Sisters Of Mercy Research Articles

English park by the Luznica Castle in Croatia (inventory, valorisation and restoration guidelines).

Castle Lužnica is registered cultural heritage of Croatia. It is situated in Zapresic, near Zagreb, where it was built in 18th century. It is very valuable baroque open-ended castle with cylindrical corner towers. The mansion is situated in wide English park. Since 1925 it has belonged to Sisters of Mercy. The mansion has been recently completely and expertly reconstructed. Owing to willingness and motivation of the sisters, variety of spiritual and profane contents was introduced into the area of Lužnica. Numerous activities are basis for the revitalization of this site, being still in progress. Beautiful English park today is appropriately maintained, and its reconstruction, according to historical study, will be also done. This mansion is identified as a very valuable not just at local and national level but also international. It is a partner with 35 other mansions in the joint IPA cross-border program of Croatia and Slovenia based on joint cultural and tourist resources. Lužnica is, compared to majority of similar complexes in this region (that are ruinous, derelict, without ideas and use), very bright example for successful attempt of self-maintaining and self-financing. This castle is beautiful example of majestic reconstruction and revitalisation of cultural heritage since its new use provided self-maintaining and self-financing resources. It could be a guideline to other similar initiatives, motivation and encourage to professional and sustainable protection of cultural heritage.

Embracing Activism in Apartheid South Africa: The Sisters of Mercy in Bophuthatswana, 1974–94

In South Africa in the latter half of the twentieth century, the Church shifted from a stance of seeming complicity with the government's racist policies to a more active role with the country's peoples. Religious congregations such as the Sisters of Mercy, Johannesburg, moved to increase their activities in areas such as justice and peace, hunger relief, and especially education and skills training. This article examines the Sisters' varied work with displaced peoples in Bophuthatswana from 1974 to 1994.

From ‘apprentice’ to professional: The training of New Zealand Catholic teachers 1945‐65

This article draws on my doctoral research into the expansion of the Catholic educational mission in New Zealand in the years from 1945 to 1965. The project utilised archival and documentary sources and interviews with thirty three Catholic educators: twenty one female religious from the Sisters of Mercy, Dominican Sisters and the Religious of the Sacred Heart and twelve male religious from the Marist Brothers, Christian Brothers and the Society of Mary (Marist Priests) and two former diocesan directors of Catholic education.

The Contribution of the Sisters of Mercy to the Development of Social Welfare

The history of the professionalization of social work often begins with the men of Toynbee Hall who inspired the settlement movement in the United Kingdom and the United States. But is it possible that an earlier group inspired them? The research presented here raises the question of whether the work of the noncloistered Sisters of Mercy may have been a prototype of the settlement movement in England. With their secular beginning in Ireland in 1824, the sisters opened Houses of Mercy in Ireland (1827) and England (1839) and eventually throughout the world to provide relief to the poor through charity, job training, education, health care, and counseling. This article presents original documents to illustrate their work and to open the question of the sisters’ role in the history of social welfare.

Nursing the Mission: The Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculate Conception and the Sisters of Mercy in Glasgow, 1847–1866

Nursing the Mission: The Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculate Conception and the Sisters of Mercy in Glasgow, 1847–1866

Russian nurses: from the Tsarist Sister of Mercy to the Soviet comrade nurse: a case study of absence of migration of nursing knowledge and skills.

Nursing in Russia during the Tsarist era had no structure and little formal organisation. The typical nurses of the nineteenth century were 'Sisters of Mercy', working within the communities of the Orthodox Church and semireligious societies, which were formed to provide a military nursing service. The experience of the Crimean War did not stimulate the foundation of an organised nursing service. There was no transfer of this body of nursing knowledge or experience to the wider rural or civilian population. The majority of Russia's population received inadequate medical and little nursing care.

