Adaptation and professionalisation

Sisters, especially teaching sisters, were the principal agents of Americanisation for the millions of Catholics who settled in the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The 1884 decision of the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore that each parish should have its own school was less the initiation of sisters’ crucial roles in this regard as it was tacit acknowledgment of what they had already accomplished educationally in preventing “leakage” from the faith. But what did adaptation really mean? This essay argues that sisters – many themselves immigrants, of course – arrived at a range of responses to the challenge of determining what it meant to be American and Catholic, religious and educator. Based upon primary research in dozens of congregational archives in all regions of the US, and upon the experiences of communities that variously negotiated the challenges of adaptation in their own ranks, it suggests that the very diversity of sisters’ responses is itself central to the creation of an American Catholicism that has been vital, variable and permeable

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