08/29/2026
☘️ The same women who were told they owed allegiance to a foreign power and couldn't be trusted built the largest private hospital network and the largest private school system in the history of the United States. They were Irish nuns and most Americans have never heard their story.
When the Famine Irish arrived in American cities in the late 1840s they arrived into a country that viewed Catholic women in religious orders with open suspicion. Protestant ministers gave public sermons warning their congregations that nuns were instruments of a Vatican plot to undermine American democracy. Convents were accused of harboring foreign agents. In 1834 a convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts had been burned to the ground by a Protestant mob. The women who stepped off ships from Ireland into that environment and immediately went to work building hospitals and schools did so in the face of organized institutional hostility.
Seven Sisters of Mercy left County Carlow in 1843 and arrived in Pittsburgh, where the bishop had begged for nuns to staff his diocese. The oldest of them was twenty-four years old. Within years they had founded a hospital, a high school, and an orphanage. They moved to Chicago, where Sister Mary Vincent McGirr established Mercy Hospital, the first permanent hospital and first teaching hospital in the city. She was a novice when she arrived. President Abraham Lincoln visited a military hospital staffed by the Sisters of Mercy during the Civil War and wrote afterward that of all the charity and benevolence he witnessed in the crowded wards, that of the Catholic sisters was among the most efficient.
By 1968 there were approximately 204,000 women religious in the United States, the vast majority of them from Irish and Irish-American backgrounds, staffing 10,000 schools, colleges, and universities and running the largest private hospital network in the nation. By 1870 twenty percent of all schoolteachers in New York City were Irish women. By 1890 Irish women comprised two-thirds of teachers in some New York City school districts. The nuns did the same work as their lay counterparts for one-third of the salary and asked for nothing in return. The hospital you were born in, the school that educated your parents or grandparents, the social safety net that caught Irish immigrant families when nothing else would, a significant portion of all of it was built by women who arrived from Ireland in habits, in a country that didn't want them, and simply got to work. Follow The Irish Remembered for more. ☘️