‘She Came From a Fine Catholic Family'*: Religious Sisterhoods of the Maitland Diocese, 1867–1909

This article is concerned with the distinctive nature and ethos of the three religious sisterhoods, the Sisters of St Dominic, the Sisters of Mercy and the Sisters of St Joseph, whom James Murray brought to the Diocese of Maitland between 1867 and 1883. It examines matters of class and status in relation to these sisterhoods, the recruits they drew to their ranks and the choices which women made both with regard to joining a particular religious congregation and to their place within it.

Past Principals: “The Public Pervasive Presence of Powerful Women in the Church” in South Australia, 1880–1925

In the History of Education, religion has largely been ignored in the last 20years in the need to incorporate class, gender, and race relations into historical analysis. Consequently in Australia, Catholic schooling and in particular those run by female religious orders remains relatively untouched. In this paper I initiate an analysis of the roles played by female religious principals and the contradictions inherent in such a lifestyle. I focused my research on the period 1880–1925, because it was then that Catholic female religious had the opportunities to open and develop school representing a wide socio-economic range in South Australia. Irish Dominicans, English Dominicans and Sister of Mercy established superior school, in addition to their ‘poor school’, in the city, suburbs and country towns of South Australia between 1869–1925. In these early y ears, when communication and transport were very difficult, the resulting geographic isolation from authority both at home and overseas, resulted in a great deal of scope for individuality. In addition opportunities for potential leaders were provided by the Orders ‘forms of governance, their need for economic and business acumen, and the professional qualities required in the development and maintenance of their school. Furthermore in the History of Education, it b generally argued that “women teach and men manage”. My analysis of female religious principals qualified this notion, because this was not so in Catholic convent high school. There was no such division of labour in these school. In fact there were several avenues leading to opportunities for supervisory status, culminating in a principal's position. Evidence available demonstrates the regular and significant use of resourcefulness and initiative in the fulfilment of the vision and ambition of many such women. Whilst we may not always agree with their goals or the strategies employed, nevertheless this paper will provide several examples of out spoken dynamic women, sometimes manipulative, but always with considerable authority, providing spiritual or professional direction in their varied and changing roles.

Catherine McAuley and the Tradition of Mercy by Mary C. Sullivan, R.S.M.

Catherine McAuley and the Tradition of Mercy. By Mary C. Sullivan, R.S.M. (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. 1995. Pp. x, 420. $32.95.) As an Irish Catholic church historian I am not pleased with books such as this for several reasons, and thus reviewing one gives me the opportunity of expressing my frustration and concerns which I know are not unique or limited to myself. One purpose for publishing this volume is expressed in the introduction (p. 5), where the reader is told we need reliable texts of source documents for future generations. But why do we need a book of reliable texts of source documents in the late twentieth century when there are all sorts of inexpensive means of producing exact reproductions of the original documents, for example, microfiche, perhaps with editorial criticism, which can then easily be made available to libraries, archives, private scholars, and the general reader and at minimum cost. Of course, this presupposes that the various archives, in this case of the Sisters of Mercy, are willing to place such material in the public domain and thus not to limit access only to serious scholars, or only to members of their own community. This procedure would also eliminate any suspicion that primary sources been edited or altered in any way which is much easier to accomplish and impossible to detect in printed versions, and something that, from this historian's experience, is hardly unknown in the field of Irish Catholic church history. Another admitted purpose of this book is to promote the cause of Catherine McAuley's ultimate canonization. Thus in the introduction (p. 4), the author and editor, a Sister of Mercy, asks the question: Why is she [Catherine McAuley], whose heroic virtue is recognized, not yet publicly declared a Saint by the Church? The author answers that one reason is that the Sisters of Mercy have not the found sufficient [financial?] means to make her more widely known. Yet in the bibliography we find that over the [last fifty] years alone, writers, mostly Sisters of Mercy, published no fewer than five biographies of Catherine McAuley! To this day there is still no general survey history of the Catholic Church in modern Ireland. Irish historiography itself was late in developing, largely due to the nationalistic jingoism that demanded the preservation of the historic fantasy of the green dream version of that nation's past. This, in part, explains why scholarly Catholic church historiography has also been ignored, since the great expansion in personnel and institutions as well as the powerful public image of the modern Irish Catholic Church would not been possible without its willing marriage to nineteenth-century Irish nationalism which began under McAuley's contemporary and her order's primary promoter, Archbishop Daniel Murray of Dublin. Thus under this new reality, to be Irish was to be Roman Catholic and vice versa. This was essentially the formula and basis of Irish nationalism which was invented and championed by Daniel O'Connell. …

