,
encouragement, guidance and thus come under the head of social work.”35
At Catherine’s suggestion the
Order was called The Sisters of Service, for as teachers, nurses, and social
workers, they were to be an active missionary order committed to alleviate the
poverty of body and spirit of the most abandoned souls, with a special mission
to immigrants. All agreed that they would not undertake any large urban
apostolates, such as orphanages, hospitals, or private schools in which the
established women’s orders were already involved. Sisters of Service would
live singly if necessary, or in small groups in hamlets and at cross-roads in
the sparsely settled areas.
At subsequent meetings the
three made several other important decisions which would identify the new
religious order as one which had broken free from the monastic restrictions
which had previously been applied in varying degrees, to all women’s orders.
The net effect of these traditional rules had been to curtail the religious
orders’ involvement with and accessibility to the secular world. In contrast,
the Sisters of Service would offer their lives to God by taking the traditional
vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, but be committed to living and working
among the laity, unrestricted by rules of even semi-enclosure. This freedom
would increase the Order’s opportunities for mission among non-Catholics as
well as bolster the faith of those who had lapsed because their needs had been
neglected.
Catherine declared that as a
first step, the sister’s long voluminous habit must be abandoned as being too
impractical, and too conspicuous a sign of the barrier between them and the
laity. Both clerics agreed and Archbishop McNeil even suggested that Sisters of
Service wear no distinguishing dress. Then they concluded that a recognizable
uniform was a practical necessity because the Vatican would demand it, and it
would be more economical to provide all the sisters with a simple dress, coat
cloak, and small hat in a current style. Their clothing could be altered by the
Order if fashion changed and the wearer became oddly conspicuous. The
substitution of a hat for the traditional elaborate headdress would be more
economical, remove a visible symbol of the sisters’ separation from society,
and also make it unnecessary to cut off their hair. The religious insignia of
the Order would be a small, simple silver cross on a slender chain inscribed
“We Have Come To Serve,” which could be removed or tucked inside their dress,
if circumstances such as teaching in public schools required that no official
religious insignia be worn in the classrooms.
The Sisters of Service would
continue to use their own Christian and family names instead of receiving a new
religious name when they took their vows. “They were careful to avoid anything
which might be a barrier. Requesting strangers to address them by a Saint’s
name might prove to be such…to those not of the Catholic faith.36
In their discussions on
community lifestyle, Catherine insisted that there would be no extreme form of
penance or fasting, or very early rising hours ( i.e. before 6 a.m.) which
would endanger health and contribute to fatigue on the job. When the local
people at the mission needed help, the sisters could go to their houses alone
and even remain overnight in their homes if they felt it was necessary.37
Fr. Coughlan summed up the
objectives and methods of the new order in a letter to the priest who was to be
appointed by him with the approval of Archbishop McNeil, to be the clerical
director of the Sisters of Service. “They were to do educational, medical and
social work among the poor in Western Canada, particularly the foreign-born.
... Modern conditions will require a modification of the usual rules and customs
of ordinary religious orders. For example, we think the nuns should not have a
special religious habit but dress ordinarily. They would have to go by twos
into lonely settlements and be deprived of Mass and Holy Communion for a long
period etc. What we need now is money and candidates.”38
Money was now of primary
importance as canon law decreed that “no religious house may be erected unless
it can be prudently estimated that it will be able to provide suitably for the
habitation and maintenance of its members from its own resources, or from
habitual alms, or otherwise.”39 Catherine herself contributed her savings of $2,000;
Archbishop McNeil contributed some personal funds, but said that the
debt-ridden Archdiocese of Toronto had no money to spare, and. a large sum was
required to launch a new order. He persuaded the Catholic Women’s League to
contribute $6,000 annually until the order was established, and was also
successful in a personal appeal to Theresa Korman Small, a wealthy Toronto
widow.40 Fr. Coughlan was delegated by McNeil to be his
clerical overseer of the Sisters of Service. Such supervision would be
necessary until enough women had entered the order to ensure its continuance.
The bishop would then instruct the sisters to elect their own Sister General
(the title selected for the head of the Sisters of Service), and a Council to
advise her. This could take many years, and Coughlan soon realized that his
responsibilities as Provincial of his own order would leave him no time for
such a big task. McNeil and Catherine agreed with Coughlan’s proposal that the
administrative responsibility for the new order be delegated to Fr. George Daly
CSsR, whom he described as an experienced, energetic, and able priest.
