The sisters: Holy Cross women and the work of the orders

1843 – 1964

The arrival: the Sisters of the Holy Cross came to this ground in 1843, four sisters from France — Sister Mary of the Heart of Jesus, aged nineteen; Sister Mary of Bethlehem, forty-five; Sister Mary of Calvary, twenty-five; Sister Mary of Nazareth, twenty-one, in Notre Dame Magazine's account — the first women religious of the settlement that became South Bend. They opened a novitiate at Bertrand, Michigan, in 1844 and an academy there; the academy moved in 1855 to the present site of Saint Mary's College, across the river from the city. The institutions they built — the college, the parish schools where Holy Cross sisters taught generations of the city's children, the academy's whole course — stand in the Religion and Schools sections. What belongs here is the labor's scale: hundreds of Holy Cross sisters lived and worked at Notre Dame itself between 1843 and 1958, in its classrooms and its domestic economy, besides those who ministered at Saint Mary's — a century-long workforce of women on which both institutions visibly ran.

Mother Angela Gillespie: Eliza Marie Gillespie (1824–1887) was traveling with her mother from Ohio toward Chicago in 1853, meaning to enter the Sisters of Mercy, when the pair stopped at Notre Dame to visit her brother Neal, one of the university's first graduates. Father Sorin, meeting her, declared on the spot that God was calling her to the Holy Cross instead; after days of prayer and a visit to the Bertrand sisters, she agreed, took the name Sister Mary of St. Angela, made her novitiate in France, and became head of the academy at Bertrand, remaining its head when it moved to the Saint Mary's site in 1855 — the first director of Saint Mary's, where she built a curriculum of advanced mathematics, science, foreign languages, philosophy, theology, art, and music for its women students.

Her wartime record is the largest single episode in this section: when the Civil War came, General Grant's request for nurses reached the sisters in October 1861, and by the next morning Mother Angela and five sisters were on their way to his headquarters at Cairo, Illinois. Under her leadership, in Saint Mary's College's account, eighty Holy Cross sisters served as nurses in Union military hospitals and aboard the hospital ship Red Rover — the first sisters to nurse for the United States Navy — and at Mound City, Illinois, she directed the conversion of a row of unfinished warehouses into a 1,500-bed military hospital, among the best in the country. As provincial superior she established thirty-five schools across the country; the congregation she helped lead founded forty-five academic institutions between 1855 and 1882; and in 1869 she presided over the American sisters' separation from the French congregation, on which account she is often considered the founder of the Sisters of the Holy Cross in the United States. She died in early 1887. South Bend's Angela Boulevard carries her name. The nursing counts vary by what is counted — sisters nursing, sisters pensioned for it, sisters volunteering — and run in the accounts from sixty-five to eighty-eight; the college's eighty is printed above as its own figure, not as a settled total.

Madeleva, at pointer size: the twentieth century's sister of this ground is Sister Mary Madeleva Wolff — president of Saint Mary's College from 1934 to 1961, founder in 1943 of the School of Sacred Theology, the first graduate school of theology in the country open to women — whose whole profile stands in the People section and is not retold here. Between Mother Angela's academy and Madeleva's graduate school runs the through-line of this entry: for a century and more, the education of women at the city's edge was designed, staffed, and governed by women religious, and two of the women who governed it changed what American Catholic women were permitted to learn.

Sources:

1. Notre Dame Magazine, "The Women of Past Presence" — the four sisters of 1843 and their ages, the hundreds of Holy Cross sisters at Notre Dame between 1843 and 1958, the Gillespie meeting with Sorin in 1853, the brother Neal, the Bertrand novitiate, and Mother Angela's standing as one of Sorin's "two hands."
2. Saint Mary's College, "In From the Margins of History" (2021) — the four sisters' arrival in 1843, the academy's move of 1855, Mother Angela's leadership of the Civil War nursing (eighty sisters; the first nurses to serve the U.S. Navy, on the Red Rover), and her thirty-five schools as provincial superior.
3. Working Nurse, "Mother Mary of St. Angela (1824–1887), Civil War Hospital Administrator" (2018) — the October 1861 answer to Grant and the Paducah posting, the Mound City hospital conversion, the 1869 separation and the founder standing, the early-1887 death, and Angela Boulevard's naming.
4. Irish Rover, "Who Are the Holy Cross Sisters?" (2022) — Mother Angela as Saint Mary's first director and her curriculum; the congregation's forty-five academic institutions founded between 1855 and 1882; the sisters' volunteering of October 1861.
5. Religion and People sections of this history (banked) — the Holy Cross institutions whole, the sisters' teaching in the parish schools, and Sister Madeleva's profile.