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St. Louis Cultural History Project—Spring 2022

  

Daniel Lord, S.J. with Catholic sisters

  

Daniel Lord, S.J.: Booster for the American Nun
By Stephen A. Werner, Ph.D.

Today, in the St. Louis area, my home, most people never see Catholic sisters. They could visit the chapels of the cloistered Pink Sisters or the Carmelites, but most never do. However, in the 1960s there were 3200 sisters in the area from fifty different congregations. The evidence of sisters is all over, if one looks for it. Many dozens of empty convents at parishes exist. A number of very large old buildings still stand that were once mother houses and novitiates. In Calvary cemetery, in numerous large plots, sisters from many different orders lie on the hillsides. These sisters built and staffed many grade schools, high schools, colleges, and hospitals.

In studies of American religious history, the role of Catholic sisters in shaping America is often ignored or given inadequate attention. By comparison, the Shakers get well-deserved attention, but there were far more nuns with a much greater impact. In any major U.S. city with a large Catholic population there would have been more Catholic sisters with their institutions and buildings than there were in all the Shaker communities combined.

In 1948, the St. Louis Jesuit Daniel Lord would comment:

After my years of association with people I have reached the reasoned conviction that women religious, our nuns, are the outstanding body of women in all the world.

I have come to marvel at the proportion and value of their achievements. I could name for you old nuns in our country whose work entitles them to the rank of empire builders. They have created entire educational systems. They have parlayed a pair of hands and a log cabin into a dozen magnificently equipped hospitals. They have calmly managed millions of dollars in property with apparently a magic that transcended the possibilities of actual money.

I have seen them guide communities of nuns from a handful of young women to far-flung organizations influencing tens of thousands of souls. I have seen them reach out to the missions of lands whose names I hardly recognized.

Indeed I feel safe in saying that history will not show us any other women's achievements even remotely comparable to what our nuns have done in solid accomplishment, creative ability, executive skill, and unselfish devotion to humanity.

I have come to admire women religious because among them individuals in such large numbers do such startlingly important things. They are presidents of colleges and principals of high schools; they run the country's finest private hospitals; they run those convent schools that turn hoydens into ladies; they are scholars and executives of a high order; they write books and sing some of our finest poetry and edit magazines; they turn little children of the poor into sterling citizens of the country and of the kingdom of God.1

In the early twentieth century, the Catholic population grew rapidly due to waves of immigrants, who then often had large families. Child labor laws and mandatory education laws became more common. Many young people, freed from the burden of working, could now go to school. And completing high school became the norm.

By the 1930s, 135,000 sisters in America were running schools, colleges, hospitals, institutes for the Deaf, orphanages, retirement homes, charity programs, homes for unwed mothers, and living in cloistered convents. In the next decades, their role and impact would further increase.

The growing Catholic population needed schools and sisters to staff them. Nuns built the immense Catholic school system in America. Brick and mortar parish priests often got the credit, but nuns, with their dedicated service and low cost, made both possible. Paid very little for their work, sisters made it possible to run Catholic schools. This freed up money to build elaborate church buildings. Few people who see a beautiful old church today ever consider that sisters helped subsidize it.

Sisters were sometimes marginalized. An emphasis on humility and deference to male clergy often kept sisters from realizing their true situation. Many clergy embraced their positions in a hierarchy they saw as designed by God, and displayed patriarchal attitudes.

Daniel Lord, S.J. appeared with a different vision: he saw sisters as co-equal partners in the Apostolic work of the church. (He saw lay people in the same way.) Although Lord never questioned restricting the sacramental priesthood to men, beyond that he wanted women religious to play roles commensurate with their talents. He had a more open attitude on women in the church than did many clergy of his time.

Daniel Lord

Daniel A. Lord, S.J. (1888-1955), was one of the most influential Catholic religious figures in America in the twentieth century. A prolific writer, he wrote 32 books, 228 pamphlets (that sold 25 million copies), and some 70 plays, musicals and pageants.