Notes and Comments

NOTES AND COMMENTS The American Catholic Historical Association's Spring Meeting The University of St. Thomas, Houston, hosted the spring meeting of the American CathoUc Historical Association on March 22 and 23, 1996. The program committee consisted of Richard J. Schiefen, C.S.B. (Chair),Virginia Bernhard , Irving A. Kelter, and Joseph M. McFadden, aU of the University of St. Thomas, and L. T ElUs,University ofTexas atAustin (retired).Approximately one hundred and forty participated in the conference, including seventy-three who read papers or served as chairs and/or commentators at the various sessions. They represented fifty-one institutions. Many arrived a day early and attended on March 21 the B. K. Smith Lecture in History,an annual event at the University of St. Thomas. This year's lecturer was PhUip Gleason, Professor of History Ui the University of Notre Dame and past President of the American CathoUc Historical Association, who spoke on "Recovering the CathoUc Voice in American History." Four sessions convened on Friday, March 22, at 10:00 a.m. Bede Lackner served as chair and commentator for"Early Cistercians on the Church,"with papers byJohn R. Sommerfeldt,"Salnt Bernard of Clairvaux and Church Reform"; Paul Lockey, "Blessed Guerric of Igny on the Church"; and Daniel LaCorte, "Aetfed of Rievaulx on the Church." President Joseph McFadden of the University of St. Thomas chaired a session at which Kevin Dwyer, O.S.A., spoke on"Augustinian Bank FaUure in Lawrence, Massachusetts." The commentator was Samuel Thomas. A panel on "The Church and ChaUenge ofWar and Revolution" was chaired by Caroline CastUlo Crlrnm. Papers included"The Revolution in the Mexican Revolt:The Role ofthe CathoUc Church in the Mexican Revolution," by Christopher Ohan, and "Sisters of Mercy during the CivUWar," by Sister M. PauUnus Oakes, R.S.M. The audience served as commentator. MeUssa Hovsepian chaired a session on "Family and Gender Ui Modern American Church History." LesUe Liedel spoke on "Nineteenth-CenturyWomen ReUgious and the Tenure of Church Property Ui the Cleveland Diocese." Katiiryn A.Johnson's paper was entitled "'The old tyrant can't get away with it': Conflict between the FamUy Life Bureau and the Christian Family Movement, 1948-1962"; and a paper by Timothy D. UhI was entitled "Subservient Sisters:A Foucaultian Analysis of Historical Scholarship." Margaret Susan Thompson provided the commentary. FoUowing lunch there were sessions from 2:00 to 3:30 and 3:45 to 5:15. During the first period there were four sessions. "Adventures in Texas CathoUc Bi749 750NOTES AND COMMENTS ography" was chaired by James Talmadge Moore and included papers by FeUx D. Atfnárez,Jr.,"Carlos Eduardo Castañeda: Pre-eminent Cadiolic Historian"; Roy R. Barkley,"Biography and the CathoUc Handbook of Texas"; and Patrick Foley, "Jean-Marie OdUi, CM.: First Bishop of Galveston." Thomas J. Jodziewicz was commentator. A session on "Labor, LiberaUsm, and Rerum novarum.A Comparison of Papal Impact Ui Germany and Spam," was chaired by John C. GaUagher, CS.B., -who also served as commentator. Douglas Cremer spoke on "Working Class Integration and Rerum novarum: The CathoUc Workers' Movement In Germany, 1891-1907," and David Ortizjr., on "Defenders ofTradition or die Nation 's Moral Compass? The Catholic Press In Spam, 1885-1902."RichardJackson was chair for a session on "The Catholic Reformation," and Irving Kelter served as commentator. WiUiam Schrader read a paper on "The Triumph of ReformCathoUcism Ui the Cathedral Chapter of Osnabrück, 1585-1623"; Thomas Worcester, SJ., spoke on "Canadian 'Savages' and the CathoUc Reformation Ui France," and Martin V. Flemming on "Letters to the King: Fray Toribio de Motolin ía's Defense of the Franciscan Mission to New Spain, 1523-1555." The fourth session was "Communicatmg CathoUcism through the Mass Media." Kathleen L. RUey spoke on "Pioneer of the Electronic Gospel: Bishop Fulton Sheen as American CathoUc Apologist and Media Spokesman," and Anne Klejment read a paper entitled"CathoUc Unity and the Origins ofthe CathoUc Digest." Robin WUUamson and Thomas R. Greene served as chair and commentator respectively . There were three sessions during the second part of the afternoon. Steven AveUa served as chair and commentator for a session entitled "Workers for the Harvest Field: Developments Ui Depression Era American CathoUc...

