LAURALTON HALL - Key Persons
A remarkable woman once walked through the poorest sections of Dublin City saddened and stunned by what she found there-ignorance, neglect, and disease. She was appalled by the all too visible helpless hunger and hopeless prejudice. The poor had overwhelming needs, as the poor always do. These Irish poor had no way out, caught as they were in a bitter struggle of political-religious ideas and ideals that denied them food, freedom, property and education. This woman knew there was something she had to do; she comforted, she prayed, she instructed, she consoled; she returned again and again. Finally she started an institute of women religious who could bring to those in need the incomparable quality of God's mercy.
Who was this woman of compassion and prayer? Socialite turned social worker, lady of fashion who lived among the poor, woman of wealth who had no money, activist who early learned the discipline of sanctity. Her name was Catherine McAuley; her institute is the Religious Sisters of Mercy, started in 1831 with only seven co-workers.
In nineteenth century Dublin, which Catherine labeled "one scene of wretchedness and sorrow," poverty and ignorance appeared to be taken for granted. Distressed by the misery of the poor, she was one of a few extraordinary women who began to care for those for whom, to all appearances, no one else seemed to care.
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I95 from Points North I95 South to Exit 36 (Plains Road): Turn left at end of exit ramp. Turn left at light onto Post Road (Route 1). Turn right at fourth light onto High Street. Follow for ½ mile, staying right at fork, to school entrance on right.
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Nano Nagle, founder of the Presentation Sisters; Mary Aikenhead, founder of the Sisters of Charity in Ireland; and Catherine McAuley, founder of the Sisters of Mercy, all lived in Dublin within a period of fifty years. All had similar hopes for educating and helping the poor.
Although they were permitted, according to their rule, to take in those seeking an education, the Presentation Sisters and the Irish Sisters of Charity observed the rule of cloister and did not go through the city to work there among the poor. Catherine McAuley, who had studied the accomplishments of both Nano Nagle and Mark Aikenhead, knew first-hand the very real problems of the deprived in Dublin because she had seen where and how they lived. She had an idea of what could be done and set out earnestly to try to do it. And it was she, who in the providence of God, was able to use her social position and inherited wealth to help the needy who wandered the city streets.
As founder of an Irish religious order, Catherine might be thought unlikely to succeed, largely because a religious institute was never really her intent at all. She was approximately 50 years old when the Institute of the Sisters of Mercy was established; she lived only 10 years after that uncertain beginning; and she found out very quickly that what she had thought a vast amount of inherited wealth-close to one million dollars in twentieth century currency-was pitifully inadequate for the needs of those who cried out for help. Not all the money in Dublin could have relieved the social ills apparent everywhere. Those she saw in need were not only numerous, but they seemed daily to multiply.
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