Vovete et reddite Domino, “Vow ye and pay unto the Lord your God,” a text from the Twenty-fifth Psalm, is the inscription to be found directly over the entrance door of the Georgetown Convent of the Visitation. To vow and then to pay unto the Lord!
To vow, indeed, is one thing; but to pay that vow is quite another. Not only must the religious make her vows to God in the beginning of her spiritual life, but she must also pay them to Him by the giving of a constant lifelong service, until her soul lies bare before the judgment seat of God. Vovete et reddite Domino-in these words the Georgetown Convent of the Visitation proclaims its nature and its mission: a house of vows and fulfilled promises. For over a century it has stood on the heights of Georgetown, just above the historic Potomac and the Virginian hills of Arlington beyond. Hundreds of brides of Christ have called it heaven and a home-those wise women who have chosen the barbette and the silver cross, the long black veil and the conventual habit of a Visitandine Religious, as their trousseau for their marriage to the King. Venerable for holy deeds and holy lives, its early history is linked irrevocably with the story of its sainted foundress and first superior, the humble Alice Lalor, she who, in religion, was Mother Teresa of the Heart of Mary. Ever since that day, when, with her two associates, she first climbed the heights of Georgetown village to build close to the nation’s future capital her institution of enduring usefulness, her
days of fulfilled vows and redeemed promises have left their impress on the community, never to be effaced. Persons and places, round about, have all been changed in the course of years. But time can little touch the things that rest on God. Mother Teresa builded well. Her body rests beneath the convent chapel, awaiting in peace and solitude the coming of her Savior; her love and gentleness to-day pervade the halls of old Georgetown as in the days of her earthly existence. Her vow of service made long years ago she continues to pay to her God in the existence of that blessed institution of her making. Its accomplishments today are but a continuation of that which she labored and suffered to inaugurate. Behind its walls and cloister gratings her work is going on with devoted earnestness; her ideals are being carried out with care and exactness. To her children of each generation she is a watchful mother, whose influence over their lives and actions is lasting and telling. Silent though she be in her well-earned rest and lowly repose, she is a living personality; living, indeed, for “to live in the hearts of those we leave behind is not to die.” And Mother Teresa Lalor’s place in the affections of her Visitandine Daughters throughout this whole land of ours cannot be questioned. For hers was a life which, under heaven, was most fruitful and blessed. Truly, indeed, was she one of America’s greatest foundresses.
Alice Lalor was born in Ballyragget, Kilkenny, about the year 1769. In her early home she saw unusual evidences of a great love between her father and her mother; this happy remembrance she treasured until the closing days of her life. Indeed, as the years went on and the home ties were broken by deaths and separations, both the memory of a father who often declared that he thought no woman living equal to her mother, and that of a maternal love and devotion so extraordinarily beautiful, continued to increase in intensity, until she seemed to live again with the loved
ones of home who had gone on before her into the great land beyond the threshold.
Alice Lalor’s father was a sturdy Catholic gentleman of the old school. His hospitality was proverbial throughout the entire countryside; to priests and bishops, especially, he extended a whole-hearted welcome to the family hearth. His superior intelligence won for him the friendship of Lord Devessey, whose religious zeal prompted him to offer wealth and social rank to his host if the latter would become a member of the Established Church. He even engaged his brother, a minister of the Church of England, to carry on a series of theological discussions with Mr. Lalor, in the hopes of winning him to the Anglican religion. But Mr. Lalor was too good a Catholic for that. He could do nothing but spurn temporal prosperity, when its getting was conditioned by apostasy.
Mrs. Lalor’s solicitude was centered, especially, on her little daughter, Alice. The child’s first tendencies toward piety were prudently cultivated by the mother, who was quick to discern in Alice a soul of rare quality. From the mother’s lips the child first heard the words of eternal wisdom. Her precociousness attracted attention when she was yet very young, and her unusual piety and her bright and cheerful disposition won for her the affection of her pastor, Father Carroll. From him she received the Bread of Life for the first time. Her admittance to the Holy Table at an age which was quite early for those days was accompanied by an extraordinarily sensible consolation. This sweet gift of her Eucharistic Lord was never withdrawn from Alice Lalor at any time during her whole life. Jesus in His Sacrament of love was for her not only the Bread of eternal life but the sweet reflection of her immortal soul. Lover of the Blessed Sacrament, indeed, was Alice Lalor.
When at the age of seventeen the child received the sacrament of Confirmation from Bishop Lanigan of Kilkenny,
the prelate was attracted by her deep spirituality. To him she made a general confession and to his searchings she opened up the innermost recesses of her soul. Her piety and intelligence prompted him to select her as the prefect of the Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament which, with the pastor, he established in her native parish. Father Carroll realized that he had been given a strong ally in keeping alive the spark of fervor lately kindled in his parish. Bishop Lanigan looked upon her as a future helpmate in the foundation of a community of Presentation Nuns in his diocese. He received from her a vow of chastity, made in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament; and as a token of her pledge he placed a ring upon her finger. Although complete renunciation of the world was not then practicable, as there was no convent in the neighborhood, she had resolved to consecrate herself unreservedly to Almighty God.
