Venerable Catherine McAuley (1778–1841)

Birth and loss of her parents

Catherine Elizabeth McAuley was born on 29 September 1778 near Dublin, to James McAuley, a practicing Catholic, and Elinor Conway.^[5] Her father died on 18 July 1783, when she was only five; her mother, left alone with Catherine, her younger brother James and her sister Mary, died in turn in 1798, when Catherine was twenty.^[6][7]

This early double loss opened a period of family dispersal. With no resources of their own, the three McAuley children were taken in by different branches of the family — with profound religious consequences for each of them.

Uncle Conway, then the Armstrongs

Catherine first lived with a maternal uncle, Owen Conway, before joining her brother and sister in 1801 in the home of a Protestant relative of their mother, William Armstrong.^[8][9] The contrast between these two worlds would mark her life durably: her brother James, who remained with the Armstrongs, adopted Protestantism, became an army surgeon — he would serve through the Battle of Waterloo — and kept with Catherine a relationship "more formal and distant" than the one she enjoyed with their sister.^[10] Mary married a certain William Armstrong Macauley in 1804, had five children, contracted tuberculosis and was received back into the Catholic Church on her deathbed, secretly, without her Protestant husband knowing.^[11]

Catherine, alone of the three, openly kept her Catholic faith amid surroundings that made it difficult for her. This is the first trait of a spiritual physiognomy that would never change: a quiet fidelity, never polemical, to the Catholicism received from her father.

In the service of the Callaghans

In 1803, at twenty-five, Catherine became the governess and companion of William Callaghan, a Protestant apothecary of Dublin, and of his wife Catherine Callaghan, a Quaker; the couple was childless.^[12][13] In 1809, the Callaghans settled in their country property at Coolock, north of Dublin, where Catherine McAuley followed them and remained in their service until 1822.^[14]

These years at Coolock are what biographers call the "hidden years": nothing in this existence of a governess devoted to a well-to-do couple foreshadowed the foundress she would become. And yet it is there that her entire future spirituality patiently took shape.

A silent pedagogy of mercy

Without open permission to practice her religion in a predominantly Protestant household, Catherine McAuley used her position to instruct discreetly in the Catholic faith the servants of the house and the poor children of the neighbouring village, for two decades.^[15] Her spirituality at that time drew above all on Scripture rather than on sentimentality: she discovered the suffering Christ through the psalter, which became her constant support, and drew from it, in her own words as reported by the archives of her congregation, "help and strength, constancy and mercy".^[16] It is a spirituality of the Cross far more than of consolation alone — a trait that would remain central in her teaching to the future Sisters of Mercy.

Conversions at the close of life

Catherine's patient witness bore unexpected fruit at the end of these years of service. Catherine Callaghan, the Quaker mistress of the house, converted to Catholicism shortly before her death, on 3 October 1819.^[17] Her husband William Callaghan, whose initial hostility to Catherine's Catholic practice had gradually softened, also turned toward the Catholic faith in the last years of his life, though without being able to complete a formal conversion before his death, which occurred in 1822.^[18] By a codicil dated 27 January 1822, he designated Catherine as his sole universal legatee — a gesture that astounded his own family and would change everything.^[19]

A providential inheritance

Catherine McAuley thus found herself, at forty-four, at the head of a considerable fortune, the fruit of twenty years of silent service rather than of calculation. She conceived of this inheritance in only one possible way: to place it entirely at the service of the poor of Dublin. On 22 June 1824, she leased a plot of land at the corner of Lower Baggot Street and Herbert Street; the foundation stone of the building was laid in July 1824.^[20]

Building on Baggot Street

The plan was simple and ambitious at once: a large house able to shelter homeless women, to offer religious and school instruction to poor girls, and to serve as a base for regular visits to the sick. The works advanced even as bereavement struck Catherine's family once more: her sister Mary died of tuberculosis on 11 August 1827, a few weeks before the opening of the house she would never see completed.^[21]

The opening, on the feast of Our Lady of Mercy

The House of Mercy in Baggot Street opened its doors on 24 September 1827, the feast of Our Lady of Mercy — a date Catherine chose herself and which would give its name to all the work to come.^[22][23] Catherine settled there with two companions, Anna Maria Doyle and Catherine Byrn, to take charge of the daily running of this "institution for destitute women, orphans and schools for the poor".^[24]

At first, nothing indicated that this work was to become a religious order: Catherine and her companions formed a lay association of charitable women, living in community but without vows or enclosure — a form of commitment still rare in the Church of Ireland at the time.

