Pioneer Spirit

Catherine Spalding, Sister of Charity of Nazareth

Mary Ellen Doyle

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813188942
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Biographies

Mother Catherine Spalding (1793–1858) was the cofounder and first leader of one of the most significant American religious communities for women—the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth near Bardstown, Kentucky. Elected at age nineteen to lead the order, Spalding also founded several educational institutions, Louisville's first private hospital, and the first social service agency for children in Kentucky.

Pioneer Spirit is the first biography of Catherine Spalding, a woman who made it her life's work to serve the citizens of the Kentucky frontier. Catherine, who lost her mother at a young age and was raised in many different homes before she was ten years old, eventually came to be raised in a colony of Catholic families. These formative years taught her independence, the value of hard work and an enduring spirit, and the importance of education, all of which would figure prominently in her later career.

Spalding became increasingly interested in health care, services for orphans, and education, and her business skills and strong sense of purpose allowed her to achieve her goals with little interference from outsiders. She showed a natural gift for administration, and the scope and services of the Sisters of Charity expanded under her leadership. In the midst of this ministerial work, however, Spalding always maintained the connection of her ministry to spiritual and communal life, ascribing great importance to all three facets of her calling.

Author Mary Ellen Doyle notes that in Spalding's correspondence with the Sisters, she repeatedly emphasized the heart of charity: "genuine interest in each other and sisterly affection free of personal ambition or jealousy." By the time of Catherine Spalding's death, the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth extended beyond Nazareth to more than one hundred sisters in sixteen convents. Spalding's legacy of service continues today with more than six hundred members worldwide, and her story of progressive and compassionate leadership offers unique insights into the growth of a religious order and the struggles of developing America's frontier communities.

One

Kentucky Girl

1798–1812

What did three-or four-year-old Catherine understand when told in 1797 that her family was moving far away? In that year, Edward Spalding sold his inheritance of 112.5 acres to his brothers and moved his family (which by then included a fourth child, Louisa) to the enclave of Maryland Catholic migrants at Cox’s Creek in Nelson County, Kentucky. Could little Catherine grasp how far Kentucky was from Maryland, how long the journey overland, across the mountains, and on the river? Did she realize at all that she could not expect to see again her grandmother or any of her extended family? What explanations or comfort were offered the child? What did she understand, anticipate, fear, or enjoy?

Catherine’s mother died early in their Kentucky life, in 1798 or early 1799. No cause of Juliet’s death is recorded, but the birth of her fifth child, Ann Spalding, is given as 1797 or 1798.¹ On the frontier, a mother’s death at or soon after childbirth was frequent enough to render it a probable cause. Left with five young children, Edward married Sarah Housley on December 7, 1799, two weeks before Catherine’s sixth birthday. We have no record of Catherine’s feelings about her mother’s death or her father’s rapid remarriage. What is clear, however, is that the comfortable, familiar experiences and people of Maryland, and her mother, probably her best helper and comforter in adjustment to Kentucky, were all gone.

In his early years in Nelson County, 1799-1801, Edward Spalding seems to have done well. He owned several slaves and horses, bought three hundred acres on the Salt River, and was appointed constable for Nelson County. But that was the end of his good fortune. Catherine’s most impressionable years were to be affected by her father’s growing problems and increasingly irresponsible solutions.

Apparently Edward wanted to prosper quickly. He had five children and their stepmother to support. He may have speculated in land beyond his means or been swindled in a land deal. He may have engaged in the gambling endemic to the frontier. Whatever the reasons, in 1802 he borrowed £353 from his brother-in-law Robert Housley and mortgaged all his property, real and personal, including a slave Nancy, to be forfeit if the debt was not paid in a year. The risk of such a contract was aggravated by the fact (did he forget it?) that he had sold Nancy a month earlier to one William Edwards. Next he borrowed £120 from Hayden Edwards, probably William’s brother. This time he got his sister’s husband, Thomas Elder, to be his security. There were other debts, too, an accumulation sufficient to ruin him. Whether or not he intended to pay, he could not. In 1803 or 1804, Edward Spalding simply deserted his monetary obligations and his family and disappeared. His name is off the tax lists in 1803, and in 1805, the court judged he was no longer “an inhabitant of the Commonwealth.”²

Edward’s wife either decamped with him or, more probably, was also deserted by him and declined to take responsibility for his household and children. At that time, families, not courts, determined the placement of children. Edward Spalding’s children became the wards of Thomas Elder, probably when their father left the state, perhaps even sooner. Thus Catherine lost her father and stepmother and experienced a second uprooting when she was ten—or younger.