Family opposition to the project of the foundation of the bishop’s community of Presentation Nuns proved a providential obstacle. One of Alice Lalor’s sisters had married an American merchant, a Mr. Doran, who wished his wife to have the companionship of her sister Alice, at least for a time. Alice, who was then thirty-one years of age, agreed to go with them to America, and sailed with her sister and brother-in-law in the winter of 1794. Before leaving, however, she promised to return in two years, at which time she would aid in the foundation of the long-contemplated community. But another Bishop was destined to have her in his keeping and another country to profit by her labors.
Among the passengers on the ship were two widows, women of wealth, culture, and education, a Mrs. McDermott and a Mrs. Sharpe, who formed an intimate friendship with Alice Lalor. “Heart to heart speaketh,” and soon they made known to one another that each was desirous of entering the religious life. On the eve of the Epiphany, 1795, when their ship was sighting land, they
agreed that they would seek out a priest, and that priest, whoever he might be, they would regard as their spiritual director. On the Day of the Manifestation God led them to the Reverend Leonard Neale, one of the few priests laboring at that time in the city of Philadelphia.
Like many another Maryland youth, Father Neale had been educated at the Jesuit College at St. Omers, in French Flanders. He was admitted into the Society of Jesus, September 7, 1767. Thence he went to Bruges, and later to Liège, where he was ordained priest. In 1773 he, as a Jesuit, fell under the mandates of the famous decree, “Dominus ac Redemptor,” but though forced to lay aside the Jesuit habit, he retained the spirit of the Society. Together with the English Jesuits he went to England, where he engaged in pastoral work for four years. In response to his petition for foreign mission work, Propaganda assigned him to Demarara, in British Guiana, South America, where he labored from 1779 to 1783. Broken in health and in spirit he returned to his native state, January, 1783, and in April of the same year associated himself with his former brethren of the Society of Jesus, among whom was the Reverend John Carroll, later Baltimore’s first archbishop. When the only two priests in Philadelphia were stricken by the yellow fever that same year, Father Neale gladly took their place. For nearly six years he remained in the city, acting as Vicar-General to the then Bishop Carroll of Baltimore. During Father Neale’s stay in Philadelphia many souls placed themselves under his direction. No greater lover of Jesus Christ came to him than Alice. Lalor!
For some time Father Neale had visioned a community in the New World that might inaugurate the work of Christian education carried on so successfully for centuries in the Old. The three penitents who were brought so unexpectedly to his feet from beyond the sea seemed to him the women destined to coöperate with him in his proposed undertaking.
But Alice Lalor felt herself bound to return to Bishop Lanigan in Ireland, bound by the ring she wore on her finger since the time of her great decision before Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, and bound by her promise to the bishop. Father Neale, however, realizing the greater service she could render religion in America, asked her to remain. He showed her that she would not be revoking her vow but would be fulfilling it in a more complete manner in this new land where the Cross of Christ was raising itself, feebly and with difficulty, in the wildernesses and in the growing cities. The home ties were still drawing her to Ireland, however, not to those of kith and kin who were awaiting her return, but rather to those bound so irrevocably by spiritual claims in the cradleland of her vocation. Father Neale, as her confessor, offered to dispense her from her promise to return. Perceiving her hesitancy and her great uneasiness, he said to her one day: “Let me see that ring, my child.” The priest took the ring and, looking at its commemorative inscription, twisted it in two and threw the pieces away. She felt that she could not stand the pain caused by the severance of this last tie to her dear homeland and that great religious resolve made there many years before. But Father Neale’s action, as he had intended, had destroyed this last reluctant cord which was threatening to draw her back to Ireland. With single purpose, then, she turned her eyes from the old home to the new, and with firm steps placed her feet in the pathway of her new determination to labor in her adopted country. This was a day of signal victory for the infant Church of God in the American Republic.
At the suggestion of Father Neale, a little house was rented, wherein Miss Lalor and her two associates lived as a quasi-religious community. Mrs. Sharpe had her daugh
ter with her, a child of eight years; and some time later a young American postulant was admitted. In addition to their spiritual exercises they performed works of mercy. That she might most thoroughly purify her heart for the service of God, Alice Lalor made frequent use of the discipline and engaged in rigorous fastings. Her health was not able to stand the extremes to which her zeal led her, however, and she was forced to moderate these practices. at the command of Father Neale. The yellow fever soon thinned their slender ranks, and the head of the little community found herself one night alone in the house with the body of her dead postulant. Father Neale, too, at this time almost died. But Alice Lalor and her two associates remained in the midst of the danger, ministering like angels of mercy to the dead and dying.
