Sister Madeleva Remembered: Why She Still Matters After Fifty Years

An obituary published shortly after her death at age seventy-seven described Sister M. Madeleva Wolff, C.S.C. (1887-1964) as “the most renowned nun in the world.”¹ The New York Times noted her wide-ranging achievements as a poet, essayist, scholar, and educator, citing in particular her establishment in 1943 of the graduate School of Sacred Theology at Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana, the first of its kind for women and laymen.²

Sister Madeleva’s distinctions were many. A scholar of medieval literature, she was one of the first two nuns to earn a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley (in 1925) and later pursued postgraduate study at Oxford (1933-1934). She founded one college (Saint Mary-of-the-Wasatch in Salt Lake City in 1926) and served for twenty-seven years as president of another (Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana, from 1934-1961). In the early 1950s, her efforts launched the Sister Formation Movement, a coalition of congregations of women religious devoted to advancing the professional preparation of young nuns for teaching and other careers. Her volumes of poetry, thirteen in all, won acclaim and numerous awards; among them, the Spirit Award of Merit from the Catholic Poetry Society of America. Catholic and secular colleges and universities conferred honorary degrees upon her.

During her lifetime, Sister Madeleva’s recognition extended well beyond the academy and the church, owing in part to her extraordinary personal gifts and accomplishments but also to the era itself. She spent her entire adult life in the period often referred to as the “Golden Age of American Catholicism,” a time of rapid expansion of American religious communities and the institutions they sponsored. In the minds of many of her contemporaries, she was the real-life counterpart of the nuns idealized in blockbuster films of the period: The Song of Bernadette, The Bells of Saint Mary’s, and Come to the Stable, and in the Broadway play The Sound of Music. Enhancing her reputation, Life magazine, which at the time had the widest circulation of any publication in the United States, devoted a three-page spread to her achievements as president of Saint Mary’s (June 10, 1957), and NBC’s Today show flew her to New York City for an on-air interview with Dave Garroway, the show’s host. At the same time as Eleanor Roosevelt, she received the “Women of Achievement” award from the Women’s International Institute, and she was the only woman to lecture in a series on poetry at Boston College that included Robert Frost, Ogden Nash, and T.S. Eliot. The Macmillan publishing company, which had published several of her poetry collections, commissioned an autobiography. It appeared in 1959 as My First Seventy Years; it sold well enough to be reissued in paperback.

Among her friends and correspondents, Sister Madeleva numbered playwright and diplomat Clare Boothe Luce and her husband Henry Luce, founder of Time-Life Enterprises (in the mid-1950s, he served on the Saint Mary’s board of lay trustees), hotelier Conrad Hilton, actress Helen Hayes, philosopher Jacques Maritain and his wife Raïssa, Trappist monk Thomas Merton, and authors and scholars J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, with whom she had studied at Oxford. Long before art maven Sister Wendy, televangelist Mother Angela, and, on a different plane entirely, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Sister Madeleva was a celebrity.

In the half century since her death, numerous articles, books, and dissertations along with entries in national and international encyclopedias have documented Sister Madeleva’s contributions to American Catholicism and solidified her place among notable twentieth-century women. The 76 doctoral and 354 masters degrees awarded by the School of Sacred Theology during the twenty-six years of its existence prepared a generation of women to assume leadership roles in the church and the academy. The credentials earned by sisters thanks to the influence of the Sister Formation Movement benefited their personal lives as well as the schools and other church-sponsored organizations in which they served. Such endeavors...