As Catherine approached her teens, litigation over her father’s debts began. For several years the judgments fell heavily on her relatives. Robert Housley claimed and won all the mortgaged property but had to sue William Edwards to get the slave Nancy. Hayden Edwards sued Thomas Elder, guarantor of the £120 debt. Elder could pay that much, but not the other creditors who also sued him. In 1807, Elder spent some time in debtors’ prison for his brother-in-law’s debts.³ His embarrassment, financial losses, and the ensuing hardships had to encompass his own large family and his Spalding wards.

In what surely seems a related incident, William Edwards, who ran a tavern, got possession of Catherine’s sister Ann Spalding, less than ten years old. In October 1807, Thomas Elder obtained a writ of habeas corpus requiring William Edwards to bring Ann before the court. Had Edwards claimed her services when he lost the slave Nancy and while Ann’s uncle was in debtors’ prison, unable to protect her? Did the court return her? Were two girls, one black and one white, caught in these men’s financial follies or misdeeds? And what might this experience of being claimed, shuffled about, and disputed like property have done to the emotional and social formation of Ann Spalding, destined to be a Sister of Charity in charge of slaves? The coincidence of William Edwards being legally involved with Edward Spalding’s property and child twice in so short a time invites such speculation. But it seems beyond question that teenaged Catherine was painfully cognizant of her little sister’s fate, her uncle’s suffering, and the pain, turmoil, and hardship in the Elder home caused by her father’s deeds.

In the court action of late 1807, Ann was still called “daughter” of Edward Spalding. At the start of 1809, however, when Catherine was fifteen, court records begin to note the legal disposition of Edward’s “orphans.” Where, when, and how Edward died may not have been known to his children any more than to history, but his death—actual or legally assumed—clearly caused further upheaval for them all. On January 9, 1809, “Ralph Spalding Orphan of Edward Spalding” was bound into an apprenticeship to learn house carpentry. On January 26, 1809, Thomas Elder, guardian of Louisa Spalding, granted permission for her to marry Leonard Pierce. She could not have been older than fourteen. Sometime after Louisa’s wedding, Rosella, Catherine, and probably Ann were moved to the home of their cousin Clementina Elder, who had recently married Richard Clark. Catherine remained there until January 1813. Later that year, Rosella Spalding was married to Ceda Wathen, with “the consent of Richard Clark her relation with whom she has lived for several years.”⁴ Ann remained with the Elders or Clarks, separated again from all her siblings.

Thus, Catherine lost her father again, this time irrevocably. By her move to the Clarks’ home, she was shifted again—for the third time; and in the space of one year, she lost the companionship of two siblings. By any assessment, Catherine Spalding was a girl who knew physical and emotional upheavals, losses, rejection, and instability. Not much modern psychology is needed to suppose that she must either become emotionally unstable herself or, by God’s care and that of some loving adults, learn to bear losses and hardship, to find alternate sources of joy and trust, to make adjustments and move on, and to become firm in her own purposes and ethics. Over her lifetime, evidences show Catherine grappling with and maturing her own temperament, rooted surely in these early experiences. She learned to let strong feelings energize a profound care for other children orphaned by death or desertion.

In Catherine’s girlhood, the primary loving adults were Thomas Elder and “his amiable wife,” Elizabeth. Given Edward Spalding’s history, the startling fact about the Elders is that they opened their home to his children, where they already had ten of their own. Elder had owned a farm and headed a family of eleven children for twenty-eight years in Maryland. He then sold his land and migrated to Kentucky in 1800 with his wife and all but his eldest son.⁵ Even if only for about five years (1803-1809), Catherine Spalding had in the Elder home a father figure she could respect and a mother figure she could love. Surrounded again by siblings and cousins, Catherine had, even in the years of hardest trouble, a stable, large-family life with relations she could rely on.

