The Works of the House: Hospitals, Schools, and a Health System

Sisters of St. Francis Health Services incorporated 1974; corporate offices moved to the Mishawaka grounds 1986; renamed Franciscan Alliance 2010; the hospitals renamed Franciscan Health 2016

The hospital line: The Mishawaka motherhouse is the mother house of a hospital system. The sisters' hospitals — St. Elizabeth at Lafayette first among them — were incorporated as a single ministry in 1974 as Sisters of St. Francis Health Services, Inc. In 1986 the system's corporate offices moved from Lafayette onto the provincialate grounds at Mishawaka, putting the administration of the hospitals on the same ground as the motherhouse, where it remains: the system, renamed Franciscan Alliance, Inc., in November 2010, and its facilities renamed under the Franciscan Health name in September 2016, is headquartered at 1515 West Dragoon Trail. The system's own publications count twelve hospitals — eleven in Indiana and one in Illinois — and more than 18,000 employees. The line runs unbroken from the six sisters who opened St. Elizabeth Hospital in Lafayette in the winter of 1875-76 to the health system whose headquarters shares the sisters' Mishawaka address.

The school line: The province's sisters were school sisters as well as hospital sisters: seven schools by 1887, on the jubilee count, and a teaching presence in parish schools across the diocese that this city's own record shows twice over — in the Franciscan sisters who were Queen of Peace parish school's first teachers in 1958, and in the sisters of this house who staffed the girls' department of Marian High School from its opening in 1964, on the ground the sisters themselves gave, told in the Marian entry below. The province's own school of formation, the School of Aspirants, came up from Lafayette with the move. The congregation's higher-education line runs through Fort Wayne: the sisters' St. Francis Normal School at Lafayette became a four-year college course in 1937-41 and moved to Fort Wayne in 1944 as St. Francis College, the present University of Saint Francis — a Fort Wayne record, boundary-printed here because the college's mother house is this one.

Sources:

1. Franciscan Alliance / Franciscan Health system publications and reference pages — 1974 incorporation, 1986 headquarters move, 2010 and 2016 renamings, hospital and employee counts as the system publishes them.
2. Commemorating Seventy-five Years, the congregation's 1950 jubilee book (archive.org) — the school counts and the aspirants' school.
3. Parish and school records as cited in the Queen of Peace and Marian High School entries below.