In 1798 there occurred one of those providential events which are recorded in the lives of so many of God’s chosen servants. At the time of their happening these events seem casual and unimportant, but in the retrospect it is often found that they change the whole current of one’s career. This was especially true in the case of Alice Lalor. In 1799 Father Neale became president of Georgetown College. Realizing the help his three religious friends could give him in his new field of labor, he bade them come to Georgetown, where he housed them for a time with three Poor Clares who, being driven from France by the Revolution in 1793, had founded a little convent near the college. The Poor Clares were at this time endeavoring to conduct a school as a means of support; but their poverty and their rigorous life made the continuance of this venture an impossibility. For some time Alice Lalor and her two friends. assisted the Poor Clares in teaching the school, and in this way became acquainted with the rule of St. Clare and found out, likewise, that it was not the one they wished to adopt. They felt, too, that with it they could not meet the
needs of the times nor the locality. Father Neale, therefore, purchased a house in the vicinity and gave it to them. Thus was begun an establishment which to the world appeared a folly but in reality was dear to religion and later a glory to the Church in America. The shabby little building was formally opened June 24, 1799, when classes were commenced by three zealous teachers, who soon became known as “The Pious Ladies,” their only appellation for many years. Pious indeed they were, and ladies too. But their natural gentility was further augmented by the intense spiritual life they led under the direction of Father Neale. He was their spiritual father and their novice master; he initiated them into the secrets of the mystic ways. Prayer was supplemented by austerities terrifying to those of a less heroic mold. To them the privations entailed by necessity were as nothing; and only the prudent restraint of obedience saved their rapidly failing health. In his establishment and guidance of the little band, Father Neale felt he was but realizing the ideals of his young days in the priesthood. It is related that while he was in far-off Demarara, he had had one of those strange dreams not unfrequent in the lives of the saints. St. Francis de Sales, so it seems, had appeared to him and told him he was to establish a community of Visitation Nuns. The how and the where and the when remained unknown. But as the years went on, events gradually shaped themselves so as to make Father Neale feel sure that Alice Lalor, like another Jane Frances de Chantal, was to be the mother of this band of “noble women not a few”; and in her he was not to be disappointed.
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In 1800 Father Neale was consecrated coadjutor to Archbishop Carroll. As he was to continue as president of Georgetown College he did not remove to Baltimore. Hence he was able to assume his duties as novice master for the new sisterhood. It is not known just when he decided to place the sisters under the Visitation rule,
but there is the tradition in the community that very early in its history there was a consciousness that the sisters were Visitandines, at least in spirit and in desire. But knowing nothing of the rule of St. Francis de Sales, Bishop Neale regulated the life of the sisters to a modified form of the rules of the Society of Jesus. The sisters had regular hours for rising; they assembled for morning prayers, for meditation, and for Mass in the Poor Clares’ chapel; time was assigned for reading, for silence, and for an examen of conscience. They had their evening prayers in common; they recited the rosary daily; they had their fasts and their mortifications. Taken all in all they were living a truly conventual life.
When the sisters opened their school at Georgetown, the joy of the Catholics of the neighborhood knew no bounds, and as an evidence of their appreciation they coöperated whole-heartedly with the sisters in the venture. The little group of religious was increased from three to five. They kept as much as possible within their own premises so that enclosure could be observed, at least in part. But they had to do their own marketing; it was necessary for them to go out to church; and it was one of their duties to accompany their pupils in daily walks in the surrounding woods. It was a simple beginning, indeed, but one that presaged well for the things that were to follow.
But unless the grain of wheat falling to the ground die, itself remaineth alone. The grain of wheat here planted was not destined to remain alone. Death came and claimed its first victim, in the person of one whom they could ill afford to lose. After a painful illness, Mrs. Sharpe, known in religion as Sister Ignatia, their principal teacher and first directress of the academy, died July 31, 1802. “She was the soul and head of the little academy,” said the community annalist. “It prospered as long as she was able to conduct it.” Having no grounds of their own, the sisters
reluctantly laid her to rest in the public cemetery of Trinity Church, Georgetown, D. C. Her passing caused great distress in her religious family, but no one felt the loss more keenly than did Alice Lalor, now known as Mother Teresa. But none was more resigned.
The ranks were soon increased, however, by the advent of Miss Henrietta Brent, a grandniece of Bishop Neale. New members were not slow in following, and the best families in the country became represented in the community. Comfortable homes and devoted relatives were relinquished willingly for a life of want and abnegation. Those were days, indeed, when virtue ran high and love waxed warm. The cold without was more than counteracted by the love within. When Lady Poverty would allow only a few sticks of wood for light and heat, the long, dreary winter evenings were brightened by the wit and humor of Mother Teresa. Her naturally cheerful disposition never failed her; often a pleasant story from her relieved a painful situation.
1
It is recorded that at this time:
everything at the Nunnery and school bore the impress
of extreme poverty.
Provisions were dealt out by
measure; only a fixed quantity of food or fuel for each
person or place. Wheat bread was never seen there.
