The Sisters of St. Francis of Perpetual Adoration: Olpe to Lafayette, 1863-1943

Congregation founded 20 July 1863 at Olpe, Germany; American foundation at Lafayette, Indiana, 14 December 1875; the province that came to Mishawaka

The congregation: The Sisters of St. Francis of Perpetual Adoration — in their full style, the Poor Sisters of St. Francis Seraph of Perpetual Adoration — were founded at Olpe, in Westphalia, by Mother Maria Theresia Bonzel. She was born Regina Christine Wilhelmine Bonzel, called Aline, on 17 September 1830, and she built the community out of an orphanage and school work begun in Olpe in the 1850s: the community received approval on 29 September 1859, the first sisters were invested on 20 December 1860, and the congregation itself dates its founding to 20 July 1863. The congregation's own published history adds that Mother Theresia was appointed Superioress General on 6 August 1863, in the weeks after the founding. Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament in perpetual rotation was the community's defining work from its German beginnings — the "Perpetual Adoration" of its name is not an ornament but the charism: sisters keeping the watch before the exposed Sacrament hour by hour, in turns, without ceasing. Mother Theresia died on 6 February 1905; she was beatified on 10 November 2013.

The crossing: The American foundation came at the invitation of Bishop Joseph Dwenger of Fort Wayne, who needed sisters for the German Catholic population of his diocese. Six sisters — Clara, Bonaventura, Agatha, Rose, Augustine and Alphonsa, as the congregation's histories name them — left Germany on 26 November 1875 and reached Lafayette, Indiana, on 14 December 1875. There they founded St. Elizabeth Hospital and a provincial house on the same ground; the cornerstone of the Lafayette motherhouse complex was laid on 11 June 1876. The Lafayette house was the congregation's American motherhouse for its first two-thirds of a century, and the perpetual adoration was kept there in hourly rotation from the Lafayette beginnings, on the testimony of the congregation's seventy-five-year jubilee book of 1950.

The growth: From Lafayette the sisters spread across the Midwest and West as hospital and school sisters. The jubilee book's own count gives six hospitals and seven schools staffed by 1887, and twenty hospitals by 1923. Rome commended the congregation in 1897 and gave pontifical approbation in 1931. In that same year, 1931, the single American province was divided in two: an eastern province, Immaculate Heart of Mary, whose provincial house would in time come to Mishawaka, and a western province, St. Joseph, seated in Denver and Colorado Springs. The novitiate remained in the east, at Lafayette, until 1941. The congregation's formation houses followed a settled pattern that the Mishawaka house inherited whole: postulancy, novitiate, and a School of Aspirants for girls preparing to enter, which opened at Lafayette on 8 September 1942 — a year before the move east that this section exists to tell.

Sources:

1. The congregation's own published history, Sisters of St. Francis of Perpetual Adoration (ssfpa.org).
2. Commemorating Seventy-five Years of the Sisters of St. Francis of Perpetual Adoration, 1875-1950, the congregation's jubilee book (read at archive.org).
3. Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend records of the congregation's Indiana foundations.