Women religious leave lasting impact on diocese

Andy Telli, Tennessee Register

When Richard Miles, O.P., was installed as bishop of the brand new Diocese of Nashville, his sprawling diocese had no parishes, no priests, and precious few Catholics. Traveling on horseback from one corner of Tennessee to the other, he set about the task of building a diocese. In 1842 he brought to Nashville six Sisters of Charity of Nazareth, Ky., to help him.

The sisters established an academy for girls, “which flowered into almost instant success,” wrote Thomas Stritch in his book “The Catholic Church in Tennessee: The Sesquicentennial Story.”

As the years turned to decades and eventually more than a century, more religious sisters followed the Sisters of Charity to Tennessee: Dominicans, Sisters of Mercy, Sisters of St. Joseph Carondelet, Franciscans, Precious Blood Sisters, Good Shepherd Sisters, Ursuline Sisters, Daughters of Charity, Little Sisters of the Poor, Blessed Sacrament Sisters, Poor Clare Nuns, Sisters of Notre Dame, Sisters of the Immaculate Heart, School Sisters of St. Francis, Salvatorian Sisters, Sisters of Charity of Cincinnati, Sisters for Christian Community, Sisters of Divine Providence and Sacred Heart Sisters from Mexico.

They came to educate children, to care for the sick, to tend to the elderly, to serve the poor. They opened hospitals and orphanages and schools. They have served in poor urban neighborhoods, wealthy suburbs and quiet farming communities. They have braved war, bankruptcy and disease to follow their charism. Their ministry has touched Catholics in every corner of the state.

“They really practiced what they preached,” Father Philip Breen, pastor of St. Ann Church in Nashville, recalled of the Sisters of Mercy who were his teachers as a child at Christ the King School.

Although some orders are long gone from the diocese and the state, their legacy endures as they continue to help shape Catholic culture in Middle Tennessee.

No single community of women religious encompasses the experience of all women religious in the Diocese of Nashville across nearly 175 years, but several are representative, including the Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia Congregation, Sisters of Mercy, Daughters of Charity and the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament. Here are some of their stories.

This photo, taken in 1860, is the oldest known photograph of the Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia Congregation. The Dominican Sisters are one of the longest serving religious orders in the Diocese of Nashville.

Dominicans

Bishop James Whelan, O.P., the second bishop of Nashville, wanted to open a Catholic school in the city, so he turned to his fellow Dominicans at St. Mary Convent in Somerset, Ohio for help.

In August 1860, the community sent four sisters to Nashville – Sister Columba Dittoe, Sister Philomena McDonough, Sister Lucy Harper and Sister Frances Walsh – who established St. Cecilia Academy and a new congregation.

Both the school and the congregation took root on a hill overlooking downtown Nashville on property known as Mount Vernon Gardens. One hundred and fifty-one years later, they are flourishing.

The Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia Congregation, known across the country and around the world as the Nashville Dominicans, now have 274 sisters and 16 postulants, the largest number ever. The sisters teach in schools across the United States and in Sydney, Australia, and – new this year – Vancouver, British Columbia.

Bishop William Adrian breaks ground for the new Dominican campus schools on Harding Road in 1956.

“All that we’re about is taking the Lord wherever we can. That’s what we’re all about. That’s what the church is about,” said Mother Ann Marie Karlovic, O.P., the prioress general of the congregation.

But in the early days, there were grave doubts that the small community would survive.

By the spring of 1861, St. Cecilia Academy was full with young women from Nashville and beyond. The sisters decided to move ahead with construction of a new building, but the Civil War began later that summer and financial hardships for the sisters and their school soon followed.

In 1867, the school, convent and all the sisters’ personal property were sold at public auction to repay the congregation’s debts. Nashville Bishop Patrick Feehan stepped in to save them, buying everything, assuming the sisters’ debt and remortgaging the property.

It took nearly two decades for the congregation to put its finances on sound footing.

In the meantime, the congregation’s ministry was expanding. In 1864, they took charge of St. Mary’s Orphan Asylum in Nashville. In 1876, they branched out to Chattanooga to assume responsibility for Notre Dame School. The growing congregation soon after began to take responsibility for more parochial schools, such as the former St. John School in the Edgefield neighborhood of Nashville, St. Mary’s in Clarksville, St. Mary’s in Jackson, Assumption School in Nashville, Sacred Heart, St. Joseph and Nativity in Memphis, and Winchester Academy in Winchester, Tenn.

In the early 20th century, the Nashville Dominicans began to venture outside Tennessee to operate schools in Monmouth, Ill., Virginia, Chicago and Cincinnati.

