NOTE: Enjoy this excerpt from The American Daily Reader, by CatholicVote president Brian Burch and Emily Stimpson Chapman. To order the complete volume, visit the CatholicVote store today!
Mother Mary Magdalen Bentivoglio bore a striking resemblance to the “Little Engine That Could.” She chugged and she chugged up a veritable mountain of obstacles, all to establish the first order of contemplative religious women in 19th-century America.
The Poor Clare nun arrived in New York from Rome on October 12, 1875. Her sister Constanza, several other Poor Clares, and their spiritual director, Father Paulino de Castellero, traveled with her. The women originally came to America to run a girls’ school in Minnesota, but soon after their ship docked Castellero had second thoughts and advised against it.
Unsure of how to proceed, Bentivoglio approached New York’s Cardinal John McCloskey about establishing a monastery in his diocese. But McCloskey told them that a contemplative order wasn’t compatible with the American way of life. So, Bentivoglio approached Archbishop John Baptist Purcell of Cincinnati. He said the same. After that, the nun went to almost every other diocese on the Eastern Seaboard. The answer was always no.
Finally, New Orleans said yes. The nuns arrived in March 1877 and welcomed their first postulants almost immediately. Before the summer ended, however, the Franciscan minister provincial ordered the women to Cleveland. Once they arrived, the same minister provincial ordered them to abandon their rule, take in a group of German Poor Clares, and start speaking German.
It was too much for Bentivoglio. With her sister and several novices, she packed up and moved on. Finally, a wealthy Catholic from Omaha, John A. Creighton, offered to build the nuns a convent. Omaha’s bishop, James O’Connor, agreed, and a papal bull establishing the Poor Clares in America sealed the deal.
All was not yet well, though. In the years that followed, the Bentivoglio sisters endured two years of exile from their community due to false allegations of impropriety, and when Bentivoglio established a new convent in Indiana, the nuns nearly starved for lack of money.
But today, more than 20 Poor Clare monasteries in the United States and Canada owe their beginnings to the “Venerable” Little Abbess Who Could.