Clinical course in 52 severely wounded patients treated in the Intensive Care Unit during the war in Croatia

Fifty-two severely wounded patients, admitted directly from a battlefield or after surgical treatment in a war hospital, were treated in the Surgical Intensive Care Unit of the ‘Sisters of Mercy’ University Hospital in Zagreb during the 1991 war in Croatia. Considering the severity of the wounds, blood loss was not as severe as expected. This can be attributed to the nature of the injuries as most of the patients were wounded by fragments of explosive devices which cause less tissue destruction than military bullets. Low serum potassium levels, metabolic acidosis, low total protein levels and consequently low serum calcium levels correlated with wound severity. Low serum potassium levels were caused by its redistribution. Reperfusion liver injury was also present. Consumption coagulopathy was one of the characteristic disturbances in this type of injury. There was a relatively big difference between fluid input and output caused by fluid loss through drain sites and large open wound surfaces. The low mortality of the severely wounded was due to their young age and the well-organized military medical service which was developed from the civilian medical service in a short time.

Sisters of Mercy

Sisters of Mercy

Late in the Field: Catholic Sisters in Twentieth-Century Ireland and the New Religious History

Late in the Field: Catholic Sisters in Twentieth-Century Ireland and the New Religious History Margaret MacCurtain The most significant development of the 1980s in the field of history has been the emergence of women's history. Its acceptance by the Irish professional history estabhshment has been slow. In setting the history of women as the theme for the twenty-first Conference of Historians held in Queen's University, Belfast, 27-29 May 1993, the Irish conference of historians has yielded tardily to the demand of practitioners of women's history at third-level institutions to come together and share the research on women's history, an area formally recognized by the International Committee of Historical Sciences in September 1987. Its entry into and its reluctant acceptance by the academic world in Ireland have given rise to new ways of looking at primary sources and innovative methods, and has sparked an interest by a reading and hstening pubhc that has taken professional historians aback.1 No summer school, no third level, or university department of history can afford to ignore the treatment of women as an important field of studies. Yearly, the volume of new scholarship on women accelerates as graduate schools take on the task of guiding theses in women's history, often without the training and specialized skills needed for this rapidly expanding field. High on the list of new tools is the issue of gender as a category of analysis; to it may be added in the nineties those of class and ethnicity in the redefinition of "difference." A feminist analysis of power yields a different configuration of the past and, in general, according to Linda Gordon in a recent survey of U.S. women's history, "most women's historians consider themselves social historians, focusing more on private than on pubhc experience, more on informal than on official sources of power."2 The chronology of writing twentieth-century nuns into Irish history is full of surprises. A cluster of studies in the first years of the twentieth century focused on subjects such as Foxford and its woollen mills (founded by Agnes Morrogh-Bernard), Mother Arsenius,3 and Irish convent industries including lace and linen weaving.4 Somewhat later, Helena Concannon, professor of history in University College, Galway, wrote several studies of the Poor Clares nuns, estabhshing securely the spiritual traditions of contemplative nuns in Ireland.5 