Over the years the Dominicans expanded to other schools across the country, and bought property on Harding Road in West Nashville, which became the site of the Dominican Campus, home to Overbrook School, the relocated St. Cecilia Academy and Aquinas College.

Through the 1980s, most of the sisters in the congregation were natives of Tennessee, women who had been taught by earlier generations of Nashville Dominicans.

Before she joined the congregation, Mother Ann Marie was taught by the Dominicans at the old St. Thomas High School in Memphis.

“I guess it was their joy,” that attracted Mother Ann Marie to the Dominicans, she said. “They were joyful. The Christian life is joyful, because it’s from Christ.”

After the Second Vatican Council, the Dominicans’ numbers began to dwindle, but, unexpectedly, that trend began to reverse itself in the late 1980s, Mother Ann Marie said.

“Young women just began to appear from different places,” Mother Ann Marie said. “We didn’t really teach in those places. It was just an interesting blessing.”

Today, Dominican sisters come from every region of the country, as well as Canada, Australia and, this year for the first time, Ireland.

As their numbers began to climb, so did the requests from bishops for the Dominicans to come to their dioceses to run schools.

“It’s actually impossible to meet all the requests,” Mother Ann Marie said. “We don’t have some sort of plan of where we’ll go next,” she said. Instead the congregation keeps a file of the requests and when they have sisters available who would be a good fit, “that’s where we go next.”

Currently, the congregation operates schools in the dioceses of Nashville, Knoxville, Memphis, Arlington, Va., Birmingham, Ala., Charleston, S.C., Joliet, Ill., Lafayette, Ind., Providence, R.I., and Richmond, Va., as well as the archdioceses of Atlanta, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Denver, New Orleans, St. Louis, St. Paul and Minneapolis, Washington, D.C., Sydney, Australia, and Vancouver.

To accommodate the congregation’s growth, the Dominicans completed a $45 million expansion and renovation of their motherhouse in 2006. This year, the sisters have added furniture in the chapel to make room for the still expanding numbers, Mother Ann Marie said.

“There is always room for new life,” she said of welcoming new sisters each year. “It helps us to remember our own call. … It calls us back into the love we had at first, to the ideals we had at first.”

Mother Mary Clare McMahon, foundress of the Sisters of Mercy in Tennessee, is pictured at St. Bernard Convent in Nashville.

Sisters of Mercy

In the aftermath of the Civil War, Bishop Feehan invited the Sisters of Mercy to his diocese to open its first parish school. From that first school, St. Mary School in downtown Nashville near the state Capitol, the Mercy Sisters fanned out across the state, teaching in nearly every corner of the diocese.

But the Mercy Sisters did not confine themselves to education. Throughout their long history in Tennessee, they have met needs wherever they presented themselves, serving in parishes as pastoral associates, operating hospitals, ministering to prisoners, caring for young mothers and AIDS patients.

“There were a lot of needs,” said Sister Suzanne Stalm, RSM. “We were blessed to have sisters to fulfill them.”

The common thread running through all these ministries is compassion, said Sister Suzanne. “Mercy and hospitality,” added Sister Judith Coode, RSM.

Compassion, mercy and hospitality have been at the core of the Mercy Sisters’ mission since they there founded by Mother Catherine McAuley in Dublin in 1831.

Besides the typical vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, “we take a fourth vow of service,” said Sister Judith. The recipient of their service is “always the poor, the sick and the uneducated,” she added.

In Tennessee, the Mercy Sisters started with schools.

Six sisters from the community in Providence, R.I., answered Bishop Feehan’s invitation and arrived in Nashville on Halloween in 1866, and went to work at St. Mary’s School just a few days later. The school was quickly bustling, and in 1867 the school was moved to a new, three-story building on Vine Street and had an enrollment of 400. The following year, Bishop Feehan purchased the Campbell Mansion for the sisters to open their second school, St. Bernard Academy, which is still operating today as an independent Catholic school.

Bishop Thomas Byrne’s residence was later used as a convent for the Sisters of Mercy in the early 20th century. The Sisters of Mercy arrived in Nashville in 1866, and have been a continuous presence in schools and other social justice ministries since then.

Not only were the energetic Mercy Sisters attracting students to their schools, they were attracting more women to their order, including Bishop Feehan’s sister Alice. Over the years, more and more Tennessee women joined the Mercy Sisters, which established a new community with its motherhouse in Nashville.

As the number of Mercy Sisters in Tennessee grew, so did the number of schools where they taught. Since their arrival in Tennessee, they have taught at schools in Memphis, Jackson, Dayton, McEwen, Elizabethton, Knoxville, Loretto, Lawrenceburg, Johnson City, Columbia, Kingsport, Springfield, Alcoa, and several schools in Nashville, including their own St. Bernard Academy, the old St. Joseph, which was located where the Nashville Electric Service building now stands, St. Patrick, the former Cathedral School, St. Ann, Christ the King, St. Edward and Holy Rosary.

