Giving their lives

Holy Hope Cemetery in Tucson, final resting place of
two CSJs who died in the 1918 pandemic.

AS WE REMEMBER

Sister M. Evangelista
Wark, CSJ, d. 1918.

our beloved dead during the month of November, let us hold in our hearts eight (perhaps nine) Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet whose names are recorded in the archives of the Los Angeles Province. They are listed by location in the order of the day they died, with their age:

Lewiston, Idaho

• March 30, 1918 – Sister Mary Rose Fee, age 32.
• October 23, 1918 – Sister Mary Evangelista Wark, age about 32.
• November 26, 1918 – Sister Mary Clement, age 24.
• January 3, 1919 – Sister Angelica Heenan, age about 30.
• January 10, 1919 – Sister Mary Joseph Godsell, age about 32.
• Nov. 27, 1919 – Sister Mary James Vanderpool,* age 17½ .

Tucson, Arizona

• January 16, 1919 – Sister Mechtilde Smith, Tucson, age 36.
• January 21, 1919 – Sister Mary Irene Bertonneau, age 32.

If we look closely, what do we notice?

• Most of the deaths occurred in a 10-month period.
  
• Four died within three weeks of each other.
  
• The sisters were young and in their prime – the prime of their lives and the prime of their religious vocations.
  

Eerily, in these dates, locations and ages of the sisters are the arc of a pandemic – the 1918, or Spanish, Flu. As we mentioned last time we visited this subject, it was the last major contagion to sweep the United States before the current Covid-19 outbreak and a far more devastating plague. It killed more than 50 million people around the world.

Sister Mary Rose Fee, CSJ,
was the first of the Carondelet
sisters to die in the pandemic. 

The disease (of the strain H1N1) probably started in the American military and came back the same way with the soldiers returning from World War I. As far as we know, the sisters who died were all nurses who contracted it from their patients and died in their own CSJ hospitals, St. Joseph’s of Lewiston and St. Joseph’s of Tucson.

The pandemic tore through the country in three or four waves between 1918 and 1920. The first sister, Mary Rose Fee, died in the first and mildest onset in early spring of 1918. Six more perished in the much deadlier second wave, which arrived in the fall of 1918 and is still notorious for killing young adults in their 20s and 30s. Finally, in an era when girls often joined the convent in their mid-teens, Sister Mary James Vanderpool had already been a sister for two years when she died in the late fall of 1919, not even 18 years old.  

We sometimes forget that the Carondelet sisters of a hundred years ago lived difficult lives of inadequate food, austere living conditions, exhausting work – especially during a pandemic – and constant exposure to the sick. In their hospitals the sisters provided the best medical care the early 1900s could provide, but it was a world without ventilators, vaccinations, antibiotics, and treatments we take for granted today.

Requiescant in pace, all the sisters who sacrificed everything to care for the dear neighbor.

* The Vanderpool family lost a second daughter a year and a half after the first when Sister Mary Alphonsus Vanderpool, CSJ, died in Lewiston on June 11, 1921, at age 19. Although technically not within the period of the pandemic, she may also have been a victim of the Spanish Flu toward the end of the fourth wave. The cause of death for both sisters is listen as “pulmonary tuberculosis,” but Sister Mary James is considered to have died of the flu. 

Death certificates for the Vanderpool sisters, Mary James
and Mary Alphonsus, who died about 18 months apart.
The superior at St. Joseph Hospital in Lewiston,
Mother M. Adelaide, has signed both.

St. Joseph Hospital in Lewiston in 1905.

Sources: Necrologies of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, Los Angeles Province; Find a Grave, St. Joseph Medical Center (Lewiston).

The Mount's hidden saint

ONCE UPON A TIME, the name John Henry Newman was a familiar one on the campus of a Catholic college or university – a building, a club, a center. For much of its history, this was true at the Mount, too. The Newman Seminar Room was part of the original architecture of the Charles Willard Coe Memorial library in 1947 until it disappeared in the renovations of 1994-1996. The legacy continues to this day as the Newman Collection of rare books, papers and letters, which occupy an entire wall in Special Collections on the library’s first floor.

Caricature of Newman in
Spy Magazine in 1877 (MSMU
Special Collections)

Today, October 9, we celebrate the memorial of Newman as Saint John Henry Newman, canonized October 13, 2019, by Pope Francis. That his feast day is observed in the early fall of the academic semester is key to knowing who St. John Henry was. Among other things, he was a gifted essayist, novelist, and poet and a prolific one as well. But the work we care about is here is his 1852 The Idea of a University, which influenced the course of Catholic higher education and the liberal arts for the 20th Century and after.