Her work contributes by its scholarly method to a history of Irish female spirituality. Two major biographies of founders, one by Roland Burke, S.J., A Valiant Dublin Woman: © 1995 Journal of Women's History, Vol 6 No. 4/Vol 7 No. ι (Winter/Spring) 50 Journal of Women's History Winter/Spring The History of George's Hill (1940), the other by T. J. Walsh, Nano Nagle and the Presentation Sisters (1959), exemplified the tenets of Catholic historiography of the mid-century: namely, that historical biography, especially of those who were leaders, was "the key to unlocking the past, and the object of this exercise was to understand more fully the history of the institution."6 In 1965 Angela Bolster pubhshed her Ph.D. thesis, "The Sisters of Mercy in the Crimea," a revisionist study that upset admirers of Florence Nightingale. Bolster, with her emphasis on documentary sources, went on to edit The Letters of Catherine McAuley, and has been one of the main influences behind the steady stream of postgraduate studies of Mercy Sisters since the seventies.7 At least fifty postgraduate theses dealing with the role or activities of Irish rehgious women in the twentieth century have been researched in various university departments over the past fifteen years. Of these, five dealt with the Mercy Sisters in different regions of Ireland, four with the Presentation Order of nuns, three with the Loreto Institute, two with the Sisters of the Holy Faith, one each with Dominicans, Ursulines, Sisters of St. Louis, and Poor Clare teaching Sisters. Several more theses, including the Ph.D. dissertation of John Coolahan, professor of education at Maynooth College, treated the Cathohc Sisters in the context of state training colleges, and several more examined their involvement with workhouses.8 Biographies have appeared in the 1980s...

Book Review: Sisters of Mercy: Spirituality in America, 1843–1900

Book Review: Sisters of Mercy: Spirituality in America, 1843–1900

The Cincinnati Sisters of Mercy in the Cardinal Manning Special Issue

The Cincinnati Sisters of Mercy in the Cardinal Manning Special Issue

Catherine McAuley’s Theological and Literary Debt to Alonso Rodriguez: the ‘Spirit of the Institute’ Parallels

In the early development of their spiritual and theological roots, the Sisters of Mercy are indebted to many Irish diocesan priests and to many religious orders active in Dublin and the surrounding area during the early nineteenth century, especially to those most supportive of Catherine McAuley and the first Sisters of Mercy prior to and following the founding of the Institute of Mercy in Baggot Street in 1831. Among the religious orders, the Carmelite Fathers on Clarendon Street, the Presentation Sisters on George’s Hill, the Dominican Fathers at Carlow College, the Irish Sisters of Charity (in the person of their founder, Mary Aikenhead), the Poor Clares, and the Irish Christian Brothers come immediately to mind. The theological debt of Catherine McAuley (1778–1841) and the Sisters of Mercy to the Society of Jesus, however, is fundamental and quite specific. The subsequent historical affiliations of the Sisters of Mercy with members of the Society of Jesus and the frequent consultations which many congregations of Sisters of Mercy have had, and continue to have, with various Jesuit advisers and spiritual directors have their earliest exemplar in the remarkably close association of Catherine McAuley with the classical religious writings of the well-known sixteenth-century Spanish Jesuit theologian, Alonso Rodriguez (1526–1616). This intellectual relationship is suggested by much in Catherine’s thought and writing, but, for the purpose of this article, most notably in the remarkable parallels that exist between Catherine’s only long essay and Rodriguez’s early seventeenth-century essay on the same general theme.