Corn bread was used, made from corn which the sisters
themselves had raised, and had husked and shelled be-
fore sending it to the mill to be ground. They cleaned,
salted, and put up their own fish and meat; grew all
their own vegetables, and for that purpose kept a fine
garden, the heavier work of which was done by their
negro man or men, the lighter by themselves.
Butter was rarely a part of their diet; and when this luxury could be allowed at all, it was carefully distributed in small pieces-one piece at the plate of each sister or child. Their coarse corn bread was divided in the same careful manner-a single slice to each person; and if any one found this insufficient, she had to endure the lack of more. In the sketch of the life of Mother Juliana Matthews it is related that, being Refectorian and at one time Dispenser, she had charge of giving out the provisions, and that while carrying around the bread basket before meals she often felt tempted to pick out a specially large slice for herself. To avoid all fault or inequality in the matter she used to shut her eyes and take whatever bit of bread her hand chanced upon. Sister Agnes did the same thing. “Yet,” she was wont to add, laughing, when she told of it, “it never entered my mind that this stinted fare was occasioned by necessity. I thought it entirely voluntary and suggested by a desire of practicing holy poverty.”
In winter, the Dispenser was obliged to stand in the cold while the sisters were getting their appointed supply of fuel for the ensuing day. When there was snow on the ground, she stood on a log in order to keep her feet dry, and watched the others as they took, each one, the quantity allowed for her apartment or office. Four sticks of wood each day were given for the large assembly-room stove. For the small stoves six or eight smaller pieces were set apart. If coal was burned, two scuttles made the daily portion. The bedclothes of the plain couches on which the sisters slept were too scanty to keep them warm. Through the crevices of their rough, unplastered board-walled dormitory the snow blew in freely; so that the floor and the very beds were often covered with little snowdrifts. The beds, at the best, were narrow cots of straw; but most of the sisters slept on the floor, being obliged to give up their cots to the children. So constant and severe was their exposure to the cold, that
their hands frequently became purple and swollen, the skin cracking open with the frost.
Their breakfast and supper these days consisted only of a cup of rye coffee or of milk and water, with the ever-constant single slice of corn bread already mentioned. At dinner a spoonful of molasses by way of dessert, after the salt fish or meat and vegetables, was sometimes granted as a special dainty on the occasion of grand festivals, and was highly esteemed. They also saved the parings and cores of apples, and by boiling these prepared a sweetish drink with which to vary their simple list of beverages. Each sister was provided with a tin cup and a pewter spoon for use at table, besides a tin basin and pitcher in the dormitory.
For brooms they used weeds; or, rather, they manufactured very good brooms out of a particular kind of weed. They did not even make a pretence of indulging in chairs; only one chair was to be seen in their assembly room, and that one was reserved for Mother Teresa. The other sisters sat on trunks or chests, which completed the furniture of the apart ment. In the evenings when they gathered together for recreation the room was illuminated by a “saveall”; that is, a vessel filled with grease from the pot skimmings of the kitchen. Yet not even this was used on moonlight nights; and if, at any time when the “save-all” was burning, the supply of grease that supported it gave out suddenly, the sisters contentedly sat in darkness or enjoyed the faint glimmer of the firelight. When this accident happened on Saturday nights, and any one of the sisters had a rent to draw up or some stitches to take in her severely tried wearing apparel, she lit a pine-knot reserved for such emergencies. No one thought of keeping a lamp for her private use; and the solitary candle used in the convent was burned only in the choir.
But during all the years that this condition of things
continued, no word of complaint was ever heard. On the contrary, the sisters were very gay, and made merry over the shifts and inventions to which they were driven by their poverty; the absurd conduct of their “save-all” in relapsing into darkness just when it was most needed, was sure to bring out hearty laughter.
Like St. Jane de Chantal, Mother Teresa was sure to be most cheerful when circumstances were most appalling. She literally shone joyously beneath a burden of discomfort. If starvation threatened, and even mouldy bread became too precious, Mother Teresa’s gayety changed the sisters’ hunger to cheerfulness. If the “save-all” refused to dispel darkness, her amusing tales and anecdotes introduced a brilliancy which left nothing to be desired. At last the sisters used to say, when their Mother was particularly genial with innocent entertainment: “Ah, she has something to tell us which will give us pain, and is trying to raise our courage first!” All this extreme privation was not intended by the rule; the nuns were entitled to better fare. However, they remained the victims of such distress, and moreover, happy ones.
There were, at this time, thirteen pupils in the school; children delicately reared, to whom the privations and severities of life under these circumstances offered a Spartan ordeal. Yet they flourished under it, and became strong and hardy; in this respect prefiguring the growth and strength that the school and convent were to attain. The advances made in the beginning, however, were very slow. The little sisterhood was not yet assimilated to the Visitation, or to any religious order, whatsoever. It was obliged to remain thus informally or partially organized for years, often in doubt as to whether it would be able to cohere at all, and constantly enduring the hardest of work, the most meagre of fare, the severest anxieties.