Lord grew up in Chicago and attended Holy Angels School where Sister Mary Blanche of the Sisters of Mercy had great influence on him. He attended the Jesuit St. Ignatius high school and college. In 1909 he entered the Jesuits at St. Stanislaus Seminary outside of St. Louis.

He became the National Director of the Sodality and from 1926-1954 he traveled constantly across the country and visited countless Catholic grade schools, high schools, colleges, and parishes. (At its peak, there were 13,000 Sodalities in America and Canada.) He also gave innumerable conferences, lectures, and retreats. In the process, he very likely met and interacted with more Catholics in America than anyone else: students, lay adults, brothers, and priests, and, in particular, Catholic sisters. He also corresponded with many thousands of people and gave advice to many, especially on choices about marriage and vocations. More than any other figure, he had the pulse of Catholic America and appears to have done more than anyone else to support and encourage Catholic sisters. He became the great booster for the American nun.

Lord always thought big. He saw the possible and his vision was infectious. A number of sisters, encouraged by Lord, started thinking big themselves. Many became visionary and energetic leaders in their orders and began to see new possibilities. Such empowered women would scare the bejesus out of some bishops.

A School for Teaching Sisters

During his teaching years at the Jesuit university in St. Louis, Lord and another Jesuit, wanting to improve education, created a series of six Saturday morning talks in the spring of 1919 on teaching methods. They launched a small teacher’s college and many teaching brothers and sisters in St. Louis showed up. Lord recalled: Almost one hundred of them came to smile at me when I rose to begin my first class in the teaching of high school English. It was the most wonderful audience I had ever savored. Indeed, I think classrooms full of nuns spoil teachers for almost any other type of class. They come eagerly, avid for knowledge, intelligent and alert, and with ears that hear and minds that retain.2

Such a training program was unusual for its time. Lord followed it up the next year with a full year of Saturday classes for 125 sisters. However, since the university did not admit women, Lord held his classes at Maryville College (then in South St. Louis) of the Religious of the Sacred Heart. Lord anticipated the later School of Education at the university. This was the first time courses were offered to women. It would be many years before women were admitted as regular students. Decades later, the university, as other Catholic universities, would educate many thousands of sisters, and several orders of sisters built their own convents on the campus. In St. Louis, Lord was the pioneer.

Our Nuns

In 1924, during his theology studies, Lord published Our Nuns. In previous years, he had visited some twenty institutions run by Catholic sisters in St. Louis and Chicago. The fifteen chapter subtitles describe the places he visited: The Foundling Asylum, The Orphanage, Deaf-Mute Institute, The Negro Schools, The Boys Training School, The Girls Training School, The Catholic Grade School, The Academy, The Girls College, The Refuge (the Good Shepherd home for girls in troubled situations), The Hospital, The Insane Asylum, Social Work, The Old People’s Home, and The Convent of Contemplatives.

Our Nuns is a fascinating window into the activities of Catholic sisters in the 1920s. Lord explored a world that many Catholics knew little about.

Pamphlets on the Religious Life

Lord wrote a dozen pamphlets on the religious life starting with the popular The Story of the Little Flower about Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, published in 1925 just as she was canonized.

Daniel Lord Pamphlet: Shall I Be A Nun?

In 1927, he wrote the pamphlet Shall I Be a Nun? in response to numerous inquiries he received in person and in letters from young women considering the religious life. The pamphlet starts with a fairy tale of a king in a cold castle asking a beggar girl to leave everything and marry him. It then uses such imagery as a way to understand the religious life. Shall I be a Nun? would eventually sell 148,000.

In his writing Lord frequently expressed the belief that true /religion—the Catholic faith—and moral living would lead to happiness. He saw a lack of religion and immorality as paths to unhappiness. Consistent with Lord’s theology of happiness, Lord argued in Shall I Be a Nun? that religious life was a path to happiness.

In his 1929 pamphlet, Shall My Daughter Be a Nun?, the character of Father Brooks talks to Mrs. Hutton, the reluctant mother of Jane who wants to enter the convent. But, solemnly, before God, I can promise you, Mrs. Hutton, that if you have the faith and courage to let your daughter do what God wants her to do she will be happy for life. I promise you in return for the vocation of your daughter happiness for her—and happiness for you.3

This pamphlet answers the objections of parents such as Who will care for us in our old age? Father Brooks asks, Are we going to send the best girls out into the world and keep only the third-raters to do God’s work and serve humanity?4 This pamphlet would sell over 111,000 copies.

