Sister Susanne Watson stood in a Westmoreland County field adorned with daffodils and stones engraved with the names of nuns. She's comfortable among the dead at St. Xavier Cemetery, where Pittsburgh's Sisters of Mercy have come to rest for 160 years.
Martha Rial, Post-GazetteSister Fidelis McDonough visits Kershawn Davis, 8, one of two of Loretta Waddell's great- grandchildren, who live with Waddell, right, in West Oakland. McDonough, a Sister of Mercy, helps run Mercy Neighborhood Ministries and West Oakland Women's Outreach.
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"These are my family," she said. "They've got a place set for me at the table. I'm ready to go, any time."
The Sisters of Mercy, with roots in Ireland, rose from a small beginning in Pittsburgh. For years they were fixtures on the scene, mostly as educators or teachers, with numbers hovering at about 500 for the first 60 years of the 20th century.
Mercy nuns are still a quiet presence at Carlow University, the flagship institution that celebrated its 75th year on Sept. 24. They educated generations of Pittsburgh children at prestigious private academies and dozens of neighborhood parochial schools. They founded Mercy Hospital, the city's first, and today sponsor the Pittsburgh Mercy Health System.
The good they've done in Western Pennsylvania is incalculable.
But their numbers are dwindling.
In Pittsburgh today, 18 Mercy sisters serve in elementary, preschool and child-care posts. Eleven do their turns at Mercy Hospital. Six teach or administer at Carlow University.
They are among the 120 Pittsburgh Mercies who live together at a splendid convent in Oakland, part of the Carlow campus; 55 more live in apartments and parishes from Monroeville to Peru.
Their average age is 67. These may be the last of the Pittsburgh Mercies.
The nuns who helped build the city apparently have worked themselves out of a job.
The burdens they once carried are now shouldered by government social services, church outreaches, charities, school districts and health-care networks.
That's not a bad thing and not a surprise, said Micaela Young, communications officer for the Pittsburgh Mercies.
She likened the order's lifespan to a family business: As the "mom and pop" store grows up and incorporates, more outside people are brought in to work. The more successful it becomes, the fewer family members have a hand in its daily workings.
Young left the order in 1983, but kept close ties to her former sisters. When the national and regional Mercy provinces began reorganizing themselves, the Pittsburgh Mercies asked Young to represent them as "communicator" at several important gatherings. She continues to travel extensively to help communities of American nuns envision the future of their institutions.
"There is always work to do. Maybe religious life will rise up in a different form," Young said. "Maybe it's already here."
There are 788 graves in St. Xavier Cemetery. All the bodies buried here are female; all but two were vowed nuns, Roman Catholics who promised a lifetime of "poverty, chastity and obedience" according to a thousand-year-old ritual. And as Sisters of Mercy, they added a fourth promise: to serve the poor, the sick and the ignorant.
Which explains why, in 1843, a band of seven educated, middle-class Irish women volunteered to be missionaries to a filthy frontier town called Pittsburgh.
There were poverty, sickness and ignorance aplenty out here on the frontier. Five of those pioneer nuns are buried at St. Xavier, their resting places marked with black marble crosses. The other two went on to found eight branch houses, in towns from Providence to Chicago.
At one time or other, the women buried here ran orphan asylums; schools for "colored" children, suburbanites and well-off girls; military field hospitals; Sunday schools; immigrant settlement houses; homes for single women; homeless shelters; and night schools for undereducated nuns.
"We pride ourselves in doing the work that is needed right now, in our day and age," said Sister Judith Stojhovic, principal of St. Maurice School in Forest Hills. She acknowledges she may be one of the last of Pittsburgh's Mercy teaching sisters.
Here lies Mother Xavier Tiernan, the first American woman to join the Mercies.
Young Eliza Jane Tiernan was a beauty, a socialite of 23 years with a devout streak. When the Mercies arrived just before Christmas in 1843, the raven-haired Eliza greeted them with flowers for their altar. Five months later, she asked to join them.
"Two glass candlesticks and some paper flowers were all the poverty of the community could afford to decorate the altar in those early days," wrote Sister Gertrude Blake, another early entry. "The Lord could not stand that for long, so he sent us something better."