A community without enclosure

From 1828, the Archbishop of Dublin, Daniel Murray, accompanied the young work: he authorized the name "House of Our Lady of Mercy" and, on 22 November 1828, permitted the women of the house to visit the sick at home and in hospital.^[25] The chapel of the house was dedicated and opened to the public on 4 June 1829.^[26] This freedom of movement — unenclosed women, in a distinctive habit, circulating through the streets of Dublin to bring relief — is precisely what soon earned the community the nickname, at first mocking, of "walking nuns".^[27]

"An upstart undertaking"

This freedom did arouse serious opposition from part of the clergy and laity of Dublin, in the late 1820s. These women were reproached for duplicating, without assuming the canonical obligations, the work of already constituted religious congregations; the respectability of such a commitment was doubted for unconsecrated women. Catherine herself would be called an upstart — an arriviste — and her work judged unworthy of "respectable women", if not as an intrusion of the "uninstructed sex" into a domain reserved to the clergy.^[28]

Far from letting herself be discouraged, Catherine held firm, carried by a conviction she would later express with disarming humility about her own work:

"If the Order is my work, the sooner it falls the better; if it is the work of God, it needs no one." — Catherine McAuley^[29]

The decision to found a congregation

Faced with the continuing pressure of the clergy and of certain lay people, Catherine and her companions understood, between 1829 and 1830, that the only way to stabilize their work canonically was to constitute themselves as a true religious congregation, with approved vows and rule.^[30] This was not, originally, Catherine's plan: she had conceived the House of Mercy as a work of committed laywomen, not as the seed of a religious institute. It was canonical necessity, as much as spiritual wisdom, that led her to this step.

The novitiate at George's Hill

On 8 September 1830, Catherine McAuley entered, with two of her companions, Anna Maria Doyle and Elizabeth Harley, the convent of the Presentation Sisters at George's Hill, Dublin, to be formed there in religious life; their canonical novitiate began on 9 December 1830.^[31][32] At fifty-two, Catherine thus submitted herself, with remarkable humility for a woman who had already founded and directed a charitable work for three years, to the full demanding regime of a novitiate, under a formula of vows specially approved by the Archbishop of Dublin.^[33]

The vows of 12 December 1831

On 12 December 1831, Catherine McAuley, Anna Maria Doyle and Elizabeth Harley pronounced their religious vows into the hands of Archbishop Daniel Murray, who received their profession and appointed Catherine superior.^[34][35] This date is retained, to this day, as that of the official foundation of the Sisters of Mercy.^[36]

Catherine McAuley's distinctive intuition was not to organize charitable groups — those already existed — but to invent a form of apostolic religious life, unenclosed, in which community prayer and the classic vows (poverty, chastity, obedience) are combined with total mobility at the service of the poor, the sick and the ignorant. It is this intuition which foreshadows, several decades before their multiplication at the turn of the twentieth century, the great active women's congregations the Church would later know.

Nine foundations in ten years

From the foundation onward, the congregation grew at a remarkable speed. Between 1831 and 1841, Catherine McAuley personally founded or supervised, travelling across Ireland and England by stagecoach and then by railway, nine new communities, as well as several annex houses.^[37] The following table summarizes the principal foundations accomplished under her direct leadership.

How to read this table: list of the nine community foundations of the Sisters of Mercy personally established by Catherine McAuley between 1836 and 1841, in Ireland then in England — not counting the annex houses of Kingstown and Booterstown, near Dublin.^[38][39]

The trial of the 1832 cholera

The year following the foundation immediately put the charism of the young congregation to the test. When cholera struck Dublin in 1832, the Sisters of Mercy devoted themselves to the service of the most destitute sick, at the risk of their own lives, concretely prolonging the founding intuition: mercy is not a discourse, but a bodily and immediate service rendered to the poorest, without distinction.^[40]

The pontifical approval of the Rule (1841)

At the end of work written and reworked by Catherine herself, the Rule and Constitutions of the Sisters of Mercy received the approval of Pope Gregory XVI, on 6 June 1841 — only a few months before the death of the foundress.^[41] This Roman confirmation canonically sealed what ten years of labour and controversy had patiently built.

