Called to Serve: A History of Nuns in America

5. Serving Those in Need

111 5 Serving Those in Need M A R I O N G U R N E Y, a recent convert to Catholicism, was convinced there was only one way to bring salvation to New York City residents in the early twentieth century. “[T]he city of New York will be saved if it is,” Gurney claimed, “not by the distribution of clothing and groceries, nor yet by the study of Browning and the cultivation of fine arts, but by regeneration of individual human lives as one by one they are brought back to the Sacraments of the Catholic Church.”1 Gurney, a graduate of Wellesley College, was an enthusiastic advocate of social settlements, which gave middle- and upper-class Americans the opportunity to live among the poor and working classes while offering them a variety of educational and social services. When Clement Thuente, OP, a Dominican priest who was pastor of St. Catherine of Siena parish on New York’s East Side, decided to open a settlement house within the parish boundaries, he turned to Gurney for assistance because she “knew the needs of the neighborhood as well as the priests who had thoroughly surveyed it, understood settlements thoroughly, and generously offered her services to organize a Catholic settlement, no matter how humble and poor.”2 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, immigrants from southern and eastern Europe found themselves dealing with a host of practical problems, including finding a place to live, securing employment, and keeping their children safe. In addition to recognizing the many difficulties faced by these newcomers to the United States, Gurney was concerned about their spiritual lives, and contended that Catholic settlement houses could effectively provide religious education and sacramental preparation classes for children and adults. Called to religious life, she had difficulty finding a congregation that combined the active and contemplative ministries in exactly the way she envisioned. After a period of time spent in prayer, meditation, and consultation with her spiritual director, Gurney decided to found a religious community dedicated to the work she believed God was asking her to do. 112 Serving Those in Need In 1908, a notice in Church Progress announced the formation of the “Institute of Our Lady of Christian Doctrine,” which would train women to minister in rural parishes without a resident pastor. The Institute was not designed as either a teaching or nursing community of women religious, and could not “undertake any form of institutional work.”3 Gurney hoped this new community would serve the church by preparing children for First Communion and Confirmation, developing a parish library for volunteer catechists, and publishing material related to the field of religious education. Their ministry, she informed New York Cardinal John Farley (1902–1918), served as an additional way of counteracting Protestant missionaries seeking to draw Catholic immigrants away from their faith. Gurney and four other women begin living as a religious community on September 8, 1908. Unlike most other young women entering religious life in the early twentieth century, they were not cloistered while they were being formed, or educated, for religious life. Instead, the sisters organized and staffed a Sunday school at Our Lady Help of Christians parish on the Lower East Side. During the three years the women worked at the parish, enrollment in religious education classes increased from 20 to 700 students . When the new community was asked to work at St. Joachim’s—also on the Lower East Side—the sisters discovered that it was very difficult to interest the parish’s children and their parents in either religious education or sacramental preparation. Gurney’s work in settlements enabled her to diagnose the problem: “They [the sisters] were not a part of the neighborhood life, in touch with all its humble joys and sorrows.”4 If they were to succeed in bringing the Word of God to the people of St. Joachim’s, they would have to meet the physical and spiritual needs of those they were called to serve. As important as it was to save the souls of those living on New York’s Lower East Side, it was also vital to ensure that the poor received food, clothing, job training, and an opportunity to experience social , cultural, and educational activities. In response to a memorandum detailing the conditions among which the residents of the Lower East Side were living, Farley permitted the women to open the Madonna House Day Nursery on Cherry Street in September 1910. Within six...