Mother Xavier knew her way around town. She rose fast in the ranks, and when smallpox and typhus epidemics swept up the Ohio River, she helped to open the city's first hospital in an old music hall. "Those sisters did everything at that hospital. They were nurses, caretakers, bookkeepers, maintenance and cooks," said Young. "They worked themselves to death."
The lovely Mother Xavier was one of three young nurses to die in one week in 1847. Much of Pittsburgh turned out for her funeral. She was a nun for only three years, but her local fame and sacrifice won credibility for Mercy in a town that looked with suspicion on Catholics and unmarried women. When a subscription drive opened to fund a permanent Mercy Hospital along Stevenson Street, money poured in.
Today, Mercy still offers free care to the indigent, but it no longer must struggle by without government help.
It pioneered Blue Cross and Blue Shield coverage and was the first hospital in Pittsburgh to offer employee life insurance and college tuition benefits. Its school of nursing, founded in 1893, has graduated 5,500 nurses.
As time went on, Mercy had resources enough to lend a hand when other Catholic hospitals faced hard times. Pittsburgh Mercies took over Holy Cross Hospital in Fort Lauderdale in 1959, and, in more recent times, merged with Providence Hospital and Jeannette Hospital.
Martha Rial, Post-GazetteSister Jane Scully (right) offers the sign of peace to Mount Mercy College graduate Mary Alice Duff (seated, right) at a Mass celebrating the 75th anniversary of Carlow University at the Mother of Mercy Chapel on the campus of Carlow College. Scully is the retired president of Carlow.
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John Beale, Post-GazetteSister Susanne Watson talks about fellow Mercy nuns as she walks through St. Xavier Cemetery in Latrobe, where Sisters of Mercy are buried.
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As America's medical system transformed itself, the Mercy Hospital changed, too -- lay people were brought into management, and fewer nurses wore habits. Mercy became the Pittsburgh Mercy Health System, a network of clinics and community health programs, in the 1970s. In the '80s, Mercy joined the Eastern Mercy Health System, another effort for far-flung units of Mercy sisters to re-align themselves for survival's sake. In 1998 the Eastern Mercy Health System merged again, this time with Sisters of Providence and Allegany Franciscan systems to form Catholic Health East. It is one of the nation's largest nonprofit hospital groups.
"This ensures even if the Mercies die out, their values will continue in our hospitals," Young said. "These are very Catholic hospitals, with pastoral care departments, active chapels and a crucifix in the rooms."
Merging, renaming and redefining were going on through the same years within the order, too, and within the hearts of the nuns themselves. Hospital director Sister Joanne Marie Andiorio resigned her job soon after brokering the Mercy-Providence merger. She left the Mercy sisters, too. She'd been a nun for 42 years and a hospital CEO for 26. She needed a change, she said then. Today she sells commercial real estate for Howard Hanna.
Nationally, only 13 percent of Mercy sisters now serve in health-care positions. In Pittsburgh, two Sisters of Mercy serve on the board of trustees at Mercy Health System.
Sister Jane Scully is 86, but she's cut from the same cloth as Mother Xavier.
Sister Jane is a people-person, a schmoozer. She trained to be a librarian, but she preferred pioneering. Her quick wit and intellect won her a place as the first woman member of the Duquesne Club and Port Authority Transit board.
She served 10 years on the board at Gulf Oil Corp., seeing it through its bitter conclusion and ultimate takeover by Chevron. She was president at the then Mount Mercy College in Oakland beginning in 1966, and it was Sister Jane who decided Mount Mercy had too familiar a ring to it. "I changed the name of the place in 1970-something," she says, matter-of-factly. "There were more than 30 Mount-Mercy-Mary kind of college names, and I wanted to get this fine school out from the M's in the middle. Carlow is the name of the town in Ireland where the Mercies came from. It's short and strong, and right up at the top of the alphabet." She served as president until 1982.
