How Much There Is to Learn

“How Much There Is to Learn”: The Sisters of Saint Joseph and the Education of a Teaching Congregation
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-David McAllister, Archivist

The 1939 play And True Love Is; or, (A Poet’s Quest) traces the intellectual and spiritual growth of Kevin Mor, a poor Irish boy, who becomes a poet. In Act III, he turns towards the owner of a bookshop, explaining his unexpected scholarly path: “You have not the same necessity for reading that I have. I daresay you know almost everything worth knowing. — I am only beginning to find out how much there is to learn.” (Act III, Scene I)

The play’s author, Sister Rosalia McGlone, was writing for high school students, but like Kevin Mor, she had herself traveled a similar path.

Sister Rosalia’s own education changed profoundly over the course of two decades. When she entered the Sisters of Saint Joseph in 1894, her education was vocational—bible history, catholic theology, and the Holy Rule. She went out on her first mission, St. Charles Borromeo School, in September 1895. For the next 16 years, she made her yearly and perpetual vows and taught in the early grades in both Philadelphia and McSherrystown, PA. As was common, she received no additional instruction or coursework in pedagogy or in specific subjects. Her religious vocation provided the preparation she needed for the schools. As one scholar looking at the state of parochial education in the late 19th century commented, “all Catholic education [was] religious education and all Catholic curricula [was] religious curricula.”

And then in 1911, another journey started. She went back to school not to teach but to study. “School” is almost too tidy a word for what followed. Her education unfolded over years of Saturday classes, summer institutes, state examinations, university courses, and independent study. She started with a Biology course. The next year she took eighth-grade equivalency courses. She took exams in July, scoring below average in Religion and English and above average in Spelling.

She couldn’t attend classes in the summer of 1913 because of illness, but in May 1914, Council decided that she “will attend U of P.” She started with a college-preparatory class in English at the University of Pennsylvania; another followed at Catholic University the next summer. At her request, she was “allowed to enter for a [college] degree at U of P,” starting in the fall semester of 1915. She attended for three years while teaching full time at St. Francis of Assisi school in Philadelphia, supplementing the courses at Penn with summer school at Catholic University. She earned her Bachelors of Arts, with a focus on Educational Psychology and Secondary Education, on 12 June 1918, starting a Masters program the same year.

Six bound ledgers, four measuring roughly fourteen by eight-and-a-half inches, two slightly smaller, preserve the record of Sister Rosalia’s education. Across their pages appear dates of attendance, examination grades, certificate numbers, and degree completions. Hers is only one entry among thousands. What they demonstrate in toto are the varied paths that nearly every sister in the growing congregation took to become professionally educated. In 1910, there were no sisters with normal school experience or who had earned a state teaching certificate. A few recent entrants had attended and graduated high school before entering, but the overwhelming majority had no instruction past grade school; there were no college graduates, let alone any advanced degrees. And yet, twenty years later, over one thousand sisters who taught elementary school had received a state teaching certificate, hundreds had earned a high school degree, scores had attended college, several dozen graduating, while a select few gained masters and doctorate degrees.

By 1930, three paths emerged for educating sisters: for elementary school teachers, state certification; for middle and high school teachers, a high school diploma or its equivalent; for academy and college teachers, a university education. Yet, in 1910 only the barest outlines of these existed. They were forged by trial and error, and there was no one-size-fits-all approach. Sisters traversed different “schools” at different times based on their own level of education, aptitude and age. They could, like in the case of Sister Rosalia, start by taking summer classes in primary grade subjects and end up taking graduate classes at a university, or stop with a teaching certificate. The Congregation transformed itself in two decades. It discovered, in Sister Rosalia’s own words, “how much there is to learn.” These ledgers record how.

By 1910, it was clear to the General Council that for the Sisters of Saint Joseph to remain a vibrant Congregation, a formalized system of teacher education was necessary. This had been contemplated first in the mid-1890s after Rev. John Shanahan, Superintendent of Schools in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, introduced a standardized syllabus for each grade. Then, Reverend Mother Clement Lannen proposed an intensive program of subject-specific study during the summers and yearly competency exams, but many professed sisters balked. “Several of the Superiors begged Mother M. Clement to exempt the Srs. from any other study but that of the syllabus, saying that the Sisters’ health would suffer were they to be under the strain of Fr. McDevitt’s supervisions, and an annual examination.” Reverend Mother relented and the coursework stopped. In January 1910, however, she revived the program. In a letter to local superiors, she outlined the necessity and basic approach for advancing education in the congregation. “Of late years we have had no definite plan of study for the Sisters, and, as a Community, we have suffered because of this fact. … We are essentially a teaching Community, each member should advance in secular as well as in religious knowledge.” Teachers currently assigned to 1st-3rd grades, “will study Fourth grade arithmetic and language;” those assigned to 4th grade, will study Fifth grade, etc. Through this “concerted effort,” Rev. Mother wrote, we will make sisters’ “work in the class room easier and more interesting.”