Newman was a gigantic and hugely contentious political figure in 19th Century England. He was a renowned scholar, philosopher and cleric in the Church of England and popular professor at Oxford University. But while still a young man he began to harbor doubts about Anglican theology and starting publishing his questions in a series of pamphlets, or "tracts," sparking an uproar that lasted the rest of the century.

His eventual and very public conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1845 cost him and his followers their families, friends, homes and livelihoods. England was deeply anti-Catholic at the time, with a shocking bigotry that almost mirrors the racial ferment of 21st Century America, so it was no minor thing for Newman to change churches. He was ordained a Catholic priest in 1846 and resettled in Ireland to preach and teach in comparative poverty, and continued to write, often focusing on the problems of moral relativism, which he saw writ large in the Church of England. Not unlike Rev. Martin Luther King, his efforts and sacrifices over decades improved the lot of Catholics in England and he was able to return after 32 years, settling in the industrial city of Birmingham. He was made a cardinal by Pope Leo XIII in 1879 and died in Birmingham in 1890.

The careful reasoning and logic that led him to the Catholic Church made him a hero of Catholics in the United States, who were very much second-class citizens in the early 20th Century (and, believe it or not, regular targets of the Ku Klux Klan). Shut out of other elite schools, Catholics redoubled efforts to build their own colleges on Newman’s model, and further did him homage by forming Newman Clubs on almost every college campus in the country, religious or secular.
 

Newman was a big deal at Mount Saint Mary’s College. The 100th anniversary of his ordination to the priesthood fell on October 27, 1946, and was celebrated with an all-day symposium that included a dramatization of his long poem Dream of Gerontius, lectures by notable Hollywood Catholics and writers, a panel discussion, and choral performances of original compositions by the music faculty setting Newman’s prayers and poems to music.

Members of the Newman Club gather in Brady Hall in 1953.

Newman’s biggest fan at the Mount was Sister Catherine Anita Fitzgerald, CSJ, ’44,  the leader who built Coe Memorial Library in 1947. It was she who insisted on the inclusion of the Newman Seminar Room in the blueprints and the one who filled it with books, art and antiques during her many years as head librarian and faculty member. In the 1950s she formed the Friends of the Library, whose first major fundraising effort was the purchase, at a Sotheby’s auction in 1960, of a large collection of Newman’s books, among them many rare first editions. To the Mount’s Newman Collection, over the ensuing decades, were added newer books as scholarship in Newman’s thought and influence grew and flourished. (Sister Catherine Anita herself wrote articles for scholarly journals and contributed an  article about Newman for the Mount journal Inter-Nos.)  

Other Newman scholars in Los Angeles have occasionally made the pilgrimage to Chalon to use the collection, and it is still mentioned in the Mount catalog as an important library asset. St. John Henry, however, hasn’t been part of Mount life since the 1960s – either in the classroom or at shared events with the Newman groups at USC, UCLA, Loyola and Marymount. In some places, including MSMU, his teachings on liberal arts and Catholic orthodoxy gradually fell out of fashion after the Second Vatican Council in favor of more feminist or social justice-oriented theologies. Sister Catherine Anita, Newman’s on-campus champion, died in 1996 not long after the Newman Seminar Room ceased to exist.

But we hold the collection in trust for the future, because truth never goes out of style – a favorite principle of Newman himself. If you want to commune with a genuine saint – after the Covid-19 pandemic, of course – come to the first floor of the library at Chalon where you will be welcome to browse his books.  In the meantime, we have digitized some of his handwritten letters from our collection (by the way, these are officially second class relics since he became a saint). The PDF will download to your computer. NB: You’ll need to be able to read tiny 19th Century cursive.

Our Lady of the Mount, pray for us. St. John Henry Newman, pray for us! Happy feast day!

A second-class relic with Newman's cursive, from 1831 letter to James Bliss.
(MSMU Special Collections)

The Mount, the CSJs, and epidemics

Crowded corridors at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Pasco, Wash.
The photo is undated, probably from around 1950.

WITH THE MOUNT CLOSED due to the COVID-19 pandemic and all of us hunkering down at home, we have been thinking about past epidemics that raced through the United States, all of which impacted the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet -- and later Mount Saint Mary's -- in different ways. Here are some historic highlights from our sources in the University Archives & Special Collections.

Having an epidemic? Build a hospital

The CSJs' hospital in Tucson,
Ariz., in the 1920s.

One of the scourges of the 19th Century was cholera, a water-borne disease spread by human waste and primitive sanitation. It was extremely contagious and often fatal. Those stricken would be healthy one day and dead the next. Germ theory hadn't yet been proposed, so diseases were thought to be transmitted by forms of "bad air" called miasmas, which the steamy Mississippi River next to the CSJs' early settlements seemed to produce. Creeping up the river from New Orleans, cholera struck St. Paul, Minn., in the summer of 1854, less than three years after the the nuns had arrived and before they'd been able to build the town's first hospital. With funding from local citizens and doctors, they started taking cholera victims into an old log cabin. Patients who could afford it paid a dollar a day. At the same time the sisters sped up their plans for a permanent hospital, which became St. Joseph's.