When, in 1804, the Poor Clares returned to France, Mother Teresa managed to secure a sufficient sum to purchase the former Clarist Convent. Father Neale paid for the simple altar, what little furniture there was in the house, and the library of French books. For a time the sisters. attended Mass in the Jesuit college chapel; later the Clarist altar was placed in the largest room of the academy; and finally it was moved to the building which had served the Poor Clares as their convent. At last, “The Pious Ladies” began to enjoy some kind of monastic enclosure in their sequestered quarters on the heights of Georgetown. The convent and academy occupied a square of roughly cultivated ground, through which ran from north to south a creek that emptied into the Potomac at the foot of the hill. On the eastern side lay the convent garden, orchard, and meadow, the convent itself and the house to which Bishop Neale had moved in 1808, when his term as president of the college expired. On the west the land rose in a series. of steep terraces, which were beautified by raspberry bushes, lilacs, and other shrubbery. Here, too, stood the “Old Academy,” the house to which Mother Teresa had come when, in the earlier days, she had withdrawn from the Poor Clares. At first there was no bridge across the creek, and difficult was the task, impossible quite often, of passing to and from the convent and the academy. Afterward a rustic bridge was built to span the stream, and at least one of the hardships of the early days was eliminated by this achievement.
Only four postulants came to Mother Teresa during her first nine years at Georgetown. In 1808, Miss Catherine Anne Rigden, a convert and a native of Georgetown, and the one destined to be, ten years later, Mother Teresa’s successor, entered the community. But after this no one sought admission for two years. While the prospect of any increase in the little religious institute seemed hope
less, Mother Teresa, however, was always hopeful. Her trust in God raised her infinitely above the threatenings of her earthly surroundings. The period of stagnation was finally broken in the midwinter of 1810, when a nineteenyear-old stranger, Margaret Marshall, by name, came from Conewago, Pennsylvania, and asked to be admitted as a postulant. Soon other members came, valiant women all, to cast their lot with the heroic little band on the Potomac. God’s eye had never left Mother Teresa in all those years of trial and ordeals; He was but fitting her for the mystic motherhood that was to be hers as first Visitandine Superioress in the United States.
Repeatedly, Bishop Neale had been urged to change the character of his institute. He had always desired to have it a house of the Visitation, but to this end he could not realize even the possession of the rules of the Order. The first house at Annecy had been suppressed during the French Revolution, and was not restored until 1822. The other houses in Europe refused to send a copy of the Constitutions to Georgetown because this community had not been founded in the regular way, by professed members of the Order.
Well-meaning friends had pointed out the uselessness of continuing the institute as a Visitation community, when it was that only in name. First, Archbishop Carroll urged Bishop Neale to merge it in another enterprise to which the former had given his whole-hearted support-the foundation of the first Catholic school for girls in the city of Baltimore, by Mother Elizabeth Ann Seton; again, a Baltimore woman of wealth who had been educated by the Ursuline Nuns in Ireland wished to see “The Pious Ladies” transform their institute into an Ursuline Convent. She volunteered to go to Ireland and to return with a colony of these sisters to aid in the work of establishment, offering to pay all expenses incidental to the journey and promising to provide additional funds to carry on the work. Other advisers tried to persuade the Bishop into uniting his sisterhood with that of the Carmelite Nuns who had been established by his brother at Port Tobacco, Maryland. But to all these urgings Bishop Neale turned a deaf ear. He could never consent to any change from his cherished plan of founding a house of the Visitation; this idea was too firmly planted in his mind to be uprooted. He had gone too far on the pathway of the gentle saint of Geneva to be turned into another, however worthy or noble it might be.
Mother Teresa, too, shared in the forebodings of disaster which the future seemed to have in store for her institute; but finally a ray of genuine and lasting sunshine burst upon the simple household. Among the books of the small library acquired from the Poor Clares, there was found a volume containing the rules of the Visitation Order. During all these years it had been in their midst, neglected, of course, because none of the sisters of that day were able to read French. There is no exact record of the time or the manner of the discovery, but it is sufficient to say that its finding caused untold happiness and satisfaction; that for which they had sought so long and prayed so earnestly was at last theirs to keep and follow. From an examination of the book, the sisters soon discovered that in their eagerness to create for themselves a monastic rule, they had been practicing more rigorous austerities than the Visitandine Constitutions required. Generous, indeed, were the first American daughters of St. Francis de Sales and St. Jane de Chantal!
The rules in their possession, the sisters now needed but the habit of the order. They were then wearing a quasiconventual dress, which on a number of occasions had been modified without satisfaction. Finally, Bishop Neale decided to give to them the Carmelite habit, as worn by the sisters of his brother’s community at Port Tobacco. While the habit adopted was mainly Carmelite, it had one difference. In the rules of the Visitation the sisters had found
that “the bandeaux shall be black,” and so the white bandeau of the Carmelites gave place to the black of the Visitation. In this detail only were the Georgetown Sisters permitted to conform to Visitation requirements.