Ironically, the woman who oversaw the Congregation’s campaign for professional certification held neither a college degree nor a state teaching certificate herself. As Sister Mary Helen Kashuba richly chronicles, Sister Assisium McEvoy was nonetheless uniquely prepared for the task. As Mistress of Novices for decades, she prepared Novices for their vocation as religious and teachers. She served on committees developing the first uniform curricula for the Congregation and worked closely with the Superintendents of the Archdiocese to introduce standardized lessons city wide. She published a textbook on Christian Doctrine in 1904, which became a national standard of Catholic education for decades, and frequently lectured to the National Catholic Education Association.

The arrangement Assisium envisioned can still be reconstructed in the ledgers that record the Congregation’s educational program in remarkable detail. The earliest, begun in 1911, follows sisters through Saturday classes, summer schools, examinations, certificates, and eventually college degrees. Its opening pages alone list 81 primary-school teachers examined in religion, English, arithmetic, spelling, and penmanship, ranked by their average scores. Sisters stationed in Philadelphia attended Saturday and summer classes taught by Sister Assisium and Sister St. Gervase Morton. Those in New Jersey, Harrisburg, and Maryland had less opportunity for classroom study. “Sisters outside the city,” Reverend Mother Bonaventure Stinson wrote in 1913, “will try to do their best,” by studying “Wentworth’s Plane Geometry” on their own. The volume still bears the bookseller’s label of Wm. H. Hoskins, Stationer, 904 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia. Although unsigned, the glued reference tables, carefully indexed opening pages, hand-ruled red columns, and distinctive handwriting unmistakably identify it as Assisium’s working ledger.

The ledgers reveal a system of teacher education that extended far beyond any single course, examination, or degree. Sisters progressed through a graded course of study that paralleled the very curriculum they were expected to teach. Unless they had been in the Congregation for over twenty years and were exempt—and this was a direct response to the opposition professed sisters presented in the 1890s—all teaching sisters were expected to participate.

For the Juniors and newly perpetually professed, Council required at least four years of summer and Saturday classes. Sister Presentation Murphy, for instance, spent 1911 to 1915 progressing from fourth grade classes to seventh grade ones, her average slipping slightly each examination period. For most of her career, however, she taught second and third grade. Still, as we will see, when the State required certification, these classes provided a foundation for her to pass the examinations and earn her certificate—which she did in 1924.

The core classes before the 1920s, however, were the high-school equivalency ones. Referred to in the ledger simply as “Academic,” these classes started in 1914 and included classes in Christian Doctrine, poetry, and literature—largely Shakespeare. These classes were designed as a stepping-stone towards two Congregation goals. The first was providing more teachers for the dioceses’ high schools. In the first decades of the twentieth century, there were more potential high school students in Philadelphia than there were teachers. By 1920, there were seven diocesan schools and over 8,000 students (private Catholic Academies increased this number to 14,000). So crowded were the schools, the archdiocese developed an Annex system, teaching first and second year high school classes in open classrooms of grammar schools like Nativity BVM School, Our Lady of the Rosary, and Our Mother of Sorrows. To fill this growing need, individual Sisters of Saint Joseph had to prepare to teach more advanced subjects. Take Sister Rose Immaculate O’Keefe, as an example. She taught at a succession of elementary schools after entering the community in 1909 and started her post-novitiate schooling with Sr. Assisium’s sixth-grade classes in 1911. By 1917, she was taking “Academic” level classes, while also teaching math at Hallahan Girl’s High School, a position she would hold for decades.

As two other ledgers make clear—one with a cracked spine, the other still remarkably sturdy, both with Sister Assisium’s penciled names, lines and figures—the Academic classes also provided a springboard to more formal education. Gaining degrees for individual sisters, high school, college, graduate ones, was the second goal of the education program started in 1910. Formal degrees, however, required more than “Academic” classes—they required enrollment in the Catholic Sisters’ College, a correspondence and resident program in Washington, DC, that let sisters earn Catholic University of America-equivalent coursework without leaving religious life. The college offered normal school, high school and college degrees.

The cracked-spine ledger, entitled “Affiliation, C.U.,” recorded the progress of sisters in the “Diploma” course of study. It lists sisters’ names, years of study running down the ledger. Across the top, covering two pages, are a list of the courses needed for graduation. Below these are the grades each sister received in each class, and at the right-hand-most column, a total number of credits received. Thus, we learn that Sister Georgina Einwechter took a Latin and two mathematics classes in 1917, four religion, two English, one Latin, one math, one French and two music classes in 1918, and completed her studies in 1919 with a course in English, physics and history, earning a total of 15 credits. There is no indication, however, if she took classes in person or through the correspondence course, nor whether these were all summer classes or she attended during the school year. Likewise, it is unclear what degree she obtained. “Rec’d Diploma Jan.1920,” is written at the bottom of her row, but was this a normal school certificate or high school diploma?