Mercy, "a path marked out by Christ"

For Catherine McAuley, mercy is not a vague feeling of compassion: it is, in her own words taken up in the Rule of her congregation, "the principal path marked out by Jesus Christ for those who desire to follow His example".^[42] She defines it concretely as the virtue which "has led, in a particular way, to help and console the poor sick and dying".^[43] It is therefore not a generous but anonymous philanthropy: it is a compassionate response directed toward the weakest, in direct imitation of Christ.

This theology has a concrete and decisive consequence in the way Catherine conceives help for the poor: not as occasional almsgiving, but as a real offer of instruction and independence. She furthermore refuses any denominational distinction in welcome: the doors of the House of Mercy open to all the destitute, without regard to their religious belonging, while firmly resisting the Protestant proselytizing attempts then aimed at the Catholic poor of Dublin.^[44] This theology of mercy as concrete service rejoins what the encyclopedia develops elsewhere on the justice and mercy of God and on how to grow in charity.

The Suscipe: total abandonment to Providence

The most famous prayer left by Catherine McAuley, known as the Suscipe or Act of Resignation, sums up by itself her spirituality of trusting abandonment:

"My God, I am Thine for all eternity. Teach me to cast myself entirely into the arms of Thy loving Providence with the most lively, unlimited confidence in Thy compassionate, tender pity. Grant, O most merciful Redeemer, that whatever Thou dost ordain or permit may be acceptable to me. Take from my heart all painful anxiety; suffer nothing to afflict me but sin, nothing to delight me but the hope of coming to the possession of Thee, my God, in Thine eternal kingdom. Amen." — Catherine McAuley, Suscipe (Limerick manuscript)^[45]

The prayer of Scripture and the spirit of the Cross

Faithful to what she had learned alone during the Coolock years, Catherine McAuley centres her life of prayer on Scripture rather than on religious sentimentality. She is particularly fond of the Jesus psalter — the repeated invocation of the Holy Name one hundred and fifty times — and of the seven penitential psalms, both turned toward trust and repentance.^[46] She teaches that meditation on the words and deeds of Christ in the Gospel is "the most effective means of impressing deeply upon the mind the sublime truths of religion", transforming the soul into a true sanctuary of the presence of God.^[47] And she sums up all her teaching on prayer in one sentence that holds for every Christian life, lay or religious:

"Your whole life should be one continual act of praise and prayer." — Catherine McAuley^[48]

This scriptural rootedness and this insistence on a prayer that runs through the whole of existence rejoin the great contemplative tradition which the encyclopedia explores elsewhere in the articles on how to grow in prayer and on what the saints say about it.

Hospitality without distinction

Catherine McAuley sees in every person in distress a concrete occasion to serve Christ Himself. Her conception of charity is anything but abstract, as shown by these words addressed to her sisters about the poor they serve:

"There are things which the poor prize more highly than gold, though they cost the giver nothing: the kind word, the gentle, compassionate look, the patient hearing of their sorrows." — Catherine McAuley^[49]

And when it is a matter of choosing between her own comfort and that of the people she serves, her answer leaves no room for ambiguity:

"I would rather be cold and hungry than that the poor [...] be deprived of any consolation which it is in our power to afford them." — Catherine McAuley^[50]

A concrete humility

The holiness of Catherine McAuley, as the witnesses of her time retain it, is expressed not only in great founding acts, but in very concrete gestures of humility. It is reported that after publicly correcting a young religious, Sister Clare Augustine Moore, for a fault of discipline, Catherine then knelt before her to ask pardon for the sharpness of her rebuke.^[51] Likewise, faced with a letter full of bitterness from a priest of her circle, Dr Walter Meyler, she burned part of it rather than answer harshly, and became fully reconciled with him before her own death.^[52] This way of living mercy even in the closest relationships is consistent with her conviction that holiness requires "nothing more than to accomplish our daily actions with perseverance and regularity — for that is what makes a saint".^[53]

Renouncing the instruments of penance

In the autumn of 1841, Catherine McAuley was carried off by pulmonary tuberculosis, aggravated by an internal abscess and a wound on her back left by years of discreet penitential practices.^[54] On her deathbed, she asked that her hair shirt, her discipline and her nail-studded shoes be burned without being opened or shown to anyone — a last gesture of discretion over an austerity she had never exhibited.^[55]

