Text of Remarks:
Sr. Mary Hayes, SND
September 10, 2004
My task this afternoon is to provide the historical context for
the presentations of Sister Mary Margaret Pignone on South Africa
and Sister Dorothy Mccormick on Kenya. In so doing I will present
two intersecting commitments that are integral to the Sister of
Notre Dame’s understanding of our vocation and that are at
the center of the history of the Congregation from its founding
in Amiens, France in 1804 to the present when we now exist as a
world-wide community with Sisters serving in North America, South
America, Europe, Asia, and Africa.
The first of these commitments is the mission of the Congregation
to respond to needs wherever they may arise and the second is our
call to serve the materially poor, particularly women and children,
in the most abandoned places. Both commitments, almost impossible
to separate, are rooted in the spirituality of Julie Billiart, the
founder of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur and a canonized saint
in the Roman Catholic Church. St. Julie possessed an abiding sense
of the goodness of God and her passion was to enable everyone whom
she met to experience this goodness. This zeal continuously inspired
her sisters; spreading her vision of a world truly conscious of
God’s goodness has impelled the Congregation forward from
its founding to the present.
Julie, herself, established the pattern of responding to needs
as they arose. During the initial founding years, in a short span
of 18 months, from June of 1806 through November of 1807 she made
24 separate journeys 19 of which concerned erecting foundations
outside the diocese of Amiens, in the dioceses of Ghent, Namur,
Tournai, and Bordeaux. She had already been accepted by the bishops
of these four dioceses as mother general, and her experience during
this early founding period convinced her that teaching congregations
required mobility, openness to change, the ability to adapt to local
circumstances and thus should not be limited to any one diocese.
With the assistance of the co-foundress, Francoise Blin de Bourdon,
she organized the Congregation through structures that would be
adaptive and responsive to emerging apostolic opportunities, and
would depend upon the leadership of women in the person of the Mother
General. Julie understood that without a mother general the mobility
of the Congregation would be undermined and she would be subjected
to the anxiety of having to request the Bishop’s permission
for everything. She desired, in other words, the power to move when
the time was right. This mode of organization occasioned misunderstanding
with the Bishop of Amiens, John Francis Demandolx which led to Julie’s
dismissal from the diocese and the relocation of the motherhouse
to Namur, Belgium.
Julie Billiart’s successor as Mother General, Francoise Blin
de Bourdon, now known as Mere St. Joseph, inherited the tradition
of flexibility and adapted it to the conditions of the emerging
industrial era. Even as the Congregation expanded in Belgium under
her leadership, Mere St. Joseph’s challenge and great trial
was to preserve the independence of the Congregation’s schools
during a ten year period when the Dutch-dominated United Kingdom
attempted to secularize the schools of Roman Catholic Belgium. She
led the resistance to this effort but also recognized the state’s
legitimate claims in the area of formal education and accommodated
to its demands when appropriate. This accommodation, particularly
with regard to teacher certification and curriculum relevance, strengthened
and expanded the Congregation’s teaching ministry, professionalized
its approach to formal education and enabled it to create systems
and policies that would facilitate its adaptation to the systems
of education in the United States and in Great Britain when the
period of expansion from Belgium began in 1840.
Two of Mere St Joseph’s successors, her immediate successor,
Mother Ignace Goethals, and Mother Constantine, whose period of
leadership lasted from 1843 through 1875, could truly be called
Notre Dame’s apostles of Globalization. Both women were risk-takers
and fully understood that the Congregation’s expansion required
flexibility and adaptation to local circumstances. In 1840, Mere
Ignace vicariously realized her dream of going to America when she
enthusiastically accepted the invitation of Bishop John Purcell
of Cincinnati and sent eight Belgian sisters to establish a foundation
in his diocese. The period of most extensive nineteenth century
expansion, however, occurred during the long administration of Mother
Constantine when foundations in the United States spread eastward
from Cincinnati to Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania and
Washington, D.C. In 1844, another missionary group left Belgium
for
Oregon where the sisters remained until being transferred to California
in 1852. The first foundation in Great Britain opened at Penryn
in Cornwall in 1845 and relocated to London in 1848. During the
1850's, in quick succession, foundations opened in Liverpool, Manchester,
and Sheffield. In order to meet the demands for teachers in these
urban areas, the sisters opened a training college at Mt. Pleasant
in Liverpool in 1856. Finally, Mother Constantine sent sisters to
Guatemala in 1859 where a foundation lasted until 1875 when the
sisters were expelled by an anti-clerical government. In all these
foundations, so distant from Belgium,Mother Constantine encouraged
adaptation and flexibility. In several letters, for example, she
reprimanded the superior of the Oregon missions for attempting to
replicate the conditions of a Belgian school among the Indian children
of Oregon. By the 1890's, the established provinces in Europe and
in the United States developed missionary interests in Africa and
in East Asia which led to foundations in the Congo in 1894, Rhodesia
in 1899, South Africa in 1907, Japan in 1924, and China in 1929.
