Sisters of Mercy

The Sisters of Mercy are a modern congregation founded to serve the poor directly, and their creation involved a deliberate break with the enclosure that had confined religious women.

Catherine McAuley and the House of Mercy

The congregation was founded by Catherine McAuley in Dublin in 1831, growing from the House of Mercy she had opened in 1827 to shelter, educate and train poor women and girls. McAuley intended a body of women who would go out to the poor, the sick and the ignorant rather than withdraw behind a grille, and the sisters became known as the walking nuns for their visible presence in the streets and workhouses and hospitals of the city, a novelty that drew both admiration and suspicion. The congregation combined religious life with active works of mercy, from which it took its name.

Education, nursing and reach

The Sisters of Mercy spread with remarkable speed through Ireland, Britain, the United States, Australia and beyond, founding schools, hospitals and refuges, and they became one of the largest and most widely distributed congregations of women in the church. Their work in education and nursing, carried by emigration and by deliberate foundation, made them a major force in the provision of schooling and health care to Catholic populations across the English-speaking world. The congregation continues that active service, still shaped by the founding decision of its foundress to place the works of mercy above the older ideal of enclosure.

Catherine McAuley built her congregation directly out of practical, active charity rather than convent life: the House of Mercy she opened in Dublin in 1827, four years before the community's formal establishment in 1831, sheltered and educated poor women and girls, and the sisters who followed her insisted on an active vocation that kept them moving through the city's streets to visit the sick and the poor, earning them the popular nickname of walking nuns among religious orders more accustomed to enclosure. That active, mobile character let the Sisters of Mercy respond to a very different kind of need barely two decades after the order's founding: during the Crimean War in the 1850s, Mercy sisters served as nurses alongside Florence Nightingale's better known mission, one of the earliest instances of Catholic religious women serving in an organised military medical capacity in a European conflict.

The congregation's combination of active nursing, teaching and social service, backed by its distinctive fourth vow of service to the poor, sick and uneducated, let it expand with unusual speed from a single Dublin house to communities across Ireland, England, the United States and Australia within a few decades of its founding.