A similar story was repeated by the CSJs in Eureka, Calif., who had barely unpacked their trunks when they were faced with patients suffering from the devastating Spanish Influenza in 1918, a virus that killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide. In Pasco, Wash., CSJs took in flu patients at their tiny Our Lady of Lourdes hospital, just two years old. The sisters in Indianapolis couldn't offer a hospital, but they responded to the pandemic by opening the campus of Sacred Heart High School for outdoor "field" masses on Sundays. Parishioners could practice some "social distancing" and still receive the sacraments.

In the end, the Spanish Flu took a terrible toll on the CSJ community, claiming at least eight mostly young and healthy Carondelet sisters between 1918 and 1921.

Measles at the Mount 

High on a hill in Brentwood, Mount students were isolated in a unique way, but they weren't immune from virus outbreaks. The "Mountain Ear," a weekly gossip column in the The View newspaper (mountaineer -- get it?) reported humorously on March 20, 1957, that a local epidemic of measles had infected four students and possibly six in Brady Hall, including the editor. If a gossip column sounds unserious, it's because in the decades before the measles vaccine it was a very common childhood disease, and most Americans, including Mount students, had developed the immunity. There's no evidence the measles spread. Over the decades, The View reported an occasional student with an embarrassing case, and no one gave it a second thought. It wouldn't be until 2015 when parents' failure to vaccinate their kids led to a dangerous global outbreak, that everyone started paying attention. The warnings show up in recent student newsletters.

The polio scourge

A childhood case of measles is one thing, but another childhood disease caused absolute terror in mid-20th Century. Although there were many polio outbreaks in the 20th century, the epidemic after World War II was the most terrifying. Starting around 1947 in California, it wasn't stopped until 1955 and the release of the the Salk vaccine. The worst year was 1952, one of the largest outbreaks in U.S. history. Cases that year of poliomyelitis, also known by its starker name infantile paralysis, numbered almost 60,000 in the U.S. Three-thousand children and young adults died, and more than 20,000 were left with permanent mild to severe muscle and nerve damage, including paralysis.

Up on the Brentwood hilltop Mount student were relatively safe. Science and nursing majors studied the disease intently, receiving advice in the columns of The View about what scientific articles to read.  Recruited by ads in the paper, many students responded with regular blood donations for the Red Cross after it was discovered that gamma globulin, a blood component, boosted the immune system and was effective in reducing the symptoms of polio and and other serious diseases.

Adelaide Spuhler Mealey '49

Students at a a Family Day event in 1954 heard a talk from an alumna about day-to-day living after surviving polio. Adelaide Spuhler Mealey, '49 contracted polio after her marriage but was able to care for her two toddlers from her wheelchair.

Virus research

No blog on viruses and MSMU can fail to mention our famous CSJ biologist, Sister Mary Gerald Leahy, whose pioneering research in the 1960s on mosquito reproduction was surfaced anew during the Zika virus epidemic in 2016. Rampant in South America, the Zika virus is spread by aedes aegypti mosquitoes -- which Sister Gerald actually raised in St. Joseph Hall -- and can cause serious birth defects if the mother contracts it during her pregnancy. The epidemic struck at the time of the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janiero, foreshadowing the current debate over canceling the 2020 Summer Olympics. The Rio Games went on as planned, but because of Covid-19 the Toyko Olympics have been postponed.  

Coronavirus

Wildfire, epidemics -- never has the Mount been entirely closed in its history until now. The wonderful benefits of transportation and travel mean that the safety and isolation of the mid-century Mount and earlier is almost a dream. But the students of the early 1950s, sweating out the polio epidemic, didn't have smartphones, online classes, Zoom or digital article databases. The common thread is that we live with uncertainty and sometimes fear, but life always manages to go on.

And while all of Los Angeles is on lockdown, maybe we will have a little more time for this blog! Stay safe, stay healthy.    

Sources

We have access to so much wonderful stuff. Check out Sister Mary Agnes Rossiter, CSJ, A Sketch of Her Life by Sister Lucinda Savage, CSJ (1947), which mentions the Spanish Flu. The CSJs' early hospitals and cholera epidemics are mentioned in The Century's Harvest 1836-1936, also by Sister Lucinda. Digital copies of The View and all our digital collections can be viewed at http://stmary2.sdlhost.com.

An advertisement from The View on February 16, 1957, urges students
to donate blood to create gamma globulin to fight polio and other diseases.