Venerable Catherine McAuley, R.S.M.

Life

Catherine Elizabeth McAuley was born on 29 September 1778 in Dublin, Ireland, into a Catholic family at a time when the Penal Laws still constrained Catholic life in Ireland. Her father James, a builder, died when she was five; her mother Elinor died nine years later, leaving Catherine and her siblings dependent on relatives.

From around 1798 she lived as the adopted daughter and companion of William and Catherine Callaghan, a wealthy Quaker couple at Coolock House outside Dublin. Catherine quietly practised her Catholic faith and served the household for over twenty years. When William Callaghan died in 1822 he left her his entire estate — roughly £25,000, a great fortune for the time.

Catherine used the inheritance to build a large house at Baggot Street in central Dublin, opened on the Feast of Our Lady of Mercy, 24 September 1827. The House of Mercy sheltered homeless women and girls, taught destitute children, and trained young women for service work. Catherine ran it as a lay institute with a small community of like-minded women, but pressure from the archdiocese led her to accept that for the work to endure it needed canonical religious status.

In 1830 she and two companions entered the novitiate of the Presentation Sisters at George's Hill, Dublin, to be trained for religious life. On 12 December 1831 they professed vows as a new community — the Religious Sisters of Mercy — adding a fourth vow of service to the poor, sick and ignorant alongside the traditional three. Catherine, now Mother Catherine, was elected superior.

Over the next ten years she founded twelve foundations across Ireland and England, sending sisters out two by two. She wrote a Rule and Constitutions, formed a distinctive Mercy spirituality of practical compassion, and walked the worst slums of Dublin in cholera epidemics. She is remembered for her warmth, her insistence that her sisters be 'easy of access' to the poor, and her famous cup of tea offered after work to anyone who needed it.

Catherine died of tuberculosis at the House of Mercy, Baggot Street, on 11 November 1841, aged 63. Her last recorded request was that the sisters take 'a comfortable cup of tea' together when she was gone.

By the time she died the Sisters of Mercy numbered around 150 in Ireland and England. Today the various branches of her foundation serve on every inhabited continent. Her cause for beatification was officially introduced by Pope Paul VI in 1978, and Pope John Paul II declared her Venerable on 9 April 1990 in recognition of her heroic virtues. Devotees await the recognition of a miracle for beatification.