During the early years of a
new Order all its Postulants and Novices must be trained by a senior sister of
a well established religious order. McNeil asked Catherine to chose which order
he should ask to provide a Novice Mistress to train her and the three other
women who had applied to join the Sisters of Service. Catherine asked for the
Community of St. Joseph at Toronto. In spite of her previous bad experience,
she had admired Sister Avila, her former Novice Mistress, and she knew that
Sister Justina would be pleased. The training would have to be according to the
Constitution of that Community for that was the Rule their Novice Mistress was
vowed to keep, and the Sisters of Service Constitutions would not be ready for
presentation to Rome for several years. It was decided this training would take
place in the Sisters of Service own Motherhouse, as yet non-existent. Finding
a suitable building for the order’s headquarters would be one of Fr.
Daly’s first tasks.
In January 1922 fifty-year
old Fr. Daly was instructed to leave his post at the CSsR. mission in St. John,
New Brunswick, to become the priest administrator and director of the Sisters
of Service in Toronto. Born in Quebec of French-Canadian Irish parentage, he
was bilingual, and from age fifteen until his ordination at age twenty-five he
had studied at the Redemptorist seminary in Belgium. He had worked in parishes
in Quebec City and Montreal, and for three years was the rector of the
Cathedral in Regina where he had become acquainted with the short-comings of
the Catholic Church in the Canadian West. An extroverted, energetic man with
many influential friends both lay and clerical, he was eager to undertake this
unusual assignment. He too had tried to introduce changes in his own religious
order to make it more effective in the Canadian milieu and had been rebuffed.
Catherine was introduced to him shortly after he arrived in Toronto and had
been impressed with his sincerity and enthusiasm. She felt that he was “a very
intelligent, zealous and capable priest.”41
First, Daly asked the Western
Canadian bishops if they would welcome this new order into their dioceses. Most
responded cordially and two requested that they be sent the first sisters as
soon as they had completed their novitiate. Immediately he launched a big
fund-raising campaign and also advertised in Catholic papers for qualified
teachers and nurses to join the Sisters of Service. With the funds supplied by
Mrs. Small, he bought a large old mansion suitable for a Motherhouse in Rosedale
central Toronto. The Catholic Women’s League undertook to furnish it in time
for the dedication.
Mother General Victoria CSJ
selected Sister Lidwina CSJ to be the Novice Mistress of the new order. For six
years she had been the Mother Superior of the order’s convent as well as the
music teacher of the separate school in Prince Rupert, British Columbia. It was
her first appointment to the position of Novice Mistress and she would become
known for her own conscientious adherence to the St. Joseph’s Holy Rule which
she earnestly tried to impress on the sisters in her charge.
In a simple ceremony
conducted by Archbishop McNeil during the first Mass in the newly created
chapel of the Motherhouse on the 15th of August 1922, Catherine and
three others were accepted as Postulants in the Sisters of Service. Although
this date was announced as the official founding date of the order, Sister
Lidwina did not appear to have been told of Catherine’s great contribution to
its unique character and purpose. Fr. Daly set up his office in the Motherhouse
and increased his speaking engagements in order to appeal for more funds.42 He also found time to buy a 100-yard bolt of plain grey
wool serge for the SOS uniforms; and interview all applicants to the order.
Many of these he regretfully turned down because they were not in good health
and he sensed they would be unable to stand the rigors of life in the frontier
settlements. In addition to this administrative work, he also played a large
role in the sisters’ spiritual formation through his instructive talks and
sermons.
Catherine was upset to learn
in April 1923 that with Archbishop McNeil’s agreement, Fr. Daly had purchased
the house next door to the Motherhouse to be used as a women’s hostel. Rooms at
a reasonable rent would be offered to immigrant working girls and the home
would be staffed by Sisters of Service. Catherine confided to Fr. Coughlan,
who had been appointed the Order’s Spiritual Director, that this was opposite
to the order’s declared purpose to work with the rural poor. He later reported
to Catherine that Daly’s response to her objection was that “he will not be
guided by the opinions of a woman.”43 The hostel on Wellesley Place was the first of many
similar city houses for hostels which Daly would eventually purchase between
Halifax and Vancouver.
Catherine experienced one
serious crisis at the end of her first Novitiate year, when she was eligible to
be sent out on a mission. She was informed by Sister Lidwina that she was being
posted to an Indian School in the Diocese of Winnipeg. Catherine, realizing the
directive had come from Fr. Daly, said firmly, “No, I will not go that is not
our work,” and explained that the Sisters of Service were founded to work with
the immigrants who had been neglected by the Church in the outlying
settlements. Other Catholic women’s orders were already working with the Indian
people and she had understood that the Order was not to duplicate their
efforts.44 Sr. Lidwina was displeased, and a coldness
developed in their relations which lasted many years. The records do not
indicate that Catherine was reprimanded by the clergy for her bold stance, but
she ceased to be consulted by the clergy on the Order’s future development.
