Neighbors and Missionaries: A History of the Sisters of Our Lady of Christian Doctrine by Margaret M. McGuinness (review)

In 1910, Marion Gurney, known in religion as Mother Marianne of Jesus, founded the Sisters of Our Lady of Christian Doctrine (RCDs), a congregation devoted to catechesis, social work, and pastoral visitation. Neighbors and Missionaries is Margaret McGuinness's centennial history of this small diocesan congregation, a short and quite readable work that should be of interest to historians of social settlements and New York Catholicism.

McGuinness does well at detailing the early life of Mother Marianne, including her Wellesley education, her brief experience in an Episcopalian religious community, and her conversion to Catholicism. After the book's initial section, however, emphasis is less on personalities (often the personnel are referred to as "the sisters," rather than by name) than on the ministries of the RCDs. This, of course, is largely the point because, like only a few other contemporaneous congregations, this group focused not on schools or health care, but on social settlement work, primarily aimed at immigrants and minorities.

The implication seems to be that the RCDs were unique in this respect (the dust jacket refers to them as "distinctive"), though they were not. This reviewer, for instance, would have appreciated some attempt to place RCD history in the context of other orders founded at or near the same time that pursued similar ministries, including California's Sisters of the Holy Family, Baltimore's Mission Helpers of the Sacred Heart, Philadelphia's Missionary Servants of the Most Blessed Trinity - and, most especially, perhaps, New York's Franciscan Sisters of the Atonement (also founded by an Episcopalian convert just three years before the RCDs). For example, was Mother Marianne aware of the existence of the Atonement, Holy Family and Sacred Heart groups, all of which preceded her own, and one of which was in Westchester County, just north of New York City? Was there any communication among these orders, especially those on the East Coast? And what role(s), if any, did RCDs play in the emerging Catholic Charities movement - and, if they were not a part of it, why not? While there is substantial detail about the history of this one congregation and its work, the account seems to exist in something of a vacuum.

Also, because the emphasis here is on ministry rather than on personalities, readers will learn little about individuals in the congregation or about religious life itself during the century of its existence. Until the final section, there is little information on the community's size or on the composition of its membership. By Vatican II, it seems, the sisters were extremely open to change and to renewal, but there is little explanation of how or why that openness developed. Meanwhile, a beneficiary of their ministry at the time described them as "advanced as far as being able to function in a modern world, and yet their mode of convent life was very traditional" (144). This, like so many other matters, seems deserving of additional analysis.

In the end, then, Neighbors and Missionaries is a good microhistory that could have been so much more. While McGuinness is to be commended for bringing attention to a too-little known women's congregation and its ministry among immigrants, minorities, and the dispossessed, there is another, and larger, story still waiting to be told.