Polgárok egy sváb faluban. A két világháború közötti Németbóly társadalmának alapvonásai

Polgárok egy sváb faluban. A két világháború közötti Németbóly társadalmának alapvonásai

The Vatican and the Sisters of Mercy: differing views of the Church

Recent confrontations between the Vatican and the Sisters of Mercy, as well as with other groups of women religious, particularly with Americans, reveal a fundamentally different understanding of the relationship of Church and State, the sacred and the secular, held by the nuns, on the one hand, and the Vatican, on the other. Current Vatican policy assumes a rigid line between Church and State which makes any office-holding, either elected or appointed, in government, by either a priest or a nun, incompatible with the religious vocation. Although the first conflict between the Vatican and Sister Mansour of the Sisters of Mercy appeared to be primarily over differing interpretations of the relationship between personal morality and public policy in the specific case of payments for abortion, subsequent conflicts with the Sisters of Mercy over other nun office-holders went beyond specific differences over Church teachings on moral issues. The holding of any public office was defined as out of bounds for priests or religious: in other words, the Vatican pressed (and continues to press) for a very harsh interpretation of the restriction in the new Code of Canon Law (canon 285, 3) and for its world-wide observation.A similar line has been taken in the case of the four priests who hold public office in the Nicaraguan revolutionary government and, most recently, the Italian priest who has been elected as a socialist to the European Parliament. In each case the resolution of the conflict is to force the person involved either to resign the public office or else be removed from their religious order (or, in the case of a diocesan priest, be suspended from priestly duties).

A GLASGOW PASTORAL PLAN 1855-1860: SOCIAL AND SPIRITUAL RENEWAL

Peter Forbes, like many influential clergy of the mid-nineteenth century in Glasgow came from the north east of Scotland.2 Educated at Aquhorties, St Sulpice and Blairs, he proved an indefatigable, imaginative pastor. In 1839 he raised £3,000 in Ireland for his church and returned there to teach for several months in the seminary at Youghal. He came back with five priests for the Scottish mission in the company of Father Theobald Mathew, the apostle of temperance, who was to preach at the opening of St Mary's on 15 August 1842.3 As a builder of the spiritual and physical strength of Catholicism Forbes was remarkable. In 1846 he returned from a tour of northern France with three sisters of the Third Order of St Francis (presumably because religious orders were technically illegal until 1847), and in 1849 from Ireland with six Sisters of Mercy. He bought the 'Noddy Kirk' which later became St Alphonsus in 1846 and five years later acquired the Duke Street Gaelic Church which subsequently became St Vincent's. He began a school, a Sunday school, an industrial school and an orphanage, which he was largely to be instrumental in transferring to Smyllum, Lanark.4 He also encouraged the purchase of Dalbeth for future religious use.5 To aid the poor he administered the pledge every week, established the Society of St Vincent de Paul and that of St Elizabeth for the distribution of clothing to the poor. In devotions he introduced the May month of Mary and the June month of the Sacred Heart and Benediction.6 In addition he wrote several pamphlets on the sacraments and religious controversy.7 In short he was literally building a Catholic community with a strong sense of identity and cohesion. Within his church a fine new organ encouraged the congregational singing of the new popular hymns of Faber and others whilst without he gathered in numerous converts and failing members of his flock.8 But more, he organised lecture courses to improve his parishioners in other ways and even a building society to seal that respectability. That was largely the work of the years 1855 to 1860.

Law-medicine notes. A further solution to the malpractice problem: corporate liability and risk management in hospitals.

I have reached the conclusion that the hospital is liable with great reluctance because I am sure that the Sisters of Mercy have done everything within their power to run a proper institution. But they, like every other governing board, are corporately responsible for the conduct of their medical staff.—Moore vs. Carson-Tahoe HospitalTHERE has developed in the United States a quiet revolution in malpractice liability, little noticed in the medical literature. It is the movement to assign responsibility for all types of professional malpractice, including acts of independently practicing physicians, to the hospital corporation itself.The establishment of . . .