The three or four youngest Elders would have been the same age as the Spalding children. In her growing years, Catherine would have found playmates and coworkers at home. One may suppose that the wit and playfulness evidenced later in her personality emerged at this time despite the sorrows affecting both families. Most of the Elder children must still have been at home through the time (1807) of their father’s losses and imprisonment for their uncle’s debts. But nothing suggests that the family’s pain was visited on the Spalding cousins or that they were made to feel they belonged any less to the family. Only when Edward Spalding was declared dead, and the growing family demanded more space, was Clementina Elder, thirteen years older than Catherine, able to persuade her father to transfer guardianship of at least some of the Spalding children to her and her husband.

Late into the nineteenth century, the Elders were remembered and cited for their love, confidence, private austerity, public mildness, and practical goodness.⁶ What other virtues could their circumstances more demand—or make more difficult? Catherine must have preserved this positive memory in her community’s traditions. The immediate recognition of her strength and warmth of character when she came to St. Thomas suggests that she had received from her aunt and uncle emotional support and ample love blended with expectation of the disciplined self-sacrifice required to make a large multibranched family live together in harmony and growing prosperity. They had formed the leader of a community of diverse women.

Beyond fond remembrance, what can be known or fairly inferred about Catherine’s daily life with the Elders and Clarks? The Elders lived in a settlement on Cox’s Creek north of Bardstown, known as Gardiner’s Station or Turkey Town until it was incorporated as Fairfield in 1820. It was one of an “intricate network of faith communities, several first gathered and sustained by pious laity.” Besides achieving safety in numbers, the Catholics hoped to warrant the assignment to Kentucky of one or two priests who would provide at least some of the “consolations of religion” for themselves and their children. Two priests came but left before Catherine arrived in Kentucky; two others died, and one “disappeared” between 1799 and 1804, the very years she was experiencing her father’s debts and desertion.⁷ The clergy as spiritual fathers were not reliable either, and she had to know it.

But one priest came and remained, and every Catholic knew him well, indeed—Stephen Theodore Badin. A French refugee, twenty-five years old, newly ordained in Baltimore, Father Badin was en route to Kentucky at the very time of Catherine’s birth in 1793. His stability there, his zeal, and the force of his eccentric personality would guarantee that a primary emphasis of life for young Catherine Spalding would be on the religion that bonded the pioneers at the Catholic settlements. Badin rode the circuit of communities, nearly always alone until Belgian refugee Father Charles Nerinckx arrived in 1805.⁸ Then they shared the services for the fifty families at Cox’s Creek. But Badin remained the chief pastor, the one Catherine would have known in her childhood. He would have supervised her instruction for first sacraments; his sermons and principles would have been her primary church influence, and his attempts to regulate the conduct of the laity would introduce her to internal church controversy.

The regulations and the controversy were elements of a dual Catholic culture that would mark Catherine’s girlhood. Some grasp of that culture is essential to understanding much of her ensuing history, especially her dealings with clerical leaders.

The Maryland Catholic migrants of her parents’ era inherited a tradition of faith sustained during persecution in England and under penal laws and civil disabilities in the colony. They had been liberated by the American Revolution, with its republican ideals of liberty and equality. The first American bishop, John Carroll, translated these ideas into a mode of church governance, and the Kentucky migrants made them into the frontier spirit. These lay folk were accustomed to desiring, but not having, a priest and sacraments, adjusting to a personal, homebound prayer life fed by devotional manuals with Mass prayers, and judging for themselves what was suitable moral conduct. They had learned to be tolerant of and inoffensive to Protestant neighbors. And they had developed active lay leadership (women included) in the management of their communal religious life. On the frontier, they wanted to build churches of a size and decor they could afford. They also wanted to keep financial control of them.

