The Congregation of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd, also known as the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, is a Catholic religious order that was founded in 1835 by Mary Euphrasia Pelletier in Angers, France. The religious sisters belong to a Catholic international congregation of religious women dedicated to promoting the welfare of women and girls.
The Congregation has a representative at the United Nations, and has spoken out against human trafficking.
In some countries' laundries and other institutions that were run by the Sisters, it was found that historically girls remanded to their care were forced to work, unpaid, in the laundries, where the environment was harsh and involved physically demanding work.
History
The Congregation of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd began as a branch of the Order of Our Lady of Charity (Ordo Dominae Nostrae de Caritate), founded in 1641 by John Eudes, at Caen, France, and dedicated to the care, rehabilitation, and education of girls and young women in difficulty. Some of the girls were abandoned by their families or orphaned, and some had turned to prostitution in order to survive. The Sisters provided shelter, food, vocational training and an opportunity for these girls and women to turn their lives around."St. Mary Euphrasia", Good Shepherd of North America
The Congregation of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd was founded by Rose Virginie Pelletier in Angers, France, in 1835. Rose was the daughter of a medical doctor and his wife, known for their generosity to the poor. At the age of eighteen, she joined the Congregation of Sisters of Our Lady of Charity in Tours and was given her the name Mary of Saint Euphrasia. At the age of twenty-nine, she became mother superior of the convent.
Contemplative Community While Mother Prioress at the Tours Convent of the Order of Our Lady of Charity of the Refuge, Mary Euphrasia formed a group of contemplative nuns, named the Sisters Magdalens (based in a devotion to Mary Magdalene's conversion). In August 1964, they were renamed Sisters of the Cross, and in July 1987, they were again renamed the Contemplative Sisters of the Good Shepherd.
During the 2005 General Chapter, it was clarified that the Congregation of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd is one congregation with two separate lifestyles, apostolic and contemplative.
This group of nuns was open to any woman from any class who wished to live a cloistered life, but were ineligible to become Sisters of Our Lady of Charity."Rose Virginie Pelletier (St. Mary Euphrasia)", Catholic Information Network On November 11, 1825, four young women began their novitiate with a short rule given to them by Archbishop de Montblanc of Tours,Sisters of the Good Shepherd Contemplatives which followed the Rule of the Third Order of Our Lady of Mount Carmel.Le Brun, Charles. "Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd." The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 6. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1909. 22 Feb. 2015
They lived their religious life in solitude, prayer, and penance. They also undertook physical work, and they earned their own way with intricate embroidery, making altar bread and working with bees.
Angers, France In 1829, the Bishop of Angers, in France, requested a home be established in his diocese. Soon requests arrived from other cities. Each convent of the Order of Our Lady of Charity was independent and autonomous, with neither shared resources nor provisions for transferring personnel as needed. Mary Euphrasia Pelletier envisioned a new governing structure that would free the sisters to respond more readily to requests for assistance. She appealed to Rome for approval to establish a new religious congregation, and the congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd was founded in 1835, with the motherhouse in Angers.
Mary Euphrasia Pelletier was Mother-General of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd for 33 years, and at her death in 1868, she left 2067 professed sisters, 384 novices, 309 Touriere sisters (outdoor sisters who were not cloistered), 962 Sisters Magdalen, caring for 6372 "penitents", and 8483 children. In her lifetime 110 Good Shepherd convents were established in places as various as Rome, Italy (1838), Munich, Germany (1839) and Mons, Belgium (1839).
Expansion
The first convent of the Good Shepherd in Great Britain was founded in London in 1841 and then in Dalbeth, Glasgow in 1851, moving to Bishopton, Renfrewshire in 1953. They arrived in Montreal, Canada in 1844, and in Toronto in 1944. The sisters arrived in Melbourne, Australia in 1862. Additional convents were founded in El-Biar, Algeria (1843), Cairo, Egypt (1846), Limerick, Ireland (1848), Vienna, Austria (1853), Bangalore, India (1854), San Felipe, Chile (1855), Malta (1858), Leiderdorp, Holland (1860), and Rangoon, Burma (1866).
Under her successor, Mary Saint Peter Coudenhove, in twenty-four years, eighty-five houses were founded, and thirteen new provinces established: eleven in Europe, two in Africa, nine in North America, five in South America and one in Oceania. The Ceylon (Sri Lanka) Mission was founded in 1869 and the convent continues to function as a religious community and school. From Ceylon, the Good Shepherd Sisters went to Singapore in 1939 and to Malaysia in 1956.
Starting around 1938, over time eleven monasteries of Our Lady of Charity in four countries joined the Sisters of the Good Shepherd.
Since 1939 the Sisters have operated a convent in SingaporeProvince of Singapore-Malaysia Since then they diversified into other ministries ranging from education to social welfare. In 1958 they opened Marymount Convent School, a girls' primary school.Marymount Convent School
In Thailand in 2021, Piyachat Boonmul of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd was appointed by the Thai government to a national advisory role in a committee with tasks of coordinating plans for the prevention and suppression of prostitution, establishment of shelters and protection, and setting regulations for detainees' acceptance and care.
