Untitled - Digitizing America

of 1861 by four Daughters of Charity from Emmitsburg.
Providence Hospital cared for both civilian
and military patients. Other nuns braved death
as angels of mercy on the front lines. Records
show that about eight hundred Catholic Sisters
served as military nurses during these four years.
Despite the fact that new Know-Nothing-type
forces in the form of the Ku Klux Klan were born in
the year following President Lincoln's death, the
Church continued and expanded its work among
the Negro people. Catholic nuns, in many places,
had been the first to tutor black children, but a
post-Civil War endeavor, as described by John
Gillard, S.J., in his book, The Catholic Church And
The American Negro, was particularly significant:
ln 1877 a home for colored waifs was started by a
colored woman in an alley of Baltimore. lt grew and
prospered until a large house was donated by a good
Catholic lady. This was hencefodh known as St.
Elizabeth's Home. Once in the large house, the
number of children outgrew the abilities of the colored
matron, who urged the need of Sisters to take
over the work. The response came from the Franciscan
Sisters of Mill Hill, England, a community of
Sisters founded by Cardinal Herbert Vaughan. Four
Sisters arrived in Baltimore on St. Stephen's Day,
1881, the first white Sisters in America to devote
themselves entirely to the welfare of the Negroes.
Of course, there had been black nuns for some
years, beginning with those admitted by Reverend
Charles Nerinckx to the Sisters of Loretto in Kentucky
as early as May of 1824, followed a few
years later by the founding of the Oblate Sisters of
Providence in Baltimore.
While the South was slowly beginning its reconstruction
efforts after years of destructive war, a
swifter devastation visited Chicago. On October 8
and 9, 1871, the city that had sprung to maturity
around first-generation immigrants, where former
wilderness had become, almost overnight, a
commercially thriving strip of business property
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selling for one thousand dollars per front foot, was
tragically decimated in a conflagration that left the
heart of the diocese in a smouldering pile of ashes.
Bishop Thomas Foley, who was away at the time
administering the sacrament of Confirmation in
Champaign, lllinois, returned to a new frontier.
Diocesan buildings alone would eost over a million
dollars to replace.
ln response to pleas for funds for the relief and
re-building of the parish, contributions began to
pour in generously from all over the country. And
so, upon the skeleton of a burned-out Cass Street
(now Wabash Avenue) home, on the corner of
Chicago Avenue, new lumber was nailed into a
long, low building that was immediately dubbed
"the shanty Cathedral." ltwas packed from doorto
altar each Sunday with devout people who contributed
sacrificially toward the construction of a
new cathedral.
The work of diocesan reconstruction began-not
only of churches, but convents and an orphan
asylurn--a sad necessity after the tragedy. Food,
clothing, and money camefrom people in parishes
throughout our continent to help restore human
dignity to destitute souls.
ln the meantime, the man who would become, in
1880, the first Archbishop of Chicago was doing
his bestto alleviate miseries in Tennessee. Forthe