Roman Catholic sisters first traveled to the American West as providers of social services, education, and medical assistance. In Across God's Frontiers, Anne M. Butler traces the ways in which sisters challenged and reconfigured contemporary ideas about women, work, religion, and the West; moreover, she demonstrates how religious life became a vehicle for increasing women's agency and power. Moving to the West introduced significant changes for these women, including public employment and thoroughly unconventional monastic lives. As nuns and sisters adjusted to new circumstances and immersed themselves in rugged environments, Butler argues, the West shaped them; and through their labors and charities, the sisters in turn shaped the West. These female religious pioneers built institutions, brokered relationships between Indigenous peoples and encroaching settlers, and undertook varied occupations, often without organized funding or direct support from the church hierarchy. A comprehensive history of Roman Catholic nuns and sisters in the American West, Across God's Frontiers reveals Catholic sisters as dynamic and creative architects of civic and religious institutions in western communities.

Since the first scandals broke in the mid-1980s, the sexual misconducts of priests have cost the Catholic Church in America more than $4 billion in compensation settlements and incalculable damage to its reputation. Although their crimes have attracted far less attention, predatory nuns have also caused harm. The depredations of these nuns took place in convent novitiates, orphanages, boarding schools for Native Americans, and in Catholic schools, both elementary and secondary. Their victims, male and female, ranged in age from six-year-olds to young adults. This book focuses on the criminal behavior of North American nuns and the responses from church leadership. Mothers superior were outspoken in their refusal to accept responsibility for the crimes committed under their watch, and their inclination was to close ranks and protect the predators, endangering many children and young people in the process. The complainants, on the other hand, were considered nuisances to be pushed aside with the least amount of exposure and expense possible. Straightforward and informative, this text begins by exploring the nuns' vow of chastity and its relationship with human sexuality, followed by dozens of case studies detailing the sexual abuse that nuns committed in various settings.

Traces the development of Catholic cultures in the South, the Midwest, the West, and the Northeast, and their contribution to larger patterns of Catholicism in the United States Most histories of American Catholicism take a national focus, leading to a homogenization of American Catholicism that misses much of the local complexity that has marked how Catholicism developed differently in different parts of the country. Such histories often treat northeastern Catholicism, such as the Irish Catholicism of Boston, as if it reflects the full history and experience of Catholicism across the United States. The Making of American Catholicism argues that regional and transnational relationships have been central to the development of American Catholicism. The American Catholic experience has diverged significantly among regions; if we do not examine how it has taken shape in local cultures, we miss a lot. Exploring the history of Catholic cultures in New Orleans, Iowa, Wisconsin, Los Angeles, and New York City, the volume assesses the role of region in American Catholic history, carefully exploring the development of American Catholic cultures across the continental United States. Drawing on extensive archival research, The Making of American Catholicism argues that American Catholicism developed as transnational Catholics creatively adapted their devotional and ideological practices in particular American regional contexts. They emphasized notions of republicanism, individualistic capitalism, race, ethnicity, and gender, resulting in a unique form of Catholicism that dominates the United States today. The book offers close attention to race and racism in American Catholicism, including the historical experiences of African American and Latinx Catholics as well as Catholics of European descent.

Although Katharine Drexel has been the subject of several biographies, they have tended to treat her as a perfect human being whom the Church later transformed into a saint. Katherine and the Sisters Who Shared Her Vision moves beyond the story of the heiress’s individual life devoted to God and shines a light on the work she did, assisted by the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament. Drexel could have lived comfortably, wealthy and privileged, as a Philadelphia philanthropist but chose to found a religious congregation of women dedicated to working within Black and Indigenous communities—without receiving the bulk of the money left by Drexel's father. The author’s careful examination of the work Drexel and her Sisters accomplished in Philadelphia and elsewhere shows impacts on the Church while also revealing racial issues at work in the story. This brings a critical perspective to Drexel's ministry to further our understanding of the Black Catholic community and renew our commitment to the difficult, ongoing conversation about race in America.

This collection traces women educators' professional lives and the extent to which they challenged the gendered terrain they occupied. The emphasis is placed on women's historical public voices and their own interpretation of their 'selves' and 'lives' in their struggle to exercise authority in education.

For many American Catholics in the twentieth-century the face of the Church was a woman's face. After the Second World War, as increasing numbers of baby boomers flooded Catholic classrooms, the Church actively recruited tens of thousands of young women as teaching sisters. In Into Silence and Servitude Brian Titley delves into the experiences of young women who entered Catholic religious sisterhoods at this time. The Church favoured nuns as teachers because their wageless labour made education more affordable in what was the world's largest private school system. Focusing on the Church's recruitment methods Titley examines the idea of a religious vocation, the school settings in which nuns were recruited, and the tactics of persuasion directed at both suitable girls and their parents. The author describes how young women entered religious life and how they negotiated the sequence of convent "formation stages," each with unique challenges respecting decorum, autonomy, personal relations, work, and study. Although expulsions and withdrawals punctuated each formation stage, the number of nuns nationwide continued to grow until it reached a pinnacle in 1965, the same year that Catholic schools achieved their highest enrolment. Based on extensive archival research, memoirs, oral history, and rare Church publications, Into Silence and Servitude presents a compelling narrative that opens a window on little-known aspects of America’s convent system.