Catherine McAuley

Catherine McAuley was born at Stormanstown House near Dublin on 29 September 1778 to James and Elinor McAuley. Both parents died before Catherine, Mary and James reached adulthood, and, while living with relatives, the three of them experienced wealth, bankruptcy and poverty as well as a strongly anti-Catholic atmosphere. When Catherine was twenty-five, a retired Quaker couple, William and Catherine Callaghan, invited her to live with them at Coolock, an estate not too distant from the centre of Dublin. Catherine proved to be a loving companion until their deaths, and when Mr. Callaghan died in 1822, he bequeathed his entire fortune to her.

It was this inheritance which made it possible for Catherine to build the House of Mercy which still stands on the corner of Lower Baggot and Herbert Streets in Dublin - the founding House of the Sisters of Mercy. On 24 September 1827, Anna Maria Doyle, an acquaintance, and Catherine’s relative, Catherine Bryn, moved into this residence which was both a school for children and a shelter for girls in need. Catherine came daily to help, while continuing to care for her late sister’s children. In September 1830, with Anna Maria (Doyle) and Elizabeth Harley, Catherine began the formal training necessary to establish a new Order of women religious.

The Order of the Sisters of Mercy was born when the three Sisters made their Profession of Vows on 12 December 1831. Pope Gregory XVI formally approved the Mercy Rule and Constitutions on 6 June 1841, just a few months before Catherine’s death, 11 November 1841. In just ten years, Mother Catherine had established ten autonomous foundations in Ireland and two in England. Roland Burke Savage in his biography Catherine McAuley: The First Sister of Mercy, (p393), summed up this part of Catherine McAuley’s life:

 The ten short years of her own religious life were but the seeding –time; it was only after her death that the full fruitfulness of her life began to show itself. At the time of her death there were little more than 100 Sisters of Mercy; fifteen years later there were 3,000 … one hundred years later there were 23,000.

Members of the All Hallows’ School community have a special link with Mother Catherine McAuley. During the last few days of her life, Catherine asked for two Sisters to remain with her, Sisters Teresa Carton and Vincent Whitty, and they were at her bedside when she died peacefully. Twenty years later, Vincent Whitty brought the first Sisters of Mercy to Queensland, arriving in Brisbane, 10 May 1861.