Sister Madeleva: the president of Saint Mary's

1887 – 1964

Sister Mary Madeleva Wolff, C.S.C. (1887–1964): poet, medievalist, and for twenty-seven years the president of Saint Mary's College, across the road from Notre Dame in the community that shares South Bend's life. She was born Mary Evaline Wolff on 24 May 1887 at Cumberland, Wisconsin, entered Saint Mary's as a student in 1906 after a year at the University of Wisconsin, graduated in 1909, and joined the Congregation of the Holy Cross, taking the name Madeleva. She earned a doctorate in English at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1925 — one of the first two nuns to take a Ph.D. there — and did post-doctoral study at Oxford in 1933–34. After presiding over Saint Mary-of-the-Wasatch at Salt Lake City (1926–33), she returned to Saint Mary's in 1934 as its third president, and held the post until 1961. Her monument is the School of Sacred Theology, founded at Saint Mary's in 1943 — the first graduate school of theology in the country open to women and lay people, a door she opened a generation before the wider church opened it. She racially integrated Saint Mary's on the same conviction. She published twelve or more volumes of verse, served as president of the Catholic Poetry Society of America (1942–48), and wrote her autobiography, My First Seventy Years, in 1959. She resigned the presidency in 1961 and died on 25 July 1964 at Boston. A New York Times obituary notice called her, in the phrase her memorialists kept, the most renowned nun in the world; the local fact under the fame is that she made a small women's college at the edge of South Bend into a place where the century's questions about women, theology, and race were answered earlier than almost anywhere else in American Catholic life.

Sources:

1. Encyclopedia.com, "Madeleva, Mary, Sister" (New Catholic Encyclopedia entry) — the birth on 24 May 1887 at Cumberland, the 1906 entry and 1909 graduation, the Salt Lake City presidency 1926–33, the Oxford year, the Saint Mary's presidency 1934–61, the death on 25 July 1964 at Boston, and the bibliography.
2. The Free Library, "Sister Mary Madeleva Wolff, C.S.C." — the founding of the School of Sacred Theology in 1943 as the first institution to admit women and lay people to graduate theology, the Catholic Poetry Society presidency, and the honorary doctorate presented by Father Hesburgh in 1953.
3. ResearchGate, "Sister Madeleva Remembered" (Catholic Library World) — the Berkeley doctorate of 1925, the Oxford study of 1933–34, the thirteen volumes of verse, and the New York Times obituary's judgment.
4. The Imaginative Conservative, "The American Nun Who Studied Under C.S. Lewis" (2017) — the integration of Saint Mary's and the presidency's 27-year span.