Lord published the pamphlet Of Course We Don’t Mean You in 1942, a collection of charming short parables. Make Way for the Lady, tells of a crowd of admirers and press waiting at a train. An elderly nun who has built three orphanages, five hospitals, two social centers, and a vast education system steps off the train. She is ignored as the crowd rushes to see the female movie star going to Reno for a divorce.

In 1954, as he was dying of cancer, Lord wrote Hospital Sisters: Your Friend in Need, Your Friend in Deed as a tribute to the Sisters of Mercy at St. John’s Hospital in St. Louis. He first entered the hospital in 1914. He made many return trips there and had great respect for the sisters.

The Depression

In 1929 the Stock Market crashed, pushing the already declining economy into the Great Depression. In his 1943 book People You’ll Like to Meet, Lord wrote a tribute to Catholic sisters in the Depression: Once More Our Sister Heroines.

The silent and unrecognized heroines of the depression were undoubtedly our Catholic sisters. Their revenues were cut as were the revenues of no other group in America. Though thousands of their pupils could no longer afford to pay, the sisters continued to keep them. In literally hundreds of parishes their salaries were not paid when the parish income sank close to zero. I have been in convents where the sisters had been living on seven cents a meal—and less.

Yet with this terrifying cut in income, with personal privations that are never mentioned in print, these sisters lost hardly a single school in the country. They kept the numbers of their pupils up to normal despite the pupils' inability to pay; they continued to give the members of their communities higher education and specialized training; and incredibly enough some of them actually built new schools.

The greatest financial marvel in the world today is that evinced by our Catholic nuns. And never before did they exercise that marvel as they did during those trying times of the depression. On almost nothing they kept going, paid interest, educated thousands, and continued to improve the standards of their own group.

For these heroines of the depression I have only unbounded admiration.5

Summer Schools of Catholic Action

In 1931, Daniel Lord began his popular week-long Summer School of Social Action (SSCA). In some years, four to six schools ran in different cities with the slogan, Six days you’ll never forget.

Sisters played a large and critical role. For example, the first SSCA drew 25 priests, 224 sisters, and 155 lay adults and students. Group photos of later SSCAs show priests in the front as a minority in a sea of sisters and lay people. These conferences provided unique opportunities for sisters, priests, and lay people to interact as equals and as partners. At many Catholic parishes, there might be several priests and enough sisters to teach the entire grade school, yet often they had little interaction. At the SSCA everyone—men and women, clergy, religious, and lay—were equal workers in the vineyard. Lord’s vision of Catholic Action did not leave leadership and action to the priests.

In 1932 Lord wrote For Christ the King, also known as An Army of Youth for Sodality youth conventions.


An army of youth
Flying the standards of Truth,
We’re fighting for Christ, the Lord.
Heads lifted high,
Catholic Action our cry,
And the Cross our only sword!

Decades later, people—including many sisters—who learned the song at conferences could still sing the song with gusto.

Theater About Sisters

Two of Lord’s plays portrayed the history of women’s religious orders in America. Your Visitation and Ours starts with Annunciation and Visitation scenes from the Gospel of Luke and moves to the founding of the Visitation order by St. Jane Frances de Chantal, to the coming of the Sisters to the Midwest, and ends with a graduation today.

In 1935, Lord wrote and produced a show for Ursuline Academy outside of St. Louis called Daughters of Victory. The scenes start with the founding of the Ursuline order in 1535 by Angela Merici and end with the arrival of Ursulines in New Orleans and St. Louis.

In 1952 Lord published his play Everynun. The setting is the 60th Diamond Jubilee of Sister Mary Joseph. A young postulant listens as Sister Mary Joseph reminisces and they watch scenes of her past life: as a young woman, becoming a nun, teaching, working as a nurse and in a retirement home, and finally becoming Mother General.