The sisters were allowed to pronounce the simple vows of religion, January 29, 1814, the Feast of St. Francis de Sales. Since they had not as yet obtained the custom book and ceremonial of the Visitation Order, this ceremony was conducted according to Jesuit style. Some time afterward they were able to adopt the full Visitation habit, for Bishop Neale had received a picture of St. Jane Frances de Chantal from Europe. Their poverty, however, prevented them from providing a new supply of guimpes, so they agreed that for the present Mother Teresa alone should be given the distinction of wearing the correct Visitandine headdress.
Bishop Neale succeeded to the archbishopric of Baltimore upon the death of the venerable John Carroll in 1815. For six years before he had struggled on with his little community, striving in vain, so it seemed, to establish relations with the Visitation Order in Europe. Up to this time no recourse in the matter had been made to the Pope, but in 1815, as chief shepherd of the souls within his vast diocese, it was the Archbishop’s duty to report in full what he had done toward forming a sisterhood in his archdiocese. In reply, Pius VII sent him a brief, dated July 14, 1816, commending his zeal, and permitting the American. children of St. Francis de Sales to take the solemn vows of religion. Great was the joy those days in old Georgetown! December 28, the Feast of the Holy Innocents, was the date of Mother Teresa’s admittance to solemn vows. It was also the hundred and ninety-fourth anniversary of the death of St. Francis de Sales! “At an early hour,” says the convent annalist, “the little conventual world was astir. Long before day, while the stars were still glimmering in the winter sky, the community knelt before the chapel altar,
in meditation.” It was the hundred and ninety-fourth anniversary of St. Francis de Sales’ entrance into Heaven; and they were about to celebrate and sanctify the day in a manner most acceptable to their holy founder, concurring in a work assigned by himself to their venerable archbishop -the establishment of his order in the New World. After an hour or so, the archbishop entered, accompanied by Father Grassi, Provincial of the Jesuits. Archbishop Neale was the celebrant and Father Grassi made the responses. No one was present except the sisters and pupils, for they lived totally forgetful of, and forgotten by, the world. Seldom was their retirement intruded upon by secular visits; so that beyond their enclosure nothing was known of an event so interesting and important to them. Mother Agnes says the day was intensely cold, the ground was covered with snow, and it was Saturday. After breakfast Archbishop Neale and Father Grassi visited the sisters in the assembly room, congratulating them upon their happiness. The archbishop told them that now like holy Simeon he could sing his “Nunc dimittis,” since his eyes had beheld what they so long had desired to see. Prophetic words, indeed, were these, for in less than six months the archbishop had passed to his eternal rest.
Christmastide this year had been a season of unusual rejoicing. The seventeen years of trial and sacrifices on the part of the sisters, and especially on that of Mother Teresa, had passed into this time of triumphant accomplishment. To Annecy in France, the Visitandine sainte source, the archbishop had written that “existence and life had been imparted” to the first established community in America of the order founded by St. Francis de Sales. The old Carmelite dress remained in use until the pattern of the true Visitandine habit came from Europe, shortly following the death of the archbishop, who was not given this added joy of seeing the full Visitation habit worn by his George
town daughters. But what he had seen accomplished justified his other words to Annecy: “Thus is this house fairly established to run its course, which I hope will never be interrupted but by the cessation of time.”
Several months of unalloyed spiritual peace and joy followed for Mother Teresa, only to be broken by what was, perhaps, the greatest trial of her life-the death of the archbishop on Wednesday, June 18, 1817. The last days of the archbishop were peaceful and his closing hours were passed in prayer and close union with God. He was privileged to receive the last sacraments from the hands of Father Grassi, in the presence of his own brother, Charles, and several priests and brothers of the Society of Jesus. He died in the little house adjoining the convent chapel, where he had resided after his resignation as president of Georgetown College, that he might be nearer the sisters. His duties as the second Archbishop of Baltimore. had never interfered with his solicitude for the spiritual and temporal welfare of the sisters. He was their father, their friend, their all; he knew every fold of their heart. Under his spiritual direction they felt safe, and his death left them orphans, indeed. At first it was almost impossible to fill his place. For a short time his brother, Francis, became the spiritual father of the community, but he was a semiinvalid, and a second stroke of paralysis rendered it impossible for him to continue his ministrations. The Jesuits at Georgetown College were unwilling at the time to assume the direction of the sisterhood. “Of real orphanage,” does one of the community annalists describe the state of affairs at the Georgetown convent following the departure of Father Neale.
But for the sake of Christ the sisters were willing to share in those sufferings of Christ caused by abandonment and neglect. They lacked even the bare necessities of life. The prophets of ill, who are always about when God’s work
looks most hopeless, joined hands with those whose help was withdrawn in this hour of greatest need. But Mother Teresa and his sisters had long ago placed their hands in God’s and had sealed their hearts against the world and its recall. And just when trials severe and numerous had almost crushed their devoted hearts, hope was born again, and the depression of their mere human spirits was lifted by him who came to their relief. This was Father Joseph P. de Clorivière who had been invited by Archbishop Neale, shortly before the latter’s death, to undertake the direction. of the Georgetown community.
