Category Archives: Unmasking the Archives (2018)

March 10, 1965 march in Selma, Alabama. Pictured from left to right Sr. Roberta Schmidt, CSJ, Sr. Antona Ebo, FSM, Sr. Rosemary Flanigan, CSJ, and Sr. Eugene Marie Smith, FSM. Associated Press (AP) photo.

As a historian, I think it is important to remember and emphasize that the lived experience of American sisters is embedded within broader social and cultural struggles that rocked the nation in the last half century. By the mid-1960s, over 200,000 Catholic women were living and working in over 400 religious orders in the United States providing an invisible, and often taken for granted, workforce that had created and or staffed thousands of schools, hundreds of hospitals and social service agencies across the country. The iconic AP photograph above – front page headlines in most major newspapers – documented a watershed moment in the history of women religious and the history of the United States.

Although the six Catholic sisters who marched in Selma that day were among hundreds of marchers, their presence was a landmark occurrence, an event that would reverberate around the country. Never before had Catholic sisters been involved in a national public protest, let alone one that was covered by all the national media. By the final march to Montgomery completed later that month, approximately 50 sisters representing 12 religious orders had gone to Selma. Catholic nuns would never be found on the sidelines of social activism again – they moved center stage.

The mandates of Vatican II dovetailed with the major social upheavals and transitions prevalent in 1960s America. The Vietnam War, the War on Poverty, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Women’s Movement jerked the country out of its 1950s idyllic complacency and shook the nation into reexamining its own ideals and its bedrock principles of equality and justice for all. Women religious were far from immune from these social struggles and emboldened by the mandates and optimism of Vatican II, they saw these events through the lens of Gospel imperatives and as significant opportunities to live their Catholic faith and religious identity in the modern world.

Armed with graduate education, real-world experience, and the spirit and documents of the Second Vatican Council, many American nuns began an even greater transition into the public sphere expanding social justice ministries beyond institutional borders. They worked on issues of discrimination involving race, gender, ethnicity, immigration, disability, and gay rights. They moved into the inner city and the hinterlands building housing projects and providing healthcare and education to the urban and rural poor. Prison ministry, anti-death penalty advocacy, environmental and peace activism became part of their social justice agenda. And globally, they reached out to women and children through microfinancing, fair trade advocacy, water and land management issues, and anti-violence campaigns.

Sr. Martha Smith, CSJ and Sr. Dolores Fitzgerald visit a family in Vredenburgh, Alabama, 2004. Carol Coburn papers, Martha Smith Archives and Research Center.

Joining with other secular agencies outside the Catholic Church to advocate for justice, Catholic sisters provided advocacy and in some cases leadership for the development of Head Start, the War on Poverty, the United Farm Workers, the Sanctuary Movement supporting Central American refugees, as well as protests to close the School of the Americas at Ft. Benning, Georgia. Attempting to take more active responsibility for the investment practices of national and global corporations, sisters also participated in protests and asserted power as stockholders against discriminatory policies involving issues such as worker’s rights, nuclear weapons, housing for the poor, and many issues involving multinational peoples.

These contributions to social justice cannot be overestimated and provide a significant narrative in American social history, women’s history, and Catholic history in the 20th century. Catholic archives must insure that this story is preserved, accessible, and communicated globally in a world searching for meaning and survival in the 21 st century.

Carol K. Coburn
Professor of Religious Studies
Avila University

On April 26, 1858, the German Franciscans of the Holy Cross Province found a new home on the shores of American soil. Exiles from their fatherland, they established an independent province on July 2, 1879. The new province was named after the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus. Their mission was simple – to bring the Gospel to the German-speaking Catholics.

Franciscan Friar standing with two Chippewa leaders, 1929

First, parishes were established in Illinois and then to Missouri, Indiana, Nebraska and Ohio. Their deep devotion stretched further to the Native Americans in Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota and Athabaskans living in Alaska.

As the missions opened up, the Friars began to serve the souls in far off lands. They were entrusted with their own missions in countries such as; China, Brazil, Africa, South Sudan; while sending missionaries to Morocco, Philippines, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong, Japan and Vietnam.

This medallion, received in 2009, is preserved in the Provincial Archives and stands as a testament of the friendship and respect between two chiefs – one of the St. Croix Band of Chippewa and the other of Father Michael Perry, the Minister Provincial at the time of the Sacred Heart Province. Extraordinary keepsakes stand as a physical reminder to the long history and spiritual ministry imparted by the Franciscans priests and brothers to all of God’s people.

Medallion, St. Croix Band of Chippewa, 2009

Today, the Franciscans continue to care for the needs of parishes in nine states. They support one another in fraternal communion. They proclaim the Gospel in respect to the diverse cultures for which they labor. And, it is within the walls of the Provincial Archives, where the documents come alive once more to reveal the Franciscan devotion for God’s people as it has shaped our history’s past.