The Sisters of Loretto

Daniel Lord had a big influence on the Sisters of Loretto in St. Louis who ran Nerinx High School and Loretto College (later Webster College/University). He inspired and encouraged many of them who went on to leadership roles in the community.

He helped Sister Mary Joseph (Scherer) create the Gallery of Living Catholic Authors. In time 775 Catholic Authors in America and Europe would be inducted. She wanted to encourage Catholic writers and the study of their work, and she envisioned the building of a research library. Sister Mary Joseph collected photographs and manuscripts. Eventually 115 boxes of material that she collected would wind up in the Georgetown University Archives.

Sister Mary Daniel Coffey

Lord influenced another young woman who became a Carmelite and took the name Mary Daniel Aloysius. (Lord’s middle name was Aloysius.) Lord wrote to her in 1947 giving advice on the formation of novices. He gave nine points. A number address prayer life; several are more practical:

8. I think the day should include such things as outdoor exercises. A certain amount of it should be required. There would be an insistence on the care of health. . . . Physical care, care of the teeth, physical cleanliness and things of that sort mean a great deal.

9. I wonder if you would consider a possibility: I sometimes feel that many of the peculiarities which may arise in later life could be obviated if people knew about them in time. Would you consider the possibility of having a Catholic psychiatrist or psychologist come out and give each one of the postulants shortly after entrance a series of fundamental tests? In that way they would get and you would get a knowledge of their basic weaknesses, against which they could be safeguarded in the future.6

(In 1961, someone studying Catholic sisters would note the lack of screening of potential sisters, including psychological screening. He also noted the lack of regular health exams and even the keeping of health records.)

In 1951 Sister Mary Daniel went to Jackson Mississippi to establish a convent. Lord used his weekly syndicated column in Catholic newspapers, Along the Way, to draw attention to the convent and help raise funds. A bust of Lord sits outside the chapel dedicated to him.

Sisters in the Modern World

In 1942, Lord wrote the book People You’ll Like to Meet: A Little Book of Pleasant People, a collection of Lord stories from his Along the Way newspaper column. The book includes short tributes to a dozen Catholic sisters and religious orders.

Lord always thought big. In the 1940s, he envisioned a time when sisters would be out in the public eye and involved in the world around them. Lord even wanted nuns as actresses in movies:

Someday soon, I would like to see nuns in full-length movies taking the part for example of the Blessed Mother or the part of a sister in the classroom or on the missions. That day hasn’t arrived.7

In subsequent years a number of movies would portray nuns, but without sister actresses, such as the 1959 movie The Nun’s Story with Audrey Hepburn.

At one talk Lord stated:

You sisters may be asked to help with the motion pictures of the future. In fact most of us would be delighted, I know, to see you sisters in shorts.8

The audience of sisters roared at his careless phrasing.

Lord thought of other ways to help nuns move into the modern world; even proposing that Mother Superiors of large congregations form some sort of union as a coordinating committee. He sent a letter to mother superiors across the country proposing a national convention:

It seems to me that out of such a conference, quite aside from the information we would all gather, it might be possible to form a kind of united program for religious women, both regard to vocations, to publicize the work of Catholic sisters, and the training of the modern girl—beyond, of course the individual training which each order would regard as proper to itself.9

It is worth noting that Lord had enough national presence and respect that he could write such a letter.

Thomas F. Gavin, S.J. in his 1977 biography on Lord, Champion of Youth noted:

It is not easy to appreciate in retrospect how radical was his suggestion for a convention of Sister Superiors. Only recently have such conferences been held. Another revolutionary idea of his was that the time order by which religious priests and nuns lived was totally unsuited to conditions in America. All his life he observed this time order rigidly. But he knew that it was an unbearable hardship on many others. He argued that a European way of living had been adopted by American religious orders and on it they had superimposed the necessity of coping with the American way of life. He considered it unreal and inhuman that nuns should rise at 5 o'clock in the morning, assist at Mass, make their hour's meditation, teach school for six hours or act as nurses for eight hours, then return to their convents to correct papers, wash, sew, cook, scrub floors and still conduct evening activities with parents, students and auxiliary groups. So radical was his suggestion that the only response with which it met was some quizzical eyebrow raising and not a little amusement.10