Catherine’s protest did have
some influence, as the following year Sr. Lidwina informed her that the same
Archbishop was now requesting three sisters to teach and nurse in an immigrant
community on Lake Winnipeg. As soon as she and Sister Catherine Wymbs, a
nurse, had taken their vows, which was in a few weeks, they would leave for
Camp Morton, Manitoba. Catherine was thrilled that at age forty, she had achieved
her goal. She would be part of the Church’s new thrust into the poor immigrant
settlements in the hinterlands of Canada.
At the Mass celebrated by
Archbishop McNeil on the 2nd of August 1924, Catherine took her vows
and became known officially as the First Sister of Service. At the reception
afterward McNeil asked that the Order’s official Annals record
that day’s events. “The first thing I want recorded is ... that the founders of
the Sisters of Service are Rev. Fathers Arthur Coughlan and George Daly. I have
cooperated, the St. Joseph Sisters have cooperated, but the founders are really
Fathers Coughlan and Daly. I want this entered in the Annals.”45 Sister Catherine Donnelly’s vision for founding their
order was not mentioned, and she would remain silent about her contribution
for many years.
Camp Morton was a former
children’s camp on the shores of Lake Winnipeg, and Archbishop Sinnott of
Winnipeg said the three sisters would live in a two-room cabin until a larger
house 26 x 34 ft. could be built. It was the first of many missions in the west
where the Sisters of Service would arrive to find they had to live in poor,
partially completed, ill-equipped buildings as bleak and crowded as those of
the people they served. In spite of
these physical
Catherine
Donnelly SOS. August 1924
Leaving
for Camp Morton, MB, for the First SOS
Mission
(Courtesy
Sisters of Service Archives)
hardships,
the Camp Morton mission was a great success. The clinic run by Sister Wymbs and
her successors was urgently required in the farming community where accidents
happened frequently and the hospital was many miles away. The two one-room
public schools located six miles from Camp Morton provided education for the
children of the Polish, German, and Ukrainian settlers in the district. The
sisters revitalized the community through their enthusiasm, expert teaching in
the schools, special festivals at the church, and the open-door policy they
maintained at their little house. A succession of sisters continued to work at
the mission for over sixty years.46
Setting
out for School from Camp Morton, 1924-1926
(Courtesy
of Sisters of Service Archives)
Catherine’s original plan for a religious order which would be supported by the
salaries of teachers and other professionals did not work out, partly because
during the Depression, teaching jobs were not plentiful as bankrupt communities
could not pay their teachers salaries. But the main reason was that the few of
the women who joined the order had professional training. Many had been unable
to complete secondary school because of family financial problems. Some of the
parish clergy were uncertain and even disapproving of the Orders’ new
unorthodox ways and advised educated young women who had religious vocations to
join the traditional teaching and nursing orders. Thus during the Depression,
the revenue from the SOS women’s hostels often exceeded that received from the
salaries of the professional sisters.
The
Teacherage at Diomand Coolee School, Bergfield, SK. 1938
(Courtesy
Sisters of Service Archives)
Daly very skillfully used the home-making and people skills of the lesser
educated women whom he assigned to the city hostels. Hostels were located in
Vancouver, Edmonton, Regina, Winnipeg, Toronto, and Halifax, and the sisters in
charge developed support programmes for many of the young immigrant women who
were working in the cities. Catherine’s main objection to the hostels was that
paying off their mortgages drained the Order of funds which she felt would have
been better spent on the chronically under-funded rural ministry, and on
further education for the hostel sisters. She believed that the Order’s
survival could best be assured by having sisters engaged with society as
trained workers in the helping professions. With this expertise the sisters
could also work in the parishes as partners with the clergy in a common cause
rather than as subordinates. She never campaigned for women’s ordination, but
she felt strongly that their opinions should be respected and their
professional expertise used by the clergy with whom they worked.
Catherine was sent from Camp Morton to Vilna, Alberta in 1926 to teach and open
another mission in another needy community. From then on she and the other
teaching and nursing sisters in the order undertook assignments in the most
desolate areas in the west. In spite of their efforts, a few missions were
unsuccessful and had to be closed. But the majority succeeded in raising the
people’s quality of living at both a spiritual and physical level. Some of the
hostel sisters also became workers in the Order’s religious correspondence
schools in Edmonton and Regina. The sisters who spoke foreign languages worked
out of their hostels at Canadian ports meeting every boat carrying immigrants
from central Europe.
