Priceless Spirit: A History of the Sisters of the Holy Cross, 1841-1893 by Sister M. Georgia Costin, C.S.C. (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 299 Priceless Spirit:A History ofthe Sisters ofthe Holy Cross, 1841-1893- By Sister M. Georgia Costin, C.S.C. (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. 1994. Pp. xi,268. $24.95.) Prominent among pioneer settlers in the American Midwest were religious sisters from Europe. With few material resources, these young women faced severe cultural and physical challenges in order to serve the spiritual, social, and educational needs of expanding frontier communities. Drawing upon archival records and contemporary accounts, Sister Georgia Costin explores the experiences of an important Indiana sisterhood, the Sisters of the Holy Cross, during its first half-century in America. Her chronicle has much to tell us about nineteenth-century religious life and organization and about the efforts of sisters to gain and retain autonomy over their collective lives and works. Interaction between sisters and church officials was uneasy throughout the period, since female initiative was, for the most part, neither expected nor welcomed . Within the Holy Cross community, however, brothers and priests appreciated the talents and generosity of the sisters and collaborated with them in various ways. In this regard, the book has an important secondary theme, one that receives nearly as much attention as its primary subject. According to Costin, previously published histories and community legends present an inaccurate , unduly negative picture of Father Edward Sorin, charismatic leader of the Holy Cross community throughout much of the period. Her decision to use the book to demonstrate that, in fact, his virtues far surpassed his character flaws is unfortunate. Not only is the exercise unconvincing and diversionary, but, equally serious, it makes the book as much a story of Sorin as of the sisters. The scope of the study is limited in two important respects. First, despite its title, it focuses disproportionately on the pre-1866 period. Second, because it relies for data almost entirely on community records and church histories, it is more an institutional history than an analytical social history. Even within the constraints imposed by her sources, Costin gives far more attention to the internal organization of the sisterhood than to its corporate works. Readers seeking to learn more about how nineteenth-century sisters financed and conducted schools, hospitals, and social agencies, recruited and educated members , and reacted to recurring, often bitter, mainstream criticism will be disappointed. With one outstanding exception, a lively account of the experiences of sisters who volunteered as military nurses during the Civil War (chapters 19 and 20), the response of sisters to national crises, political and social, receives only casual mention. Despite its limitations, this interesting,well-written account represents a welcome contribution to the growing corpus ofliterature on the lives and works of Catholic women in nineteenth-century America. MaryJ. Oates Regis College, Weston, Massachusetts ...