After eighteen months of anxious waiting, the sisters welcomed Father Clorivière to their shabby accommodations on January 19, 1819, little realizing that in the young French nobleman they would find a second founder and father. Highly educated and of unusual talents, Monsieur de Clorivière, at the age of twenty-five years, had become engaged to a young lady of Versailles. But the French Revolution breaking out frustrated his plans, and after Napoleon’s election he was implicated in a plot to assassinate the First Consul. The plan proved futile, many arrests were made, and young de Clorivière, fearing for his life, sailed for America. In the new land, adversity turned his soul to God and he decided to enter the priesthood. After the usual preparatory studies at St. Mary’s Seminary, Baltimore, he was ordained in 1812, shortly afterwards being assigned by Archbishop Carroll to the difficult post of Charleston, South Carolina, a section of the country then torn asunder by political and religious strife. There the priest’s life was more than once threatened. He strove in vain to establish religious peace, but failing in this he appealed to Archbishop Carroll, who in reply encouraged him to remain at his post, thinking that in time the priest would win over his opponents. But the discord still continued, and when Archbishop Neale succeeded to the see of Baltimore in 1815, Father Clorivière again presented his case. In answer the archbishop advised his coming to the little convent in Georgetown. Archbishop Neale knew his man, for a more providential choice could not have been made. Father Clorivière shared his bounty with the sisters; once he saw their needs, he set about to relieve them.
With Mother Teresa, the new director began to strengthen the academy curriculum and to inaugurate a course of a special training for the younger sisters of the community. Thus was laid the foundation of that efficient instruction which has ever since characterized the Georgetown Visitation Convent. In 1826 he established a free school for girls, where Mother Teresa sent her spiritual daughters to teach. Here the sisters labored for almost a hundred years in the cause of Catholic elementary education. The Visitation Nuns of Georgetown have a significant place in the history of the parochial-school system in the United States.
Mother Teresa’s joy was great when, on the feast of All Saints, 1821, the present conventual chapel was consecrated by the Very Reverend Jean Tessier, Superior of the Society of St. Sulpice, and Vicar-General to the Most Reverend Ambrose Maréchal, Archbishop Neale’s successor in the See of Baltimore. The erection of the church was made possible by the generosity of the saintly chaplain, for he devoted his entire fortune to its building and its furnishings. Mother Teresa and her sisters, however, were to receive the continued assistance of this priest for only seven years, for he died on the feast of St. Michael, in 1827. Those years, however, were sufficiently long to leave an indelible impression on the community. Father Clorivière is regarded by the sisters as their second father and founder, to whom they owe their intellectual uplifting, their chapel and their odeon, their monastery and their gardens.
For Mother Teresa, life’s shadows were now lengthen
ing. In 1819, under Archbishop Maréchal, she was present at the first canonical visit made to the convent. On the twenty-seventh of May of that year, after almost twenty years of superiorship, she relinquished the reins of government into the hands of Sister Catherine Rigden, who had entered the community in 1808, the sixth postulant to gain admittance. Shortly after her profession Sister Catherine had been made directress of studies, and in this capacity she had gained many hearts among the pupils of the academy. Following her example, a number of these girls had passed from the classroom to the novitiate. Great things were hoped from her when she was elected Superior, but God ordained otherwise. The heart of Mother Teresa suffered a hard wrench when she saw the health of the young Superioress rapidly decline; it was crushed when the end came December 21, 1820. The third Superioress of the community was Sister Mary de Sales Neale, a relative of the venerated archbishop. Her nature and judgment seemed to fit her for the post, but her humility made her feel quite unequal to the responsibility and at her own request she was deposed. Sister Agnes Brent, also a relative of Archbishop Neale, was then elected as Superioress in 1821. As she was only twenty-five years of age, it was necessary to obtain a special dispensation in order for her to accept the office.
Probably no more striking lesson in humility can be read in the lives of the saints than that given by Mother Teresa Lalor, bowing in loyal submission to this young Superior whom, as a mere child, she had received into the community, and whose first steps in the religious life she had carefully guided. Unlike most foundresses, Mother Teresa Lalor did not live and die in office; and therein lies much of her magnanimity. Hers was a masterful spirit, born for leadership. She was great during the pioneer days when, for well-nigh twenty years, her word was law in the nascent
community; but she was heroic during her twenty-seven years of submission and obedience.
