Across God's Frontiers: Catholic Sisters in the American West, 1850-1920

CHAPTER 8. Nuns of the West

Nuns of the West Warm words for Mother Xavier Ross during the funeral of Mother Josephine Cantwell—herself a pioneer who oversaw convents in Montana, Missouri, Kansas, and Colorado—captured the way many described the nuns who called the nineteenth-­ century West “home.” If asked, sisters would have dismissed funeral orations that trumpeted nunly tenacity across a range of western experiences and pious descriptions of inborn virtue. Nuns tended to wave off applause and accentuate matter-­ of-­ factness, saying , as did Blandina Segale, a Sister of Charity of Cincinnati who spent over twenty years in the Southwest as a fierce advocate for the poor: “It is difficult to understand anyone putting his hand to the plow and then looking back.”1 Chapter 8 [She] was a woman of­ remarkable qualities—with an enlightened mind, and a strong will. . . . [W]hen we take [her] circumstances into account . . . on the barren plains [we are] filled with . . . astonishment. . . . Such women are the salt of the earth. —Funeral eulogy for Mother Josephine Cantwell by Rev. Thomas F. Kinsella, in Mary Buckner SCL, History of the Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth , Kansas (1898) Sister Mary M. Cornelia SNDdeN (Courtesy Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, Belmont, Calif.) 268 : Nuns of the West Sister Blandina put her hand to the plow with thousands of other nuns. The labor of nuns in the American West blazed a trail with schools and hospitals, adult homes and orphanages that spoke to the dogged productivity of sisters. From leaky shacks rose prestigious academies, and out of canvas tents grew modern hospitals. Congregations in many locations received praise as heartfelt as that for Mother Josephine. Sisters and their congregations looked far beyond mortar-­ and-­ stone achievements. A ministry among people also guided their western lives. With widening regional exposure and deeper immersions into the cultures of the West, nuns emerged as strong-­ minded friends of the oppressed, denouncing discrimination, supporting the working class, speaking up to public officials, and squeezing from the institutional church more monetary and spiritual assistance. For such hard work, admirable at the very least for the womanly grit displayed, sisters more than earned the glowing funeral eulogy that celebrates the individual. Yet effusive phrases from visiting dignitaries ignored the harsher aspects of how and at what costs sisters compiled their accomplishments . The real lives of nuns remained hidden from those who viewed sisters as adorable religious icons rather than as complicated women traveling a complicated western path. The American West rarely treated its peoples gently. More typically, it tormented its residents, crazed with desert heat and paralyzed with mountain cold, while heaping onto these assaults of nature the indignity and pain designed by warring humans. Too easily, raconteurs gazing back on these sisters’ life narratives tinted them with a rosy glow of nostalgia that glossed over the hard-­ core baseline of history. “Salt of the earth” hardly described the wrenching processes required when risking a known personal identity for a physical, intellectual, and spiritual self in a region of intense human suffering and major political contests. The crosscurrents of western contest did not waft only through Native lands, wagon trains, urban barrios, mining camps, or cattle ranges. They seeped under convent thresholds, drifted through kitchens, and worried their way into chapels, parlors, and refectories, bearing a real West, not a fictional one, to alter the patterns of American religious life for women. The West wrapped nuns in conflicting situations and priorities, and the sisters, like westerners on all landscapes, responded in ways that enhanced and damaged the many faces of the region. One sister, on hearing plans to extend a railroad line to a remote town, captured the western perplexity by responding, “Progress is in sight—so is disaster . . . to our native popu­ lation.”2 Nuns of the West : 269 Essential transformations in religious expectations, choices that defied long-­ held practices, or decisions that set nuns against church or government or each other exploded in a region already engaged in dramatic and profound change. Through individual and collective experience, professed women confronted the fact that, for good and ill, pressured by ethnic cultures and regional demands, the pulse of religious life changed in the American West. The nuns who left the monasteries of Europe, inundated by western life and western place, had emerged as the sisters in the convents of America. Voices of Opposition Not all westerners greeted Catholic nuns with friendship or tolerance. In...