And where the sisters served, they found young women inspired by their mission to serve.

Sister Suzanne was an eighth grader in Memphis in the early 1960s when she and her mother visited Immaculate Conception High School, which was run by the Mercy Sisters, to enroll her. It was the first time she met the school’s principal Sister Adrian Mulloy, RSM, who died in 2010.

“She didn’t walk, she floated,” Sister Suzanne said. “She was the most beautiful person I’d ever seen.”

While a student at Immaculate Conception, Sister Suzanne met Mercy Sisters “who were really interested in me.”

After graduating from Immaculate Conception in 1965, Sister Suzanne joined the community. “I entered the community because I love God and I wanted to serve other people. I’ve been in the community 45 years. That is not the reason that I stayed,” Sister Suzanne said. “The reason I stayed is because I became aware of how much God loves me.”

Father Breen has similar recollections of the Sisters of Mercy who taught him at Christ the King School. “The dedication of the sisters was absolutely outstanding. They really cared for the kids,” he said. “They went out of their way to help. They were teachers, but they also were pastorally oriented.

“We felt like we were somebody,” Father Breen added. “They made us feel like we were the children of God.”

At their peak, there were about 120 Mercy Sisters in Tennessee, the largest community in the state at the time. But, like other communities of women religious, their numbers started to fall in the 1970s. The Mercy Sisters no longer operate any parish schools in the state and sold their flagship school, St. Bernard Academy, an all-girls high school. But the school continues to operate today as an elementary school that maintains the Mercy mission, as does Immaculate Conception in Memphis, also now under lay leadership, Sister Judith noted.

“We made a deliberate effort to share our charism with the lay teachers in our schools so they could carry it on after we left,” Sister Judith said.

And sisters have moved on to to other ministries, such as working in parishes, working with the poor, working in hospitals. They have established a retreat ministry at the Mercy Convent on Pennington Bend Road in Nashville, and the 17 retired sisters who live there, continue a ministry of prayer, said Sister Judith, the coordinator of community life at the convent. Sister Judith said she receives calls every day from people asking the sisters to pray for them, which the sisters are happy to do.

Though retired, Sister Judith said, “They’re still sisters.”

A Daughter of Charity and a nurse care for a newborn baby at St. Thomas Hospital in this undated photo. The Daughters of Charity came to Nashville in 1897 to provide care for the sick. At first they worked out of a converted mansion, known as the St. Thomas Sanitarium, and today operate a 541-bed hospital on Harding Road.

Daughters of Charity

The Daughters of Charity didn’t come to Nashville to be teachers. They were invited by Bishop Thomas Byrne to realize his dream of opening a Catholic hospital.

But when they arrived in 1898 to open Saint Thomas Hospital, they brought with them not only their skill in administering hospitals, but their mission to serve the poor and their knack for organizing lay people to join them in that mission.

Their legacy continues to leave a deep imprint on the community through Saint Thomas, ranked as one of the top hospitals in the country, their work serving the poor through Catholic Charities’ North Nashville Outreach, and the Nashville Chapter of the Ladies of Charity, which for more than 100 years has put the Catholic mission of helping the needy into action.

“Every community has a different charism,” said Sister Sally Lessnau, D.C., the sister servant, or local superior, of the community of Daughters in Nashville. “Ours is to seek out the poor where we find them, to serve those no one else is serving.”

The Daughters were founded in 1633 by St. Vincent de Paul and St. Louise de Marillac to serve the poor of Paris. Their mission quickly expanded to include educating children and caring for the sick, all ministries the Daughters have devoted themselves to in Nashville since their arrival.

Saint Thomas Hospital provides about $40 million a year in charity care, and the hospital operates several clinics and programs to provide health care to the poor and the homeless.

Since its founding in 1981, the Daughters have run the North Nashville Outreach program, which provides assistance with rent, utilities, food, clothing, lunches for the homeless, bus passes so people can get to and from jobs, and other services.

In working with the poor, the Daughters always try to treat people “with great respect,” Sister Sally said.

The Daughters first opened Saint Thomas in the former home of Judge J.M. Dickinson on Hayes Street on Easter Monday, April 11, 1898. The first patient was Mrs. W.I. Feasall, the wife of a Baptist minister. The minister said he didn’t like Catholics but had heard the Catholic sisters “took good care of the sick.”

The hospital’s reputation quickly grew and the medical staff was soon urging the Daughters to build a new facility, which opened in January 1902.

