Braided Lives: The Sisters of Mercy in Sacramento, 1857–2008 by Mary Katherine Doyle (review)

Reviewed by: Braided Lives: The Sisters of Mercy in Sacramento, 1857–2008 by Mary Katherine Doyle Steven M. Avella Braided Lives: The Sisters of Mercy in Sacramento, 1857–2008. By Mary Katherine Doyle, RSM. Charleston, SC: America Through Time, 2022. 256pp. $24.99. The Sisters of Mercy, founded in Dublin in 1831 by Catherine McAuley, have played an important role in shaping U.S. Catholic life. This Ireland-based community sent the first sisters to the United States to the Diocese of Pittsburgh in 1843. They subsequently fanned out across the nation, serving the urban poor, teaching in schools, and providing health care. Today this community, now known as the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas, has unified its governance, readjusted its communal priorities, and centralized its archives in Belmont, North Carolina. Sister Catherine Doyle has updated the rich history of her branch of the community, located in northern California under the auspices of the Diocese of Sacramento. Like many sisters' communities in the American West, they forged warm relationships with a wide spectrum of local citizens. In Sacramento, they earned the respect and affection of the community through their hard work as educators and health care providers. Additionally, the Sisters of Mercy in Sacramento have been distinguished by their effective ministry to the poor. Doyle's book builds on an earlier work by Sister M. Evangelist Morgan, who published a centennial history of the community in 1957. In updating the story of the sisters, Doyle works hard to delve more deeply into the challenges and motivations of the community and sheds light on some of the hidden figures whose names escaped earlier histories. Doyle describes herself as a "passionate storyteller" and the book is written in her own colloquial style. Doyle revisits the origins of Mercy in Sacramento, recounting the invitation by an emissary of Archbishop Joseph Sadoc Alemany of San Francisco, to the Mercy Convent in Kinsale, Ireland. Responding to the request, a small contingent under the leadership of Mother Mary Baptist Russell arrived in San Francisco in 1854. Doyle relates the hazards of that journey, including a dangerous trek through the isthmus of Panama. They began work in San Francisco and by 1857 had opened an additional house in Sacramento. There they worked with prisoners in the city jails and performed the Visitation, a Mercy custom that brought pairs of sisters to individual homes. They braved the vicissitudes of living in early Sacramento, which was subject to fires, floods, and periodic outbreaks of lethal diseases. [End Page 84] In 1863, the sisters opened St. Joseph's Academy and convent, which initially included an orphanage and boarding school. Following the creation of the Diocese of Sacramento in 1886, the sisters separated from the motherhouse in the Archdiocese of San Francisco and reorganized as an autonomous administrative unit, with St. Joseph's convent as its center. In 1895, they opened Mater Misericordiae Hospital, advancing health care and nursing training in Sacramento. Despite some occasionally nasty anti-Catholic sentiment, the sisters enjoyed good public relations. This was primarily due to their unselfish service, aided by the fact that the wife of the editor of the Sacramento Bee was a graduate of their popular academy. Eventually the sisters' ministry spread from the city of Sacramento with the opening of schools and health care facilities in Citrus Heights, Red Bluff, Redding, and Mount Shasta. The community recruited some local women, including one of their mothers general, Gertrude King, a graduate of the St. Joseph's Academy, but vocations from Ireland were their mainstay for many years. In the post-World War II period, they opened a postulancy called Abbeylands at Ardfert in County Kerry. Many Irish women came to the American west after first sampling Mercy life there. A growing community, expanded activities, and demographic changes in Sacramento led to the relocation of the sisters' general headquarters from St. Joseph's convent to the foothills community of Auburn in 1940. There they built a new motherhouse, novitiate, and juniorate. By the 1920s, the sisters had relocated Mater Misericordiae Hospital to a larger space in an upscale neighborhood east of the downtown and renamed it Mercy Hospital. In the 1950s, a successful fund...