The last words and the legacy of Charity

Around her bed came in turn her doctor, several sisters and her brother James — still a Protestant but present beside her to the very end.^[56][57] To her doctor, she confided serenely: "Well, doctor, the scene is drawing to a close."^[58] To a sister weeping at her bedside, she simply asked: "Kiss me, my dear, and go — but do not cry."^[59] And to another religious fearful before death, she offered this word of peace:

"Do not be afraid to die. I never thought it would be so sweet [...] Oh, if this is death, it is truly easy." — Catherine McAuley, a few hours before her death^[60]

Her last word for the future of her work is contained in one sentence, which has since become the very motto of the Sisters of Mercy throughout the world:

"My legacy to the Institute is Charity." — Catherine McAuley, 11 November 1841^[61]

She died on 11 November 1841, aged sixty-three, holding her crucifix and her rosary.^[62] She left behind her about a hundred Sisters of Mercy, distributed across ten foundations in Ireland and England.^[63] In her last moments, she had also asked that there be prepared for her sisters, after her death, "a good, comforting cup of tea"^[64] — a gesture which has remained since, throughout the Mercy family, the concrete symbol of the fraternal warmth she had wanted to inscribe at the heart of her congregation.

From Servant of God to Venerable (1978-1990)

The reputation for holiness of Catherine McAuley led the Holy See to open formally her cause for canonization in 1978, under the pontificate of Paul VI: she then received the title of Servant of God.^[65] After the Roman examination of her Positio super virtutibus, Pope Saint John Paul II recognized the heroicity of her virtues on 9 April 1990 and declared her Venerable.^[66][67]

The table below situates this step within the whole canonization process, as it applies to the cause of Catherine McAuley.

How to read this table: Catherine McAuley has passed the first two steps of the canonization process; her cause today stands in the middle of the third step, awaiting the recognition of a miracle.^[68]

The miracle currently under study

The postulator of the cause, Sister Brenda Dolphin, examined over the years several dozen healings reported through the intercession of Catherine McAuley, none of which met, so far, the criteria of scientific inexplicability required by the Church.^[69] One more recent case, the healing in 2016 of a gravely ill infant, was however retained, rigorously examined by a diocesan tribunal, and now stands under study at the level of the Holy See.^[70] The outcome of this Roman examination will determine whether Catherine McAuley can advance to beatification.

Two centuries after the foundation of Baggot Street, the Sisters of Mercy number thousands of religious distributed in autonomous communities on every continent, united by the same founding intuition: mercy lived concretely, in direct contact with the poor, the sick and the ignorant, without enclosure or distance.^[71] The former House of Mercy in Baggot Street, restored from 1994 and opened by the President of Ireland Mary Robinson, is today the Mercy International Centre, a place of memory and pilgrimage for the great worldwide family of the Sisters of Mercy.

The figure of Catherine McAuley joins, in the Ignispedia series devoted to venerables and servants of God, that of other founders recognized by the Church for the heroicity of their virtues, such as Venerable Marthe Robin, foundress of the Foyers de Charité, or Venerable Henri Caffarel, founder of the Équipes Notre-Dame. Like them, she recalls that a work born of a silent fidelity and a providential inheritance can, in little more than a decade, spread across several continents, provided it remains founded on the Cross and on trust in Providence.

• Discover Venerable Marthe Robin and Venerable Henri Caffarel: other nineteenth- and twentieth-century founders on the way to the altars.
• Explore the justice and mercy of God: the theological foundation of all of Catherine McAuley's work.
• Read How to grow in charity and What do the saints say about charity?: two gateways into the spirit of mercy she embodied.
• Read How to grow in prayer: the prayer of Scripture which nourished her whole interior life, from the hidden years at Coolock until her death.
• Retain the essential: Venerable Catherine McAuley (1778-1841), faithful to her Catholic faith amid a hostile entourage, devoted at forty-four a providential inheritance to the foundation of the House of Mercy in Dublin, then of the Sisters of Mercy, an active and unenclosed congregation today spread across every continent. Declared venerable by Saint John Paul II on 9 April 1990, she awaits the recognition of a miracle for her beatification.