In the United States In 1842 Mary Euphrasia sent the first five Sisters to Louisville, Kentucky, to establish houses in the United States. From Louisville new foundations spread across the country. From 1893 to 1910 authorities in Davenport, Iowa placed 260 underage girls in Good Shepherd Homes in Omaha, Peoria, Dubuque, and elsewhere. Some of these girls were taken from brothels or dangerous home environments. This was seen as an alternative to sending them to the Iowa Industrial School for Girls in Mitchellville. According to Sharon E. Wood, "Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, reformers increasingly promoted private institutions as the best way to deal with problem girls."
When the Sisters of the Good Shepherd arrived in St. Paul in 1868, their mission was to serve the needs of the homeless, wayward, and criminal girls and women. The Sisters developed two distinct programs: the first, was the care of girls who came from failing homes. The second served former prostitutes or delinquent girls, a majority of which were sent there by the civil courts. At the conclusion of their court-ordered stay, most women returned to their communities. However, they had the option to remain with the sisters in a semi-religious status, living at the House, praying, assisting with chores, and easily able to come and go, or to become a full-fledged “Magdalen” nun, contemplative and cloistered within the House of the Good Shepherd. Lovina Benedict opened a home in Des Moines under the auspices of the Women's Christian Temperance Union. It was based on the Good Shepherd Home she had visited in St. Paul, Minnesota. In Wood's view the Davenport use of the Good Shepherd Homes "anticipated the juvenile court system created by Progressive reformers a few years later".
By 1895, the Sisters of the Good Shepherd cared for numerous poor elderly men including disabled Civil War veterans at a large asylum at 5010 North Avenue in Milwaukee. They later moved to a facility at 8730 W. Bluemound Road.Sisters of the Good Shepherd Asylum
New York City Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt (1895) was a firm supporter of the work of the Congregation. From 1928 to 1975, the Sisters operated Villa Loretto in Peekskill, New York. On February 14, 2000 the four Provinces of Cincinnati, St. Louis, Washington and St. Paul merged to become the Province of Mid-North America.
The Good Shepherd Sisters in Seattle ran a home for young women, most of whom were runaways, referred to the nuns by juvenile courts that deemed them "incorrigible". "The perception was that unwed mothers were sent there, but they weren't," said Sister Vera Gallagher. "In order to protect the girls, we really didn't tell the community much about what we were doing; and, because nobody knew, that was what they imagined. But they were just high-energy girls who had no place to go.".MacDonald, Sally. "Good Shepherd Nuns Retire -- `Wayward' Girls Got Help, Hope At Home Run By Convent", The Seattle Times, July 31, 1997 Deborah Mullins, the youngest of twelve from a divorced family, said the Good Shepherd nuns "[W]ere the best thing that ever happened to me. ...They never screamed at you when you did something wrong. They'd be just totally disappointed in you, and that would make you know what you needed to do." They ran a laundry, washing the sheets and tablecloths used by the railroad. The Sisters also gave the girls money to buy new clothes. "We weren't all rosaries and stations of the cross," said Sheilah Nichols Castor. "You had to be able to type, you had to be able to take shorthand, and you had to be able to cook something. When I came out, of course, I could only cook in batches of 30."
In 1867, the Sisters came to the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston, where they ran the House of the Good Shepherd on Mission Hill in Boston for nearly a century. The Sisters moved their school to Marlborough, Massachusetts in 1964, where they provided a therapeutic residential program for girls until 1985.
In 1993, the Woburn-based Cummings Foundation purchased the property and renovated it into the upscale independent and assisted living community, New Horizons. The Sisters continue to live there today rent-free, and offer residents daily Masses in the Cardinal Cushing Chapel.
Treatment of inmates
Australia At the request of the Melbourne bishop James Goold, four sisters, led by Mary of St Joseph Doyle, arrived in Australia in 1863. They established the Abbotsford Convent, and the first women's penitentiary and reform school for girls. The convent was established carry out the heart of the Good Shepherd mission, that of providing refuge for women deemed outcasts of society. From the early 1890s to the 1960s, most Australian state capitals had a Magdalene asylum, also known as Magdalene laundry, a large convent where teenage girls were placed. According to James Franklin, the girls came from a variety of very disturbed and deprived backgrounds and were individually hard to deal with in many cases. The asylums were initially established as refuges, with the residents free to leave. In the early 1900s, they reluctantly began to accept court referrals.Kovesi, C., Pitch Your Tents on Distant Shores: A History of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd in Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand and Tahiti, Playwright Publishing, Caringbah, 2006, 2nd ed, 2010 "They took in girls whom no-one else wanted and who were forcibly confined, contrary to the wishes of both the girls and the nuns."