When these folk of English stock did get a priest who stayed (Badin), he was French, an inheritor of a Catholic culture that was distinctly communal, clerical, and hierarchical. Upwardly mobile clergymen in France achieved social status and moral authority. In beautiful churches, they dispensed the solemn rituals of salvation to reverent and obedient laity. While rejecting Jansenist theology, many priests imbibed a good deal of its spirit, its emphasis on corrupted nature, moral weakness, and discipline of the passions by penance, devotion, and confession.⁹ When the French Revolution abruptly and brutally ended both status and safety, many clergy fled to the United States, where priests were so urgently needed. The best of them left material ambition behind and brought real devotion and missionary zeal, but also their inherited spirituality, a newly formed distrust of independent spirit, and a loathing of “Republicanism.” Stephen Badin was one of the most devoted and zealous—but also, by culture and temperament, sure to embroil himself in controversy with his lay folk.

Badin was indefatigable in providing the sacraments to his scattered congregations. They revered him and participated gratefully, even if they sometimes feared him. In 1801, he wrote Bishop Carroll in Baltimore that he visited Cox’s Creek once a month. Thomas Elder was an acknowledged leader in that congregation, which included his family, the Spalding children, Clement and Henrietta Boone Gardiner and their three granddaughters (later Catherine’s companions as SCNs), and also the family of Nicholas Miles, father of Richard Miles (the future bishop of Nashville, with whom Catherine would later have very conflicted dealings).¹⁰

The Mass station was the home of the Gardiners, Catholic leaders in the area. Badin’s monthly arrival meant a full day of religious observances. His rule for attendance by families at a distance was ten miles if on horseback, five miles if on foot. Badin noted admiringly that some of his people did come great distances and spent the night in the church to be there for the confessions that began at dawn. Morning prayer was followed by more confessions, for each of which Badin took ample time. While he was thus engaged, catechists whom he had trained, usually women, instructed children and slaves; other adults recited the rosary. Mass, with a sermon, might not begin until past noon (the people, of course, fasting for Communion), and it might be followed by yet more confessions, instructions, baptisms, a marriage or burial, and even some other devotions and hymns. Catherine Spalding would have experienced ritual processions to the cemetery (such as those she led years later at Nazareth) and solemn processions of the Blessed Sacrament with leaders on horseback and participants with canopy and censer, banners and bells.¹¹

Yet, if the distances and hours were exhausting, the services gave to the pioneers a collective identity in a faith community. They were graced members of an ecclesial body for whose sacraments they made these sacrifices. Beyond doubt, young Catherine Spalding saw herself as firmly and forever a daughter of the Catholic Church. She had a solid foundation in its sacramental and moral life and some impetus to aspire to deeper spiritual life and service when occasion and guidance would come.

Religious events were also social occasions, neighborhood gatherings of both young and old, that required a good deal of preparation. The Gardiner sisters were said to be Catherine’s childhood companions. She was often with them and helped them prepare for the Masses held at their grandfather’s house.¹² If the communal religious experiences helped her to have friends and playmates outside the family, one need not suppose any unusual childhood piety to account for her pleasure in preparing and participating.

Household piety, however, was the sustenance of faith throughout Catherine’s girlhood. Badin’s rule was “No morning prayer, no breakfast; no work, no dinner; no night prayer, no supper.”¹³ Many families followed the custom of blessing the children daily. Badin advocated only the basic observances, but he cooperated with Nerinckx’s introduction of extra devotions and confraternities. Whatever the observances in the Elder household, Catherine certainly im...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chronology of Catherine Spalding
• Introduction: Daughter of the Spaldings, 1658–1797
• 1. Kentucky Girl, 1798–1812
• 2. Pioneer at St. Thomas, 1812–1822
• 3. Leader to New Frontiers, 1822–1824
• 4. Educator and Mother, 1824–1831
• 5. Pioneer in Louisville, 1831–1838
• 6. Mother and Administrator, 1838–1841
• 7. Community Life-Giver, 1841–1844
• 8. Louisville’s “Mother Catherine,” 1844–1850
• 9. Builder for a Future, 1850–1856
• 10. Final Harvest, Global Legacy, 1856–1858 and Beyond
• Appendix A: Which Spalding’s Daughter?
• Appendix B: Genealogies
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index