Catherine McAuley

Catherine Elizabeth McAuley was born on 29 September 1778 in Dublin, Ireland, the eldest of three children of James McAuley, a prosperous Catholic builder, and Elinor Conway McAuley. Her father died during her childhood, and after her mother’s death toward the end of the eighteenth century the children were placed with relatives, several of whom were Protestant. In that mixed religious setting she held to the Catholic faith associated with her father. In early adulthood she went to live at Coolock House with William and Catherine Callaghan, a wealthy childless Protestant couple, remaining with them for roughly two decades as companion and household manager and gradually taking on the care of both as they aged.

Upon William Callaghan’s death in the early 1820s, McAuley inherited a substantial fortune. She used it to purchase property on Baggot Street in Dublin and to build a large house intended as a shelter and school for poor women and girls and as a residence for ladies who wished to devote themselves to works of mercy. The House of Mercy opened in 1827. She had not originally planned to found a religious congregation; she envisioned a community of secular women living in common and serving the poor. Church authorities in Dublin, including Archbishop Daniel Murray, pressed her to give the work a canonical religious form so that it would have stability and ecclesiastical recognition.

On 12 December 1831, after a novitiate at the Presentation Convent on George’s Hill, Catherine McAuley and two companions professed religious vows, thereby founding the Sisters of Mercy. The new institute combined a life of prayer with active service outside the cloister: education of poor girls, visitation of the sick and imprisoned, care of orphans, and shelter for homeless women. Contemporaries sometimes called the sisters “walking nuns” because they left the convent to work in the streets and in the homes of the poor. During the cholera epidemic in Dublin in the early 1830s they nursed the sick in hospitals and among the destitute. Under McAuley’s leadership the congregation spread rapidly through Ireland and into England; she personally founded or oversaw the establishment of numerous convents in the last decade of her life, traveling constantly despite declining health.

Catherine McAuley died of tuberculosis on 11 November 1841 at the House of Mercy on Baggot Street, Dublin, and was buried in the convent grounds. The Sisters of Mercy continued to expand after her death and became one of the largest congregations of women religious in the English-speaking world, with houses in North America, Australia, and elsewhere. She was beatified by Pope John Paul II on 9 April 1990. Her liturgical memorial is observed on 11 November. She has not been canonized.