By Sister Julia Upton
The intrepid Frances was just 17 years old when she met Catherine McAuley. Although she originally moved to Dublin for its social life, Frances soon became disenchanted with its superficiality and longed for something deeper and more meaningful. She confided this restlessness in her confessor, Father Edward Armstrong, a close advisor of Catherine McAuley, who suggested that Frances teach a few hours each day at the recently opened school for poor children on Baggot Street. This is how Frances came to know Catherine, whom she deeply admired. “A holy friendship grew up between these two gifted women which never waned during the lifetime of either,”[1] and when Archbishop Daniel Murray approved the Institute of Our Lady of Mercy on September 24, 1828, Frances became a permanent member, “setting aside her rich garments and comfortable apparel, putting on a black dress of plain material, with a lace cap….”[2]
Two years later, Catherine designated Frances as fiscal manager of the Institute while Catherine, Anna Marie Doyle, and Elizabeth Harley completed their novitiate at George’s Hill. Once they were professed and returned to Baggot Street, Frances remained in charge of the household’s financial business, as well as teaching in the school and visiting the sick. When Anna Marie Doyle became superior of the foundation to Tullamore in 1836, Frances was named Catherine’s assistant.
Her biographer, Sister Kathleen Healey, RSM, described Frances as “dignified, animated and attractive … remaining youthful in her spirit of fun always.”[3] Having matured considerably and developed her administrative ability, Frances was the ideal choice to lead the foundation to Carlow in 1837. During Catherine’s lifetime, Frances was the only other Sister of Mercy to make new foundations: Naas (1839) and Wexford (1840) which she planned with Catherine; and after Catherine’s death in 1841, she founded a convent in Westport in 1842 as Catherine had recommended.
On October 4, 1843, the newly named Bishop of Pittsburgh, Michael O’Connor, and the pastor of St. Leo’s, Father James Maher, visited the convent to make an appeal for religious teachers in his newly formed diocese in the wilderness of Western Pennsylvania. Although Frances was not present for the conversation, all 23 sisters indicated an ardent desire to take up the mission to the “New World.” Frances was selected to lead the foundation and, less than a month later on November 2, 1843, they left St. Leo’s Convent, heading to Dublin via Naas. From there they traveled to Kingston, the port of Dublin, where they set sail for Liverpool; they remained there until their ship was ready to sail. On November 10, the Queen of the West, the largest trans-Atlantic sailing vessel Atlantic at that time, was ready to set sail on its first return voyage to New York.
The speed of their decision-making was a surprising contrast to the tediousness of travel in that day. The sisters arrived in New York on December 11 and enjoyed the hospitality of the Madams of the Sacred Heart on Houston Street until they could continue the journey to Pittsburgh. After three days they traveled by rail to Philadelphia where they stayed an additional four days with the Sisters of Charity. On December 18, they finally began the last leg of their journey over the Allegheny Mountains to Pittsburgh. Because the stagecoach could not hold them all, they split into two groups, taking different routes — one north along the Juniata River, the other south through Carlisle and Greensburg. That leg of the journey, which took them 60 hours with time out only to change horses, would today take us about six hours on the interstate. They arrived on December 21, which happened to be Thanksgiving Day in Pittsburgh, and instantly became Foundation Day for the Sisters of Mercy in the United States. The following day, in a four-story rented building, they opened the convent, began preparing for Mass on Christmas Day and teaching neighborhood children.
William Quarter, bishop-elect of the newly formed diocese of Chicago, who had been among those who welcomed Frances and the sisters upon their arrival in New York, made her promise that she would also make a foundation in Chicago. Always true to her word, Frances was finally able to do so in 1846. She accompanied six sisters on the arduous journey, sailing up the Ohio River, then chartering a stagecoach to Cleveland where they boarded the Oregon, intending to take it the rest of the way. However, they were “bumped” in Detroit and had to take a stagecoach to Kalamazoo, where they boarded the steamer Sam Ward for the final leg to Chicago where they arrived on September 24. That five-day journey would take us about seven hours by car today.
Chicago was considerably more primitive than Pittsburgh in 1846 with a population made up of trappers, traders, sailors, farmers, Native Americans and immigrant laborers whose children enrolled in the sisters’ school. That autumn the other Works of Mercy also began in earnest, and plans were made for an orphanage and hospital. Several months later, Frances was needed back in Pittsburgh, so she set to make the return journey in winter and alone, with harrowing results, but that neither stopped nor thwarted the Intrepid Frances Warde. She set right back to work in Pittsburgh and on May 9, 1848, Mercy Hospital opened just in time to handle the cholera outbreaks soon plaguing the city.
Ahead lay at least 20 more foundations, among them to Providence, Rhode Island (1851); Manchester, New Hampshire (1858); and Bangor, Maine (1865). Early in the 1880s, however, shortly after her last foundation to Deering, New Hampshire (1882), Frances’s health began to fail. She wanted no special treatment and remained on her own cot in the dormitory until the end. Meanwhile, sisters from all over New England came to receive a final blessing from her in those last months until she quietly slipped away in the early hours of September 17, 1884, at age 74 in the 53rd year of her profession.
In celebrating the 50th anniversary of the foundation in the United States, Bishop Denis Bradley of the newly established Diocese of Manchester,[4] and one of Frances’s former students declared:
Fifty years ago they numbered seven. Today they number thousands and are established in fifty-eight dioceses in the United States. We were favored in having as foundress one who drank in the spirit of the Order at its very source, one who governed this community for twenty-five years, the Revered Mother Warde. She now rests amongst the hills of New Hampshire, in this land which was very dear to her.
“Rests,” did we say? We think she rests not, but is as near to each of her living children as to the dead by her side, reminding them of the blessedness of their high vocation, and of that reward exceeding great which awaits them in Heaven.[5]
[1] The Sisters of Mercy of Manchester, New Hampshire, Rev. Mother M. Xavier Warde (1902) 19. Although this biography lacks the careful referencing of future books, since it was published just fifteen years after her death, many of the contributors would have known and lived with her, which is of value in itself even if a bit hagiographical.
[2] Rev. Mother M. Xavier Ward., 25.
[3] Kathleen Healy, RSM, Frances Warde: American Foundress of the Sisters of Mercy (New York: Seabury Press, 1973) 56-57.
[4] Established on 4 May, 1884, the Diocese of Manchester, which encompasses the entire state of New Hampshire, was carved out of the Diocese of Portland, which had included both Maine and New Hampshire.
[5] Rev. Mother M. Xavier Warde, 287.