The Daughters soon after arriving also involved themselves in prison ministry and organizing a chapter of the Ladies of Charity, which was founded in 1910. The founding of the Ladies of Charity by St. Vincent and St. Louise actually came before that of the Daughters, and they have worked arm in arm as part of the Vincentian family for nearly 400 years, Sister Sally said.

The Daughters have also been in involved in education in the diocese. Sister Sally came to Nashville in 1998 with Sister Joanne Cozzi, D.C., to work at St. Vincent de Paul School. As principal, Sister Joanne lead a renovation of the school’s building and a resurgence in enrollment until she left in 2004 to take a new assignment.

Saint Thomas moved to its current location on Harding Road in 1975. Since its opening in 1898, Saint Thomas has grown from a 26-bed hospital in a converted mansion to the current 541-bed facility with more than 1,800 employees and 750 physicians on staff. The hospital is part of Saint Thomas Health Services that also includes Baptist Hospital and the Center for Spinal Surgery in Nashville, Middle Tennessee Medical Center in Murfreesboro and Hickman Community Hospital in Centerville.

Because of declining numbers, the Daughters relinquished their role as the chief administrator of their hospitals, and in 1994, John Tighe became the first lay person to be named chief executive officer of Saint Thomas.

Today, the Daughters have five sisters living and working in Nashville.

The future of the Daughters is to make a connection with lay people, inspiring and organizing them to carry on the mission of the order, Sister Sally said. And that’s all part of the vision of the order’s founders, St. Vincent and St. Louise, she added.

St. Katharine Drexel is pictured in an undated photo with children at Xavier Prep School in New Orleans. She and her order, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, founded several schools in the Diocese of Nashville to serve black students, including St. Vincent de Paul School, which operated from 1933-2009.

Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament

St. Katherine Drexel and the order she founded, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, literally had to sneak into Nashville.

She was a wealthy heiress and a devout Catholic who in 1890 founded her order to serve blacks and American Indians. Bishop Byrne heard of her order and invited her to come to Nashville to open a school in Holy Family Parish, which he had established in South Nashville to serve the black Catholic community.

Bishop Byrne was anxious to open a school because the Nashville City Council was preparing to replace the city’s black high schools with common schools and industrial training. He wrote to St. Katherine: “I feel that if amongst our Colored People, we find individuals gifted with capabilities, with those sterling qualities which constitute character, our Holy Mother, the Church, who fosters and develops the intellect only that it give God more glory and be of benefit to others, should also concede this privilege to the Negro – this higher education.”

St. Katherine came to Nashville to examine property for the new school on Eighth Avenue where the Nashville Rescue Mission is now located, and she and Bishop Byrne viewed the property from a curtained carriage so their plan to buy it would remain a secret.

Once word of the purchase and the intended use of the property leaked out, the previous owner offered to buy it back. But St. Katherine and Bishop Byrne stood firm and in 1905 Immaculate Mother Academy opened with an enrollment of 28 girls.

The school flourished with 100 students by the end of the first year. New buildings were added, boys were added and eventually the lower grades were split off to form Holy Family School.

The Blessed Sacrament Sisters later opened St. Vincent de Paul School in North Nashville to serve the black community. They remained at Immaculate Mother and Holy Family until 1954 when the schools were closed and the students were allowed to transfer to Father Ryan High School and Cathedral School. The sisters left St. Vincent in the 1970s.

Scores of Nashvillians still remember the Blessed Sacrament sisters who were their teachers, including Sister Sandra Smithson, a School Sister of St. Francis, who attended St. Vincent.

“We weren’t shortchanged in the education those sisters provided,” said Sister Sandra, who established the Project Reflect educational enrichment program and Smithson Craighead Academy charter school. “They cared about us. And we knew they cared about us. We felt it.”

The Blessed Sacrament sisters had high expectations for their students, Sister Sandra said. “They didn’t buy into any of that, ‘poor little black kids can’t really do that.’ They believed they had a role in making sure each child actualized their potential completely.”

Their attitude was “God has gifted you and you have an obligation to use it. I’m going to make sure you do,” Sister Sandra said. “They never took anything less than our best. … They demanded top notch everything.”

After studying under the Blessed Sacrament sisters at St. Vincent and later Immaculate Mother, she went on to Xavier University in New Orleans, which also was founded by St. Katherine Drexel.

“I loved every minute of it,” Sister Sandra said of her years with the Blessed Sacrament sisters. “It was a wonderful, wonderful experience with those sisters.

“The church hasn’t had any ministry with the black community,” she added, “that comes anywhere near what Katharine Drexel did with those schools.”