Catherine Spalding, SCN: A Life in Letters by Mary Ellen Doyle (review)

This book is a compendium of letters to and from Catherine Spalding, the founder of the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth in Kentucky. Mary Ellen Doyle located the letters in the Nazareth archives, and they include sixty texts from Spalding and others written to Spalding from her parents, students, other sisters, and clergy. These primary source documents were written during Spalding's forty-five years as a Sister of Charity. Mary Ellen Doyle, also a Sister of Charity, has organized the correspondence into five chapters, ordered chronologically: chapter 1 is called "The Foundation Years, 1812–1838"; chapter 2 contains letters written while Spalding was the leader and administrator of the congregation (1813–1844); chapter 3 includes letters written about the Louisville, Kentucky, mission (1844–1850); chapter 4 focuses on the congregation at Nazareth (1850–1856); and chapter 5 consists of Spalding's correspondence during her final years (1856–1858). One appendix lists the recipients of Spalding's letters, and another appendix includes the fifty-one sisters who cosigned Spalding's important letter to Bishop Benedict Flaget in 1841. Doyle has reproduced the documents for the sisters and for future historians as they were written, with only slight editing to correct spelling and the like. Thus, Doyle does not make provocative claims. Rather, she emphasizes Spalding's administrative abilities and compassion for her friends, for orphans for whom she cared, for students, and for the many sisters she led through the tumultuous years of the mid-nineteenth century.

As the author of the earlier study Pioneer Spirit: Catherine Spalding, Sister of Charity of Nazareth (Lexington, Ky., 2006), Doyle is eminently qualified to compile this book of Spalding's letters. To preserve reliability and validity, Doyle has meticulously researched those who wrote and received the letters. She also comments on each letter, emphasizing context and her own interpretation. She admits there are silences in the documents, including any commentary by the sisters on their owning slaves. She also recognizes other limitations of the correspondence, mainly the limited number of extant letters between Spalding and her ecclesiastical superiors, although some are available.

Spalding joined the Sisters of Charity in 1813 and is considered the Nazareth congregation's founder. With her sisters, she established Nazareth Academy as well as Presentation Academy, an orphanage, and a hospital in Louisville. Five extant letters written between 1812 and 1838 provide the reader with information about what Spalding did and how she carried out her important tasks. In one letter, Spalding defends her religious congregation to the mayor of Louisville and returns the money that the city paid the sisters for nursing the sick during a cholera epidemic. Not all women's religious congregations worked without pay when caring for the sick, but the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth incurred the expenses themselves rather than being "hirelings" (p. 17). Another letter sets the tone for the sisters' work: while donors would support them, the sisters would be in control, without interference from outside bodies.

The next chapters focus on letters concerning Spalding's administration in Louisville and Nazareth. The most important letter is one she wrote to Bishop Flaget, who wanted to merge the Nazareth sisters with the Sisters of Charity in Emmitsburg, Maryland, who had joined with the French community the Daughters of Charity. To maintain their distinct American identity and independence, the Nazareth sisters successfully resisted. Yet harmony was not always achieved. An 1854 letter from Spalding reveals that there were discontented sisters, "informers," who complained about her administration to the Louisville bishop even as the expansion of new institutions was underway (p. 202). Thus, letters are helpful in highlighting not only Spalding's progress in constructing the institutions but also the "frustrations and contradictions" she faced while leading the community (p. 209).

This correspondence illuminates the practices, policies, and physical and emotional energies that establishing women-led institutions required in the mid-nineteenth century and will be helpful...