Denise Thuston
Provincial Archivist (Franciscan Province of the Most Sacred Heart)

On July 31, 1973, Sister Rita Anne Houlihan, r.c., was arrested and held prisoner for 14 days for picketing with the United Farm Workers in Fresno, California. Fifty-three women and 150 men were arrested that day, including 16 sisters and 24 priests. The religious men and women had come to Fresno to “witness to the presence of the Church in the struggle of the workers against the unjust injunction preventing adequate picketing, and to encourage them in their efforts to remain non-violent, when they had been the victims of so much violence.”

While at the prison camp in Fresno, Sister Rita Anne Houlihan (center) was visited by the Cenacle Superior General Rita Foy (left) and Assistant General Mary Ann Carroll (right). Photo courtesy of the North American Province of the Cenacle.

In a series of letters and an oral history interview, Sister Rita Anne described this “rich, painful experience.” While imprisoned, she met Dorothy Day who was detained at the same jail, and was introduced to César Chávez. She even heard a concert by Joan Baez who came to help raise the spirits of the prisoners. Despite the long days of stress and uncertainty, Sister Rita Anne witnessed a beautiful sense of community among the imprisoned women. There were daily morning exercises, daily Mass, and everything was shared in common (even toothbrushes!). The Chicano women were tenderly solicitous of the sisters because they had never been “in” before. For their part, the sisters refused to sign a release unless everyone was freed together. Sister Rita Anne was able to continue the Cenacle ministry of retreats by giving private directed retreats to some of her fellow prisoners. Looking back on the experience, Sister Rita Anne wrote, “I am very happy I did this and have no regrets though it was a little scary at first.”

Jerice Barrios, Archivist
North American Province of the Cenacle

The Franciscans have a long history in the Southwest. Fray Marcos de Niza saw Zuni Pueblo in 1539, leading to centuries of evangelization and struggle. After Mexico gained independence from Spain, trust in the Franciscans diminished and their numbers in the Southwest declined until the last died in 1848.

Fifty years later, at the request of Mother Katharine Drexel, the Franciscans returned to the Southwest. Three friars from St. John the Baptist Province, Cincinnati, Ohio arrived on the Navajo Nation and manned a mission in St. Michaels, Arizona. The ministry flourished and the friars helped to develop a written Navajo language, facilitated additions of more than 1,000,000 acres to the reservation, and expanded their ministries to New Mexico in its Pueblo settlements, Hispanic villages, and other outlying missions.

After many years of running missions in the Southwest, and after decades of discussion, the friars voted to establish a separate Franciscan province. On January 3, 1985, the Province of Our Lady of Guadalupe was founded. Most of the approximately 100 founding friars were already living and working in the Southwest. Today, members of OLG Province continue to minister among the Navajo, Pueblo and Hispanic people of Arizona and New Mexico.

The early friars at St. Michaels also ran the area’s post office out of a room at the mission. It was established in 1902. During a recent spring cleaning, Br. Jose Rodriguez found the old Post Office sign and brought it to OLG’s archives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The first photo shows Fr. Anselm Sippel outside St. Michaels Mission c. 1948. The sign can be seen hanging in the background. The second photo shows the sign as it is today, with the zip code which was a later addition.

Brie Montoya
Provincial Archivist

When I started research for my forthcoming book Chicago Católico: Making Parishes Mexican, 1920-77, historian Ellen Skerrett sagely suggested “Don’t forget the Sisters!” I gathered abundant material from Mexican parishioners and Claretian clergy at St. Francis of Assisi, a church known as Chicago’s catedral mexicana. But with Ellen’s words ringing in my ears, I contacted the Sisters of St. Francis who had staffed St. Francis School from its founding in 1867. The school had great historic importance, I realized, as Chicago’s first parochial school that served a primarily Spanish-speaking population.  At the Motherhouse of the Sisters of St. Francis in Joliet, archivist Sister Marian welcomed me and shared the school convent’s annals. The monthly annals became bedrock material for two chapters of my book. These orderly, typed pages allowed me to glimpse the lost world inside the school (closed in 1964), where Euro-American sisters sometimes struggled with ethnic Mexican students and families. Moreover, the annals allowed me to see the world from the Sisters’ convent, perched on a crowded, multi-ethnic residential street. The Sisters offered straightforward reflections about ethnic transitions in the neighborhood, offering vignettes of “pantry parties” with old time German American former students, a Mexican American boy’s funeral procession, or African Americans avidly attending the parish street festival, just in front of the convent’s door.

Deborah Kanter
Professor of History, Albion College