As Carlow development director, Sister Jane raised $3 million for a new library. She traveled to the Mercies' Holy Cross Hospital in Fort Lauderdale and raised $6 million for them. She came back to Oakland and raised another $30,000 for a convent library -- a sunny room with a spectacular view across east Pittsburgh. Here she presides over weekly book discussions and poetry readings, once again a librarian.
Students from Mercy Hospital's School of Nursing learn the art of bed making in 1947 in this photograph that is displayed in Mother of Mercy Chapel at Carlow University.Click photo for larger image.
St. Xavier is the resting place of Mother Elizabeth Strange, one of the original seven Pittsburgh pioneers.
She served as a school principal, but her first calling was one-on-one visitation. Within a week of arriving at their convent on Penn Avenue Downtown in the winter of 1843, Mother Elizabeth wrapped herself in a burqa-like cloak, loaded a basket with bread, soup and salves, and headed onto the muddy streets to visit the sick in their homes. She did this for 50 years in her off hours. She became a Pittsburgh institution.
"I do not know how they recognize me," she told a biographer. "I always keep my veil down, yet everyone addresses me by name." She died in 1892. Today, many of the 120 retired sisters who live at the convent volunteer at Mercy Hospital as full-time visitors, "right into their 90s."
The visitation star these days is Sister Fidelis McDonough, a fixture in the Hill District neighborhood that abuts the Carlow campus. She helps run Mercy Neighborhood Ministries and West Oakland Women's Outreach. "I find the elderly, the hidden elderly, the people who are healthy but just don't go out," Sister Fidelis said. "We go on outings -- Gateway Clipper, Hartwood Acres concerts, covered-dish dinners -- just trying to keep active."
Sister Fidelis won't say how old she is. She involves youthful Carlow students with the elderly in the neighborhood, or white middle-class suburbanites with African-American students. There's the after-school girls with their sports clinic, or the Tae Kwan Do class, or the African theater troupe. Sister Fidelis talks fast. She's a woman in a hurry. "We've been on this hill for a long time, and seen the neighborhood change around us," she said. "We try to extend ourselves out into this unique place. There are hardly any Roman Catholics here, but if we make the effort they can learn a little about us, and we all benefit."
In a similar vein, the sisters run an outreach center in McKeesport, and 11 years ago allied with 13 other religious orders to run Sisters Place, a housing ministry in Clairton.
About the same time Mother Elizabeth filled her first food basket, the Mercy nuns opened a school in their convent basement.
A girls' academy followed in 1846, and an orphanage the next. Soon pairs of nuns were seen hiking over bridges to parish schools on the North Side.
As years went on, few new churches were built without a parochial school alongside. Mercy nuns were among the hundreds of religious teachers who staffed them, often at little or no pay.
In 1903, Pittsburgh Sisters of Mercy had 157 nuns teaching 6,649 students in the diocese.
The Mercies found funds in the rising Catholic middle class and opened private "Select Academies" for well-off girls. One, Mount Mercy Academy, stayed in the city and later blossomed into a Carlow College and now, Carlow University.
The other, St. Xavier, opened in 1845 on Westmoreland County farmland overlooking St. Vincent College.
Tuition, room, and board was $100 per year, and this money paid the bills for many Mercy ministries in the city.
If Pittsburgh was the head and hands of the Mercy order, St. Xavier was its heart. It was academically rigorous, and a plum assignment for teaching nuns. It was a refuge for those who worked in Pittsburgh, a break from the noise and dirt.
"From our community's earliest days, we made our retreats [at Xavier], here we spent our summer vacations, here we came to recover when in delicate health. It was like the home of our childhood," one sister wrote.
And its little cemetery was their final resting place.
Here lies Mother Irenaeus Dougherty, a woman who 75 years ago took the money saved for a new chapel and used it to open a college, right in the face of the Great Depression.
"She built this campus," Young said of Carlow University. "She believed, like our founders believed, that part of being a sister is being an educated woman."
And she was humble. She may have been a college president, but like every other nun, Mother Irenaeus sewed her own habit and darned her own stockings. "Other orders sometimes think the Mercies are snobbish, but we've always stressed how important it is for a sister to get a degree," Young said. Hundreds of sisters from other religious orders studied at Carlow at deeply discounted tuition rates.
