On December 12, we join with our worldwide Mercy family in celebrating Foundation Day, honoring the day in 1831, when the order of the Sisters of Mercy was established. Founded by Catherine McAuley, she and two other women, Mary Ann Doyle and Elizabeth Harley, became the first members of the Sisters of Mercy on December 12, 1831, in Dublin, Ireland.
But their work did not begin that day; it began years before in their care for those living in poverty in their community and the attention they gave to care for the sick and education for those without access. Catherine was a visionary, in ways large and small. She noticed those around her who were displaced and in need, specifically women and girls with meager resources or education, many of whom had been abused in their work as servants or treated as outcasts. She built a space for them, a large house on Baggot Street in an upscale area of Dublin, that came to be called the “House of Mercy” where hundreds received education and which served as a residence for women and girls without a safe home. This was the first of many establishments such as hospitals, schools, and colleges, including Maria College, focused on education or healthcare inspired by Catherine McCauley and the work of the Sisters of Mercy.
Catherine McAuley intentionally chose a wealthy area to build the House of Mercy because she wanted the realities of poverty to be visible to those who were not experiencing it. In doing so, she was presenting a question, both an immediate, concrete question to those living near the House of Mercy and a deeply theological question that continues to reverberate: who is my neighbor? Is it the person that lives by me in a house like mine, dresses like me, eats what I eat, speaks the way I do? Or is it the person who works in my neighborhood, someone who makes me uncomfortable and I can’t quite articulate why?
For Catherine and the Sisters of Mercy, the goal was not to divide their neighbors into those who are worthy or unworthy of value, to rank, sort, appraise, or separate. Instead, the goal of Catherine McAuley and the Sisters of Mercy, then and now, continues to be to serve as, “shining lamps, giving light to all around us,” to help us see the world as it is, to see others as reflections of the sacred, and to offer a guiding light for how to respond to what we see.
The Matthean call to care for others—feed the hungry, care for the sick, welcome the stranger, visit those in prison— asks for more than just feelings of sympathy or concern. Through their actions, the Sisters of Mercy lived out—and continue to live out today—the call in the Hebrew scriptures and Gospel text to welcome the stranger and care for those in need of support in material ways. May the Sisters of Mercy continue to be the shining lamps that they are, and may the spirit of living mercy abide within and among us as we go about in the world, seeing all as our neighbors.
Tara Flanagan, PhD
Maria College