Letters to a Nun

In 1947 Lord published Letters to a Nun, a collection of his thoughts on becoming a sister. Some of the titles of the 55 letters are You Enter, Your Broom, A Sense of Humor, Loneliness, The Puzzle of Life, Your Habit, Your New Name, Freedom, Idolatry, Poverty, Permissions, Mental Prayer, The Common Life, and Your Vow Day. One reviewer stated: Father Lord’s book might well be placed in the hands of every beginner in the religious life. It would prove a sure guide through bewildering areas in the first stage of sisterhood.

We Owe it to Our Nuns

Daniel Lord often spoke to groups of sisters. At one talk he threw away his script and asked the sisters for their thoughts. To his surprise, several comments described the same problem: sisters often found going to confession to be unhelpful. They had hoped to receive spiritual guidance and encouragement in their work.

In response Lord wrote a two-piece article, We Owe it to Our Nuns, in the American Ecclesiastical Review in 1950 urging priests to do a better job at confession for sisters. He called for priests to educate themselves on the needs of sisters. Lord suggested that priests ask sisters how they were doing in their work and even ask them about their health. He included some 30 short sayings of encouragement for priests to say to sisters.

Personal Correspondence and Influence

There is no way to know or measure the impact of Daniel Lord on countless young women and men considering vocations to the religious life. Late in his life, Lord stated that he had hundreds of stories of girls he knew becoming sisters. He even noted: I've had fathers who threatened to kill me for telling their daughters they had a vocation.11 Everyday Daniel Lord wrote numerous personal letters and he several times spoke of letter writing as his main ministry.

Daniel Lord wrote more than 100,000 personal letters, many of which dealt with young people making vocation decisions. However, most of these letters were not saved and archived. An alert reader might notice that in the above paragraphs there are no voices of women. Had some of his extensive correspondence survived, such voices could have been added.

The Legacy of Daniel Lord, S.J.

Very likely Daniel Lord influenced more young people to think about vocations than any other figure in America. He worked to bring the work of Catholic sisters out in the open so Catholics could see their many accomplishments. Lord also did much to help American sisters discover themselves and reach their potential as partners in the Apostolic work of the Church.

Two Lord colleagues commented on his work. Edward Dowling, S.J. who worked for the Cana Conference movement to train young people for marriage, and who would be a large influence on Bill Wilson of Alcoholics Anonymous, stated The greatest thing Father Lord ever did was to discover the American nun.12 Lord’s biographer, Thomas Gavin, noted His talks on this subject [vocations] at school retreats made the religious life so attractive that he literally ‘peopled’ a number of convents and monasteries with young women and men.13

The Vocation Crisis

In the mid-1960s, the Vocation Crisis hit with many men and women leaving the clergy and the religious life. New vocations numbers plummeted. Many reasons have been suggested for this tectonic shift. Perhaps the biggest factor was the expansion of career opportunities for both men and women. In previous decades, most people had limited career opportunities, and sought decent jobs, that they did not call careers.

The G.I. Bill for veterans in World War II played an un-recognized role in this shift. Many men went to college on the G.I. Bill who would not have had the chance without it. This raised their expectations and their expectations for their children, both sons and daughters. (However, it must be remembered that tragically, African Americans who served in the war were excluded from many G.I. benefits.)

A wide world of diverse careers opened for many Catholics, and religious vocations could not compete. In the Academy Award winning 1965 hit movie, The Sound of Music, based on the 1959 Broadway musical, the elderly sister sings to Maria about climbing mountains and crossing streams to follow rainbows and find one’s dreams. For Maria and for many young Catholic women watching the movie, that dream was not to be found in a convent.

Another thing no one noted as the Vocation Crisis enfolded: the biggest recruiter in America for religion vocations, Daniel Lord, S.J., had died in 1955.

  

Daniel Lord, S.J. with Catholic sisters
Catholic sisters in Detroit watching Daniel Lord's 1951 show "City of Freedom."

  

NOTES