Mother Irenaeus forged teaching alliances with Mercy Hospital, Duquesne University and St. Vincent College. She was part of a movement to ensure that parochial school teachers received education training equal to public school teachers.
Sister Judith Stojhovic started teaching in Pittsburgh in 1964, when Catholic America was at its peak. That year, the nation's 13,000 parochial schools taught 5.5 million children. There were 179,974 Catholic nuns, and more than 100,000 of them were teachers. Most were paid less than $1,000 a year.
But in 10 years' time, nine-tenths of the teachers were gone.
Today, 18 Mercy sisters serve in Pittsburgh diocesan schools and day-care centers. There are no more in the pipeline.
"Teaching sisters won't be around much longer," Sister Judith said. "We will leave our mark by training lay teachers in the methods of Catholic education and in Mercy's particular gifts. We still will have Catholic education. We just won't have the sisters providing it any more."
What happened to the Mercies echoes what happened to American Catholicism in the late 20th century. Sociologists, historians and theologians still puzzle at the "tipping point" year of 1968. That year saw the largest number of nuns ever in American history: just short of 180,000. The following year, across the nation, the flow of women into convents stopped dead. By 1972, one in six Mercy sisters had left the order. It was just the beginning of an exodus.
"It was lots of change, all at once," Young said. "For some it was too little, too late. For others, it was too much, too fast."
Mercy Sister Susanne Watson was a happy young nun in 1972, one of the few new faces that stayed on through the years of training.
She lived at St. Xavier and taught at Holy Family School in Latrobe. Her room, up on the third floor of the neat brick convent, looked out over the Laurel Ridge, the berry patch, greenhouse, bakery and barn. She loved the place, she said. She was from McKeesport, and her grandmother had been a boarding-school student at St. Xavier in the 1860s.
On St. Patrick's Day of '72, St. Xavier burned to the ground. "I lost everything that day," Sister Susanne said. "Everyone got out safely, thank God. But they dug a huge hole and bulldozed everything into it. A hundred and thirty years."
In 1972 the Sisters of Mercy didn't have time or resources for a rebuilding project. It had academies to run and fewer teachers to keep them open. The elderly sisters who'd lived at St. Xavier's would be nearer to medical care if they moved to the Oakland convent, they reasoned. The future was uncertain.
The sisters used the $1 million fire insurance settlement to buy themselves into the Social Security benefits system. They rented out the fields to a local farmer. And for 32 years, but for additions to the sisters' cemetery and retreat visits to a remaining gatehouse, St. Xavier has stood abandoned.
Sister Susanne taught school, then went on to run an apartment complex for the elderly in McKeesport. She helped form The Intersection, a social service start-up that helped Mon Valley towns weather hard times after the steel mills closed.
She's 71 now, retired, living in Monroeville. She keeps busy with carpentry, wiring, and maintenance jobs at Mercy convents and properties. On weekends she drives to St. Xavier to weed and plan, and to soak up the peace. "The place is in my blood," she said, standing at the cemetery gate. Starlings cackled in the spruces. "This place has been Mercy land since 1845. Some of us feel it's time the Mercies returned," she said.
"It's true, our past is here. But we have a future. And who can tell what the future holds?" And as if on cue, the big black birds lifted off and flew away above her sisters' graves.
A recent "summit meeting" of American Mercies decided against turning St. Xavier into a retreat center. Officials at Mercy convent in Oakland are vague about the future of the Westmoreland site.
"These properties will continue to be used to support the values and beliefs of the Sisters of Mercy," Young said.
So long as the Sisters of Mercy last in Pittsburgh.
"We are not a dying group," said Sister Patricia McCann, a Mercy activist for peace and justice issues. "We are in a transitioning, transformative time. We don't know yet what-all structures and forms that will take as regards the future of our ministries or community life. What we strive to preserve and pass on is the gospel spirit of service to those who are poor, sick and undereducated. Grounded in faith, that is what animates us."
First Published: December 5, 2004, 5:00 a.m.
