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An Overview of Nightingale’s Spiritual Journey F lorence Nightingale was raised in the Church of England; she received baptism while an infant in Florence and attended church (or chapel) regularly as a child. The family had been Unitarian on both sides and some relatives maintained that adherence , but it seems that neither of her parents did; her father’s theological views, but not her mother’s, show clear Unitarian themes. Biographers and commentators often make much of this Unitarian background, but there is simply no evidence that the switch to the Church of England was for social or ‘‘prestige’’ reasons, a point to be returned to in detail below in the discussion of Unitarian and Wesleyan connections. The family’s regular attendance at the Church of England seems to have begun only when they moved to Embley, in Hampshire. When at the original Nightingale home at Lea Hurst, Derby, they attended and financially supported dissenting chapels, Methodist and Baptist, not Unitarian chapels. Like many other intelligent and sensitive girls of the Victorian era, Nightingale sought meaning and purpose in life from her religion. An aunt, Mary Shore Smith, was particularly helpful in that regard, and there is much warm and sometimes anguished correspondence about what to believe and what to do as Nightingale struggled through this period. She was sixteen when she experienced a ‘‘call’’ from God to service , a precise event to which date (7 February 1837) she later frequently referred.1 That first call did not specify what she should do in service and it took several years before she discerned that it should be nursing. Even before that discernment, however, she nursed relatives and neighbours , including the poor near her homes in Derbyshire and Embley. 1 Note for 7 May 1867 (the anniversary of her specific nursing call) and for 28 July. As late as 7 February 1892, at age seventy-one, she looked back to four calls, now including one in 1844 to hospital work and one in 1850, while in Alexandria, ‘‘to throw my body in the breach’’ (see p 516 below). / 5 For years Nightingale’s mother and sister, Parthenope, blocked her from exercising her call. It was not until she was age thirty-one that Nightingale was finally permitted to spend some weeks at the Protestant institution for deaconesses at Kaiserswerth, near Düsseldorf, Germany , and then to take a position as matron of an institution for ill gentlewomen in London. Family resistance and the positive example of Roman Catholic orders in which respectable women did practice nursing helped to sour Nightingale on her own church and move her to consider conversion. The Tractarian movement and the Anglo-Catholic revival were strong in England when Nightingale was a young woman. The 1864 election of a ‘‘progressive’’ pope, Pius IX (1792-1878), made Roman Catholicism a more viable option for many. This pope, however, soon became extremely reactionary, proclaiming the doctrine of papal infallibility. The influence of Catholicism on Nightingale remained for some years, but she became increasingly critical of its theology and its intolerance of free expression. Nevertheless, she continued to credit Catholicism with according women a greater role (through its religious orders) than her own religion, although it, too, had a small number of religious orders for women. Nightingale spent the winter of 1847-48 in Rome, where she became friends with Sidney and Elizabeth Herbert2 and through them Archdeacon Henry Manning (1808-92),3 who was soon to leave the Church of England. (Elizabeth Herbert, too, left and converted to Roman Catholicism in 1865.) Nightingale’s church visiting included making architectural sketches, which she then applied to hospital architecture. While in Rome in March 1848 Nightingale did some kind of retreat under the ‘‘madre,’’ the maîtresse des externes, Laure de Ste Colombe4 at the Church of the Trinità. She presumably used the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius5 at this time. At least her biblical 2 Sidney Herbert (1810-61) was the Secretary for War who asked Nightingale to lead the team of nurses in the Crimean War. Elizabeth Herbert (1822-1911) was a member of the board that invited Nightingale to be matron of the Institution for Ill Gentlewomen. 3 There is a biographical sketch in Theology. 4 Laure de Ste Colombe (1806-86) was a French woman in a French order, Société du Sacré-Coeur-de-Jésus, whose mother house was and still is in Rome next to the Spanish Steps. Thanks to Sister Anne...

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