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Urban Settlement Houses and Rural Parishes: The Ministry of the Sisters of Christian Doctrine, 1910-1986 Margaret M. McGuinness B y the end of the nineteenth century, women religious representing many communities were a familiar sight inAmerican cities and towns. In addition to those founded to meet the specific needs of American Catholics, such as Elizabeth Seton’s Sisters of Charity (Emmitsburg), a number of European communities had responded to the entreaties ofAmerican bishops and sent sisters across the ocean to teach school, staff hospitals, and minister to the poor.As a result, young women called to serve God and others were able to choose from a number of apostolic communities, each contributing in a distinct way to the development of the Catholic Church in America. In recent years, studies documenting the work of women’s religious communities and their place in the story of American Catholicism have steadily grown. Some, such as Carol Coburn and Martha Smith’s work on the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondolet, have demonstrated the influence of women religious on the development of American Catholicism through an examination of a particular community. Others, such as Barbara Mann Wall’s study of nursing sisters and the development of Catholic hospitals , have focused on several communities sharing a common apostolate. Still others, including recent books by Maureen Fitzgerald on Irish Catholic nuns and their work among the poor, and Amy Koehlinger on sisters’ involvement in the struggle for civil rights, have focused on the response of women religious to specific societal needs.1 Little attention has been paid, however, to the role played by smaller com23 1. See Carol K. Coburn and Martha Smith, Spirited Lives: How Nuns Shaped Catholic Culture and American Life, 1836-1920 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Barbara Mann Wall, Unlikely Entrepreneurs: Catholic Sisters and the Hospital Marketplace, 1865-1925 (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2005); Maureen Fitzgerald, Habits of Compassion: Irish Catholic Nuns and the Origins of New York’s Welfare System, 1830-1920 (Champaign, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2006); Amy L. Koehlinger, The New Nuns: Racial Justice and Religious Reform in the 1960s (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007). munities of women religious in American Catholic life, especially those whose apostolate included neither teaching nor nursing. Since the histories of many of these communities have not yet been written, they are often overlooked in broader comparative studies because even though they were supportive of and participated in movements for social justice, lack of personnel and resources prevented them from becoming a highly visible presence in this work. Founded in 1910, the Sisters of Our Lady of Christian Doctrine is one small community of American women religious that has received little attention from historians of either American Catholicism or women. Despite the fact that they have never numbered more than about seventy professed women at any one time, these sisters and others like them represent a vital part of the larger history of American Catholicism: women religious who were neither teachers nor nurses nor contemplatives, but who were able to minister to the physical and spiritual needs of Catholics in ways other communities could not. Marion Gurney, the community’s foundress, believed God was calling her to offer material assistance and religious education to the poor flocking to America’s cities during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Unable to find a community that would allow her to carry out this work in the way she believed was most efficient , which was establishing Catholic social settlements whose programs would offer material comfort and sustenance to the poor as well as religious education and sacramental preparation, Gurney founded a religious community known as the “Institute of Our Lady of Christian Doctrine.”2 Catholic women, primarily from New York City and its suburbs, would learn of this community from either priests who worked with its members or from a personal encounter with a Sister of Christian Doctrine. Sister Dorothea McCarthy, who entered the Sisters of Christian Doctrine in 1936 at the age of nineteen, for instance, knew she had a vocation to religious life, but also wanted to work with the poor. A priest at...

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