In 1826 Mother Teresa welcomed the three sisters who came from France at the suggestion of Father Michael Wheeler, the new spiritual director, to teach the American. sisters some of the minor points of the rule. Father Wheeler, a Sulpician of Baltimore, who had succeeded Father Clorivière, will always be remembered by the Georgetown Visitandines as one of their greatest benefactors. In a circular letter, issued September 8, 1828, the sisters declared that it was due to Father Wheeler’s impetus that the academy was assuming a national character. Not only was he instrumental in securing the incorporation of the sisterhood, effected by an act of Congress, dated May 24, 1828, but under his direction, too, the number of sisters was greatly increased. Due to his energy, likewise, foundations were made; the first in Mobile, January 29, 1832, and the second in Baltimore, November 13, 1837.
The going of the sisters to these new houses caused the maternal heart of Mother Teresa a momentary sorrow, but it was quick in passing; her soul rejoiced in the knowledge that new work was being undertaken for the Master. As the years slipped by, like another St. Jane Frances, she saw pass out of her life many of those most dear to her heart. On October 26, 1820, she knelt at the bier of Sister Frances McDermott, her faithful companion for twenty-one years. And then one by one they went, some summoned by death, others to farther fields of a ripening harvest. The seed was being scattered, it is true, yet she could not help but look back on the days of old. The vacant places did not cause her sadness, however, nor did the absence of the loved ones. bring on melancholy; her vision now was reaching out to them on shores eternal. She was gazing into the glory that lies beyond the sunset.
The greatest figures in the early history of the Church
in America were among the admirers of Mother Teresa. She could claim a Maréchal and a Cheverus, a Fenwick and a Flaget, a Du Bourg and a Bruté, an England and an Egan. Archbishop Carroll was wont to often partake of her proverbial hospitality when, upon his numerous visits. to Georgetown College, she would prepare his meals with her own hands. Archbishop Eccleston referred to her as his “old relic”; and when the close of her life came he was near her to bestow upon his faithful servant the riches of the Holy Church she had so long served.
The faith and loyalty of her own being Mother Teresa seemed to transmit to her spiritual daughters. Her fidelity to her own vocation was unfaltering. It was her greatest consolation to see, even in the days of their direst poverty and greatest trials, that there was seldom a defection in the ranks of the sisterhood. Constans in fide et in
vocatione!
Obedience, to Mother Teresa, was second nature. She learned to obey in distant Ireland, at her mother’s knee. She obeyed faithfully each whispering of the Holy Spirit in all the years that followed. When her heart would have taken her back to the homeland and to Bishop Lanigan, the voice of her spiritual director decided for her an adopted country and an uncertain future. Later, in sweet simplicity. of heart, she gave herself, unreservedly, into the hands of those who had followed her in the office and duties of spiritual motherhood. With her as a subject it was not difficult for subsequent Superiors to guide the community.
Prudence, the concomitant of every virtue, was remarkable in Mother Teresa. From her deposition until her death she was counselor and Superior’s aid. For this end she was well fitted by the guard she kept over her tongue. “What ruin follows a tongue that knows no restraint or prudent bounds!” she would exclaim. “It wounds on all sides, and the wounds which it inflicts bleed for a long
time. Weigh well what you say, since evil may result therefrom.”
But above and beyond all, charity in her soul was queen; and, according to the words of St. Francis de Sales, all other virtues followed in its train. On November 21, 1843, when Mother Teresa was renewing her vows, Archbishop Eccleston noticed that she inadvertently said charity instead of chastity. Afterward he laughingly mentioned it to her. “God saw,” she replied, “how greatly I needed it.” “Charity,” she would often say, “should be the principal virtue that animates a religious soul, and without it all her exercises of piety and acts of self-denial are without merit before God.”
During the lingering days of her last illness she frequently said her life seemed but a dream. A dream it might have seemed, but it was a life not of “such stuff as dreams are made on.” Did not the years pass in vision before her with all their sufferings and their trials? Did she not remember her virginal ring broken in twain? With it she had plighted her troth. Did she not recall the days of privation and spirit-breaking suspense of early Georgetown? “The pulp so bitter, how shall taste the rind?” In pain and anguish she had labored in her mystic motherhood that other souls she might bring forth in Christ. Sufferings supreme, indeed, were these! Did she not remember? No! For during all the years she had gone into the Tabernacle, and had adored in the place where His feet stood. And here under this inexplicable wealth of divine love her soul had overflowed with a sweetness not of this earth; with a consolation so great that its remembrance filled her with inexpressible delights. Some of it she had experienced even in far-off Ireland, when her Divine Lord came to her for the first time in the Sacrament of His love. And in the long years that came after, custom and routine with her dulled not the edge of feeling. The fruit she had derived was to feel more drawn away from the earth and all the sorrows it had given her, to pant after the Celestial Country and eternal joys. “If, O Lord, Thou dealest with us thus in our exile, what wilt Thou give unto us in our Home?”
It was an early autumn morning, September 9, 1846, that God called Mother Teresa to her Home. And as her soul passed over the lintels of the Presence Gate, she realized that for her, too, God had spread out the fields of Paradise.
Source: Great American Foundresses by Joseph Bernard Code
Lathrop, A Story of Courage: Annals of the Georgetown Convent of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1895, p. 156 et seq.