Mother frances warde

Left motherless in infancy, she was confided to the care of a maternal grand-aunt who undertook the formation of her religious character according to the method of Fenelon. Naturally of a gay disposition, she was carried away by the frivolities of fashionable life until her scruples led her to confide in her director. She followed his advice in offering her services to the foundress of the Congregation of the Sisters of Mercy , whom she assisted in instructing the little inmates of the House for Homeless Children recently erected.

After their return as professed Sisters of Mercy she and six companions assumed the garb of the congregation.

Mother M. Frances Warde is known as the Foundress of the Sisters of Mercy in the United States of America.

In Sister Mary Francis Xavier was appointed superior of the convent at Carlow, which had been built under her supervision and was the first house of the congregation outside of Dublin. In she founded the convent of Naas and in that of Weyford, to which soon after its establishment the public orphan asylum was affiliated. From Wexford foundations have been sent out as far as Australia.

The convent of Sligo is perhaps the most noteworthy of her Irish foundations on account of its flourishing training-school for teachers. At Pittsburgh the sisters took charge of the cathedral Sunday school and the instruction of adults. Parochial schools and academies, visitation of the sick poor in their houses and in the poor house, visitation of the penitentiary, and the opening of the first hospital in Pittsburgh followed each other in rapid succession.

In she opened a second branch house in the Alleghenies on land given by the Reverend Demetrius Gallitzen within the limits of his Catholic settlement of Loretto.

Mary Frances Xavier Warde R.S.M.

Mother Warde exacted a promise from each of their Catholic defenders that no shot would be fired except in self defense, and the sisters held possession of the convent. The only honorable course for us is to retreat from this ill-conceived fray. I, for one, shall not lift a hand to harm these ladies. In Mother Warde opened houses in Hartford and New Haven to which free schools were attached; later on academies were opened and the works of mercy inaugurated.