Suggest an Edit — Mother Mary Alphonsa

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Biography

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Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, known in religion as Mother Mary Alphonsa, was born in 1851 in Lenox, Massachusetts, the youngest child of the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne and the artist Sophia Peabody Hawthorne. She spent part of her childhood in New England and, during her father's service as United States consul at Liverpool, in England and later in Italy. After Nathaniel Hawthorne's death in 1864 the family returned to the United States. Raised in a literary household, she published poetry and prose as a young woman and moved in the same transatlantic cultural world as her parents.

In 1871 she married the writer and editor George Parsons Lathrop. They had one son, Francis, who died of diphtheria in 1881 at about five years of age. The marriage was troubled by Lathrop's alcoholism, and the couple eventually separated. Both were received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1891. George Parsons Lathrop died in 1898. Widowed and without surviving children, Rose Hawthorne turned to a life of religious service. Disturbed by the isolation of impoverished people dying of cancer—then often treated as shameful and even contagious—she trained as a nurse and in 1896 began caring for incurable cancer patients in a tenement on New York City's Lower East Side.

In 1900 she was received as a Dominican tertiary and took the name Sister Mary Alphonsa. With her companion Alice Huber she founded the Congregation of Saint Rose of Lima, later known as the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne (Servants of Relief for Incurable Cancer). The community opened free homes that accepted patients regardless of race, creed, or ability to pay and that refused payment for care. These included Saint Rose's Free Home for Incurable Cancer in Manhattan and Rosary Hill Home in Sherman Park, New York, a village later renamed Hawthorne. She continued to write, including memoirs of her father, poetry, and accounts of her charitable work, while directing the growing congregation.

Mother Mary Alphonsa led the sisters until her death in 1926 at Rosary Hill Home in Hawthorne, New York. The Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne have continued her work of caring for people with incurable cancer. A cause for her canonization was opened in the Catholic Church; she was named a Servant of God, and in 2024 Pope Francis recognized her heroic virtue and declared her Venerable. She has not been beatified or canonized.

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