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

Historian Margaret M. McGuinness has written a notable study of The Sisters of Our Lady of Christian Doctrine (SCD), an extraordinary community of women religious founded in 1910 by Marion Gurney, a convert to Roman Catholicism. This sisterhood began its work in New York's lower East Side. Here its members lived in settlement houses alongside the poor, providing social services, religious education, and sacramental preparation for neglected and impoverished immigrant populations. Their ministry was outside the traditional roles commonly associated with most American sisterhoods that provided education, healthcare, and conducted orphanages, leading McGuinness to characterize the sisterhood as "unknown to most Catholics" (1) and "a well-kept secret even on New York's lower East Side" (2).

Gurney's concerns "about poverty-stricken Catholics living in congested urban areas without access to either religious education or sacramental preparation, as well as about those living in rural areas where priests and churches were few and far in between" convinced her "that social settlements were the most effective way to meet the material and spiritual needs of those Catholics she believed were in danger of being lost to the Church" (4). An experienced settlement worker, Gurney held that "Christianity is a social religion in which unity of faith overcomes all class distinctions." She required the sisters to "live among those whom they seek to help, identifying themselves in all that is suitable with the life of their neighbors after the example of our Divine Lord 'who dwelt among us.'" To Gurney, Catholicism was more than a creed. It constituted a way of life in which the "Christian Doctrine class gives the theory—the settlement is the workshop where the theory is put into practice" (9).

Chapter one presents Gurney's elite background and her exposure to ideals of social transformation at Wellesley College. It also explores her intense religious devotion that culminated in her brief membership in an Episcopalian sisterhood. Gurney later converted to Catholicism. In 1898, she co-founded St. Rose of Lima Settlement, the first Catholic settlement house in New York City. McGuinness notes that this institution differed from its Protestant counterparts because it did not seek "civic reform or better living or working conditions." Nor was it "a center for social reform" (32). Instead, Gurney advocated establishing the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine in the United States. She founded the New York Normal Training School for Catechists in 1901, and in 1908 she created the Institute of Our Lady of Christian Doctrine to train as catechists "intelligent women who may feel called to dedicate their entire lives to God in this apostolic labor" (38). Driven by her persistent fear that the Protestant settlements' social services would entice vulnerable Catholic immigrants away from their faith, Gurney convinced the archbishop to grant her community the necessary archdiocesan approval.

Chapters two and three discuss the sisterhood's impressive achievements in New York. They established their flagship settlement, Madonna House, on the lower East Side of Manhattan in 1910 and Ave Maria House in the Bronx in 1930. In addition to teaching catechetical and sacramental preparation classes, they operated bread lines during the Great Depression, provided child care for working mothers and taught adults vocational and domestic skills to improve family living standards. To facilitate the Americanization process, the sisters also offered English classes, established troops of Boy and Girl Scouts, and fostered patriotism through military service by organizing the Columbus Volunteers. In the 1920s, wealthy patrons of the sisterhood enabled the purchase of properties for a community motherhouse, a novitiate and two summer campsites in Nyack and Peekskill, New York. The sisters provided their services primarily to Italian immigrants, but served Chinese, Spanish, and other nationalities as well, fulfilling Gurney's intention that the entire neighborhood "knew that the Sisters of Madonna House were there for the good of all without respect to race or creed" (67). However, by 1967...