This week’s featured famous Kentucky Christian introduces the ideas
of commitment, achievement and recognition. When your youth group or children’s
church learns about Sister Mary Rhodes perhaps they can be led to think about
what people whose lives were set apart for Christian service have achieved even
when their circumstances appear to have been hard. Perhaps the students can be helped
to understand that recognition and rewards for what they do may not come in
their lifetime but that that prospect does not, for a Christian who believes in
eternal life, diminish either the value of their work or the size of their
reward.
Sister Mary Rhodes was a famous Kentucky Christian. She came
to Kentucky in 1811 where she started teaching children who had no other access
to a school. Soon she was joined by two other women and the school grew into
a boarding school. The women and the school were Roman Catholic. The women decided
to devote themselves to teaching and to God. They became the first American
order of Catholic nuns. Mary Rhodes was the Mother Superior of the Sisters of
Loretto for ten years. She must have been a skillful leader because by 1822,
the order had grown from three to 160 nuns. By then, the order had spread to
nine different locations where nuns from Kentucky were educating children. By
the middle of the twentieth century there were 70 communities of Loretto nuns
in the United States[1].
These nuns as well as women from other Catholic sisterhoods
were vital to the spread of education and to the introduction of Christianity
among the Native American tribes in the nineteenth century American west[2].
They were undaunted by the challenges they had to face perhaps because they
were confident that they had fully given their lives in the service of Jesus
Christ. Some historians think that the nuns who lived and worked on the
American frontier are great examples of how women can challenge gender norms
with a creativity and finesse that gets big things done[3].
Perhaps a lot of people did not know about their work during their life-times
but the impact of what they were able to achieve is still producing results two
hundred years later.
By Lesley Barker©2021
[2]
Ann M. Butler, “Nuns on the Frontier”. New York Times. 2012. ONLINE at https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/16/opinion/nuns-on-the-frontier.html.
ACCESSED 1/14/2021
[3] Erin
Blakemore. “How Frontier Nuns Challenged Gender Norms” in JStor Daily. 2018. ONLINE
at https://daily.jstor.org/how-frontier-nuns-challenged-gender-norms/.
ACCESSED 1/14/2021
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