Catherine McAuley was born into a wealthy Dublin family in 1778. By the time she reached adulthood, she had witnessed the death of both parents and experienced considerable personal poverty. She then worked for twenty years as a companion for an elderly couple and, upon their deaths, received an unexpected inheritance. Driven by a deep faith and pragmatic sense of charity, she opened, in 1827, an institution for unemployed and impoverished women. This proved to be the first step toward the foundation, in 1831, of the Sisters of Mercy, an order now established throughout the world, and in 1990, Pope John Paul II declared Catherine McAuley as Venerable. The present volume, a collection of some of the most important writings by and about Catherine McAuley, includes letters, memoirs, and annals by many of the first Sisters of Mercy and McAuley's original manuscript of the Rule and Constitutions of the order, critically edited for the first time.
Catherine McAuley was born into a wealthy Dublin family in 1778. By the time she reached adulthood, she had witnessed the death of both parents and experienced considerable personal poverty. She then worked for twenty years as a companion for an elderly couple and, upon their deaths, received an unexpected inheritance. Driven by a deep faith and pragmatic sense of charity, she opened, in 1827, an institution for unemployed and impoverished women. This proved to be the first step toward the foundation, in 1831, of the Sisters of Mercy, an order now established throughout the world, and in 1990, Pope John Paul II declared Catherine McAuley as Venerable. The present volume, a collection of some of the most important writings by and about Catherine McAuley, includes letters, memoirs, and annals by many of the first Sisters of Mercy and McAuley's original manuscript of the Rule and Constitutions of the order, critically edited for the first time.
Catherine McAuley (1778-1841) founded the Sisters of Mercy in Dublin in 1831. Her letters are essential primary sources for readers interested in the life and works of this remarkable Irish churchwoman and in women's history and Irish church history more broadly. Whether McAuley is writing to family members, bishops, her solicitor, priests, lay coworkers, or Sisters of Mercy in Ireland and England, her letters reveal striking details about the church and society of her day as well as about her own spiritual convictions and unstinting personal service to poor, sick, homeless, or uneducated adults and children.The Correspondence of Catherine McAuley, 1818-1841, is a new, fully documented edition of more than 320 surviving letters written by, to, or about McAuley during her lifetime. Drawn from archives worldwide and arranged chronologically, the letters are carefully transcribed and generously annotated, with brief narratives introducing each group. In her letters as well as in those of the other correspondents, one sees a delightfully human, affectionate woman; a compassionate, persistent servant of the poor and neglected; an astute businesswoman; and an unpretentious, humorous friend.This edition of McAuley's correspondence is readily accessible to general readers and demonstrates not only her important role in the founding and amazing spread of the Mercy congregation in her lifetime (now numbering more than 10,000 members globally), but also her personal contributions to the pastoral development of the church in Ireland and England. Scholars and other readers will gain fresh insights into many prominent ecclesial leaders in the years 1828-1841, including Daniel Murray, archbishop of Dublin, and Thomas Griffiths, vicar apostolic of the London District. They will also find in these engaging letters one woman's grass-roots experience of certain social, economic, and ecclesiastical arrangements of her time and place.ABOUT THE EDITOR:Mary C. Sullivan, R.S.M., is Professor Emeritus of Language and Literature, and Dean Emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts, at the Rochester Institute of Technology. She is the author of numerous works, including Catherine McAuley and the Tradition of Mercy.PRAISE FOR THE BOOK: ""All those letters whose whereabouts are known have recently been tracked down, examined, verified and scrupulously edited. The Correspondence of Catherine McAuley, 1818-1841 is a work of impeccable and exhaustive scholarship. . . . This book is a very model of what such collections should be, and it could hardly have had a better editor than Mary C. Sullivan, herself a Sister of Mercy since 1950 and a distinguished academic for decades. . . . This is not the first collection of Mother McAuley's letters, but it is surely the most complete and meticulously edited.""--John W. Donohue, America""This monograph is a magnum opus. Edited by an indefatigable scholar, it is the most complete, accurate compendium of the correspondence of Catherine McAuley. . . . This expanded treasure is, however, dwarfed by another uniquely Sullivan contribution. Not only does each of the more than three hundred entries reflect a precise rendition of documents, but Sullivan has also supplemented each with meticulously researched clarifications of the texts. This bonus provides new historical information and identifies linguistic nuances that help the reader comprehend the content and the context of Catherine's life and accomplishments. . . . For its scholarly approach as well as for what it reveals about the impact of one great Irish woman, and religious women in general, Sullivan's latest monograph deserves our careful study.""--Dolores Liptak, RSM, American Catholic Studies""Mary C. Sullivan RSM has carefully edited and thoroughly annotated these letters. . . . Others besides Mercy sisters can be
Breaking new ground in presenting the life of Catherine McAuley (1778?-1841), the Dublin woman who founded the Sisters of Mercy, Mary C. Sullivan has written the first full-length, documented narrative of McAuley in more than fifty years. This work places McAuley in her Irish context, particularly in post-penal Dublin, where the destitution, epidemics, and lack of basic education, especially of poor women and young girls, led her to a life of practical mercifulness.Using extensive primary sources and questioning aspects of earlier accounts, The Path of Mercy illumines Catherine's personality and details her life. It recounts her efforts, using her inheritance from her foster parents, to address the poverties of Irish people in her time. Together with those who eventually joined her when she founded the Sisters of Mercy in 1831, she sheltered homeless women, taught them employable skills, opened a school for the daughters of the very poor, and visited the sick and dying in the slums of Dublin. Later she founded the same works of mercy in nine other towns in Ireland, and in two cities in England.An intelligent, courageous, humorous woman, she was, even when exhausted by the rigors of her travel and ministries, always moved to ""get up again,"" as she said, for the sake of those in need. She wrote poems and letters to novices and others, urged the community to ""dance every evening,"" and never wished to be called ""Reverend Mother."" At age sixty-three she died of tuberculosis in the Baggot Street convent. During the past 180 years more than 55,000 Sisters of Mercy have served among the poor and needy throughout the world.
Catherine McAuley (1778–1841), the founder of the Sisters of Mercy in 1831, frequently gave oral instructions to the first Mercy community. Though she sometimes spoke explicitly about their religious vows, her words were always focused on the life, example, teachings, and evangelic spirit of Jesus Christ, emphasizing “resemblance” to him and fidelity to the calls of the Gospel. Her instructions have, therefore, a broad present-day relevance that can be inspiring and encouraging for all Christians. They are the “shining” words of a companion, a soul-friend, who offers guiding light to those who wend their pilgrim way toward the full embrace of God’s merciful reign. These instructions were initially written down, insofar as that was humanly possible, by sisters who were actually present and listening as she spoke. Some of their manuscripts were later copied into the long manuscript compilation that is the centerpiece of this book. Research also indicates that in preparing and giving her lectures, Catherine often relied on the content of previously published spiritual books, including works by Alphonsus Rodriguez, SJ, Louis Bourdaloue, SJ, and other well-known spiritual writers of the eighteenth and earlier centuries. The book’s endnotes illustrate this dependence. Catherine McAuley’s voice in these instructions is realistic, down-to- earth, humble, and compassionate. She is clearly dead-set against “froth” and “mere outward show” in one’s spiritual life. Like the practical Saint Teresa of Avila, whose life and thought she studied, she favors surrendering oneself now, with God’s help, to “ordinary,” every-day, possible holiness, rather than simply dreaming about extraordinary, but perhaps impossible, future sanctity. Her themes are some of the great themes of the Gospel: genuine humility and poverty of spirit, universal charity, self-denial, taking up one’s “cross,” and following Jesus Christ.
