Good Hearts: Catholic Sisters in Chicago's Past (review)

Some ten years ago, I stood for hours in a line that weaved around four city blocks, waiting to pass by the coffin of Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, the beloved leader of Chicago's Catholic community. Thousands gathered to honor Bernardin, but as I read Suellen Hoy's Good Hearts, I realized that my most vivid memory of the evening was how, while waiting in line, we visitors shared joyous stories of attending Chicago's parochial schools. The nuns who ran those schools had shaped us and shaped our faith more profoundly than any cardinal could. Yet their lives were rarely remembered with the same pomp and celebration.

Hoy reminds us that for too long the history of religious women has been ignored or dismissed despite their central role in building the American Catholic Church and many of this nation's charitable institutions. In Good Hearts, a collection of mostly previously published essays, Hoy reveals the dynamic lives that nuns led. Tracing their story from the 1846 arrival of the Irish Sisters of Mercy through demonstrations in the 1960's, Hoy offers glimpses of thousands of activist nuns who changed the face of Chicago. They exercised far greater autonomy and authority than their Protestant counterparts, although the Church's ecclesiastical structure and their own spiritual training downplayed public recognition of their achievements and left them relegated as minor players in the city's history as well. Initially they attended to the needs of the poor immigrants through parochial schools, hospitals, orphanages, and homes for "fallen women." As neighborhoods changed, religious women embraced the new arrivals, whether black or white, Catholic or Protestant.

Hoy also emphasizes the importance of class in defining the nuns' lives and the goals they set for their students. Many orders maintained a hierarchy of choir and lay sisters in the twentieth century, although an increasingly larger percentage of the sisters were drawn from the ranks of working-class immigrants or their children. In the nineteenth century and for much of the twentieth, many nuns accepted as permanent the socioeconomic system that made charity necessary, and thus "channeled their efforts toward alleviating the symptoms of poverty through personal works of mercy and charitable institutions" (p. 5). Nonetheless, they saw education as the key to social mobility, and by the 1940's, began to adopt direct action methods to address racial injustice and economic inequality.

In the only new essay, "Marching for Racial Justice in Chicago in the 1960s," Hoy effectively argues that the radicalism demonstrated by some sisters in the 1960's—such as participation in Civil Rights protests-was not a revolution prompted by Vatican Council II and the publication of The Nun in the World, although both were influential. Rather, Hoy contends that these protests were the culmination of decades of interaction with African Americans through schools, settlement houses, and various forms of social work. Moreover, she adds that subsequent challenges to the church hierarchy in the 1960's "grew out of an honest desire by a large number of contemporary sisters 'to serve God best' rather than serve a system that often felt oppressive (p. 129)."

Hoy brings these disparate essays together with a brief nine-page introduction, but a longer, more integrative piece might work better. Good Hearts does not purport to offer a complete history of religious women in Chicago, although Hoy and this reviewer agree that such an important story needs to be told. Nonetheless, Hoy has made an impressive start with this collection, drawing attention to women who were powerful agents of social change and providing a book that scholars of religious history, urban history, and women's history must read.