By 1954, a visibly ailing Fr. Daly reported that the Order was now debt free.
With a membership of only 119 women, of whom 93 had taken permanent vows, they
were now serving in 22 missions across Canada. He regretted that the Order had
not grown faster, but assured them that their quality more than made up for
their lack of quantity.47
Catherine retired from public school teaching in 1956 at the age of seventy-two
and was moved to Camp Morton, still the centre of a large farming community.
Here she was happy to continue a project she had begun in 1937, when she had
pressed the Sister General to select sisters who were good candidates for
teaching or nursing and assign them to studying with her for their secondary
school diplomas so that they could be admitted to normal school or schools of
nursing and social work. She was highly successful with her first three
students, two of whom became teachers, and the third a nurse who was assigned
to the Order’s small hospital in Edson, Alberta. When it was opportune, she had
continued this work at other missions. In retirement she started this work again
and reveled in the opportunity to become acquainted with the young novices, all
the while tutoring them in the secondary entrance requirements for higher
education.
At the 1966 General Chapter the Report on Personnel showed a substantial increase
in the number of sisters who had secured professional qualifications since
Daly’s report twelve years before. There were now 128 members in the Order and
of these 17 were registered nurses, 7 were registered technicians, 32 were
certified teachers, 12 were housekeepers, 23 worked in the hostels (now called
Residential Clubs), 19 worked in the catechetical schools, and 6 were social
workers and home visitors, and the rest had administrative tasks.
In 1968 the Sister General announced that as a result of the implementation of
the Order’s educational policy during the last two years, three sisters had
graduated with B.Ed., one with a B.A., three had become welfare workers, four
had taken special courses for teachers of religion, one qualified in public
health, one had become a medical record technician, and twelve sisters were
studying for careers in teaching, social welfare, public health, libraries, and
practical nursing. The Chapter closed with a motion recommending that Sister
Catherine Donnelly’s name be added to those of Archbishop McNeil, Fr. Arthur
Coughlan, and Fr. George Daly who were already recognized as co-founders of the
Sisters of Service.
Administration and personnel management were not Catherine’s strong points. She
had not been appointed by the clergy to be the first Sister General in 1928,
nor was she elected to that office when the Sisters of Service themselves were
permitted by Daly to elect their own officers. Yet her influence on the Order
was pervasive, for she had continued to prove by her personal faith and
endurance in the most difficult situations that the principles on which she had
insisted the Order be founded were appropriate for the Canadian milieu. She
believed that the Sisters of Service should become an integral part of the
whole community, a source of education, friendship, and social services for
all, regardless of the religious persuasion of the people.
Although Catherine and Daly disagreed on the principle of the appropriateness
of the Order’s involvement in hostels, they were one in their conviction that
the future of the Church’s missionary work lay in the abandonment of outmoded
restrictions on the methods by which apostolic religious orders carried out
their missions. The religious principles and the practical methods which
Catherine, McNeil, and Coughlan had agreed were the way to combine the
spiritual objectives of the cloister with the apostolate of active evangelism
and social service were expressed in the official Holy Rule and Constitutions
of the Sisters of Service which Daly wrote at McNeil’s request. He
translated it into French and presented it to Archbishop McNeil for his
signature just a few days before McNeil died in May 1934. By signing the
document McNeil authorized its presentation to the Sacred Congregation for
Religious in Rome for Approbation, which was the final Vatican declaration
recognizing a new order’s official status within the Church.48
The final vindication of Catherine’s vision for a new approach to the Church’s
mission were the extensive reforms which the Sacred Congregation for Religious
ordered all the religious orders to undertake following their deliberations at
Vatican II on the need for reform in the Church. As a result, strict rules of
cloister and semi-cloister and extreme forms of fasting and penance were
abolished by the apostolic orders; religious habits were modified and in many
cases were given up completely for secular dress. Definitions of the three
vows, particularly that of obedience, were changed to allow discussion and
compromise. Breaking free of many of the monastic traditions allowed for
greater individual development and resulted in the introduction of new and
imaginative ways for the religious orders to serve the “abandoned ones” which
society was neglecting. The Sisters of Service, too, have continued to find new
social needs to fulfill and new methods by which they carry on the
vision of their founder.
1
Ruth Compton Brouwer, “Transcending the ‘Unacknowledged Quarantine’:
Putting Religion into English Canadian Women’s History,” Journal of Canadian
Studies, Vol. 27, No.2 (1992 Fall), 48.
1966, SOSA RG1-01,box 5, file 14.
Schools, North Simcoe, 16 June 1916. RG1-01 box 9, file 7.