A second wave of overseas missionary activity occurred after World
War II in Africa and in South America. The need for teachers in
newly independent African nations resulted in foundations in Nigeria
in 1963 and in Kenya in 1965. In response to the 1961 Vatican appeal
to the United States Church to give 10% of its personnel to Latin
America, the Congregation established foundations in Brazil in 1963
and in Peru in 1970. With the exception of the Chinese houses which
were suppressed in 1949, each of these former missions has become
an independent unit within the Congregation.
At the center of Julie Billiart’s missionary zeal to spread
awareness of the goodness of God was her commitment to work and
teach among the poor. She never ceased stressing preference for
the poor as the central animating element in the Congregation’s
reason for being.
Literally all the Congregation’s founding documents including
two separate versions of experimental rules along with the civil
documents requesting and receiving the approval of the French government
to establish and conduct schools, stress this primary commitment.
The nineteenth century sisters who came to the United States and
to Great Britain remained faithful to this commitment. In the cities
in which we established academies for girls we insisted upon and
opened schools for poor children. During 20 year period following
Vatican II, the Congregation engaged in a lengthly period of experimentation,
culminating in the approved constitutions of 1989. During this 20
year period the Congregation developed a heightened appreciation
of Julie Billiart’s spirituality and recovered her emphasis
on education with preference for the poor. Sensitive to the challenge
to “read the signs of the times,” the Congregation now
supports an expansive understanding of its commitment to education
that values diverse expressions of teaching and learning, all directly
or indirectly in service to the poor. This new understanding has
enabled sisters to enlarge the scope of their ministries and to
respond to contemporary needs in a multiplicity of ways.
Finally, it can be argued that Julie’s commitment to the
education of the poor is part of a broader pattern of beliefs grounded
in her sense of justice. This orientation is biblical in origin;
her writings indicate her familiarity with Isaiah and are filled
with references to the good news of Jesus .Throughout its history,
from the days of Peter, the Church has underlined this emphasis
and stressed it even more during the reform period following the
Council of Trent. Julie was thoroughly grounded in this tradition;
indeed, the local Church in France made clear that citizens had
the moral obligation to help those less well off than themselves.
Yet it would be historically inaccurate, indeed misleading, to refer
to Julie’s sense of justice by using the term social justice,
since the Church’s formal articulation of its social teaching,
as we understand it today, began with the publication of Rerum Novarum
in 1891. Nevertheless, Julie’s actions and writings clearly
anticipate elements of the Church’s formal teaching. Her life
was rooted in her respect for the dignity of the person. This respect
dominated her relationships. She treated everyone with whom she
came in contact, bishops, clergy, civil authorities, workers, and
her sisters with the same care and reverence. Above all she thought
of the children in our schools, constantly admonishing her sisters
to treat the children with reverence, to understand their way of
thinking, to create a climate of joy in the classroom in part by
avoiding the use of fear tactics, and by providing a school environment
conducive to learning, by ensuring a warm fire in the classroom
and providing the boarders with “good soup.” Arising,
then, from her valuing the dignity of the person, and her concern
to reverence and care for the children in our schools, is her commitment
that the Congregation dedicate itself to the education of the poor.
Linked to these elements is Julie’s awareness of the evils
of war. From 1812 through 1814, virtually all the newly established
Notre Dame convents existed in the path of the Napoleonic armies
and their British, Prussian and Russian opponents. By and large
these armies lived off the land; scattered among her letters one
can gather a comprehensive analysis of the negative, if not evil
impact of war among civilian populations. Far more to the point,
Julie was worried to death about the physical safety of her sisters
living in the direct path of the armies.
Sisters of Notre Dame have inherited Julie’s emerging consciousness
of these patterns of justice; they have enlarged them in light of
current Church teaching, and like the presentation we have just
heard from Marie Angele on the Congo and will now hear on Kenya
and on South Africa they have made them their “faith in action.”
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