Despite this ambiguity, the ledger demonstrates the extent the Congregation pushed to get sisters a high school-equivalent education. Between 1917, when the ledger starts, and 1923, when it ends, 392 sisters attended classes at or through Catholic Sisters College. On average, these sisters had made final vows before they started this work and had been teaching for a decade in a parochial school. Each year, a slightly younger—not necessarily in age but in years in religion—cohort of sisters entered studies. By 1923, most of the students had not yet made final vows and some were still novices.

The ledger with the sturdy binding, labelled “College Students,” tracked sisters studying at several colleges and universities. In this ledger, also started by Sister Assisium, there is only one sister listed per page, with each of the courses taken listed and the number of credits for each. Sister Georgina’s further studies were recorded on one page. “C. Univ. Dipl. HS Registers for AB,” her entry starts. For several years she attends “extension” and “summer” classes. These could have been at Villanova College or Catholic Sisters College, although the ledger does not specify. Her completion of this degree is not recorded, but it is noted that on January 28, 1926, she started work at Teachers’ College, Columbia University. From a list at the back of this ledger, we know that she graduated with a master’s degree in 1927. This ledger is also where we know that Sister Rosalia graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1918.

Sister Rosalia was one of the first sisters to receive a college degree, but not the first on this list in the ledger. Sister Rose Anita Morton and Francella Burke earned degrees in 1912, the former from University of Pennsylvania, the latter from Catholic Sisters College. Quickly, a core group of sisters earned college degrees, 54 by 1930. Most degrees were from Catholic Sisters College, Villanova College and the University of Pennsylvania, and frequently graduate work continued at these schools as well as Notre Dame and Columbia.

The push into graduate education produced real scholarship, although the “College Students” ledger tells us little about what these sisters actually studied. It records when sisters received their master’s and doctoral degrees, but not the subjects of their research. Some of their theses, however, survive in the archives, offering a glimpse of the breadth of their intellectual work. Sister Francella Burke’s 1919 master’s thesis from Catholic Sisters College, for example, examined rational curves in calculus functions, considering why several cubic curves—including the straphoid, cissoid, and Witch of Agnesi—could be integrated while the quartic Cassinian Oval could not. Sister Maria Kostka Logue completed a thesis at Villanova College in 1923 on pre-Christian philosophy and its influence on the development of the Church; Sister Stanislaus Quigley examined the originality of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus in her 1925 thesis; and in 1929 Sister Regina Dolores Devanney completed a Master of Music thesis at Notre Dame University on the polyphony of Palestrina. Sister Josefita Manderfield earned the Congregation’s first doctoral degree in 1925, with a study of religious instruction in Pennsylvania. Drawing on two series of questionnaires, she examined both the legal foundations for religious teaching in each state and the ways Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish communities in Pennsylvania sought to provide religious instruction to public-school students despite legal restrictions. Her conclusion about a “great awakening of interest in the question of religious instruction” may have proven overly optimistic, but her combination of legal analysis and sociological inquiry demonstrated the increasingly sophisticated scholarship these educational opportunities made possible.

These highly educated sisters, in turn, became the faculty for the Congregation’s expanding network of academies, high schools, and colleges. They taught at the academies at Mount Saint Joseph, Saint Mary, Cecilian, and Holy Family, as well as in parochial high schools such as Hallahan and West Catholic. In 1924, they became the faculty and administrators of the Congregation’s own college, Mount Saint Joseph College, later Chestnut Hill College. With a college of their own, the Congregation no longer needed to send as many sisters elsewhere for advanced study. The first four sisters graduated from Chestnut Hill College in 1930—Sisters James Marie, Letitia Marie, Grace Marie, and Dennis Marie. They are also the final entries in the “College Students” ledger. With the college now located beside the novitiate, keeping a fastidious account of where individual sisters studied was no longer necessary.

But this was only one branch of the Congregation’s educational system. The vast majority of Sisters were not preparing to teach in colleges or academies. They were teaching elementary school children, and their education remained tied to a different and increasingly urgent problem: state certification. The founding of Chestnut Hill College, therefore, marks the end of one path through the ledgers, not the end of the educational campaign itself. For Sister Rosalia, in fact, the largest phase of that campaign was still ahead. In the largest ledger in the collection, written in her own hand—the only one not begun and maintained by Sister Assisium—Sister Rosalia recorded, entry by entry, the Congregation’s effort to bring its teaching sisters into compliance with the state’s new certification requirements. Here the ledgers shift from documenting the creation of an educational system to documenting its mass implementation.

The ledger entitled “Normal School Certified Teachers” has 400 pages of entries, nearly all filled. Its inside cover still bears the original stamp of Lamb Brothers, Stationers, while pre-printed columns organize the information for tabular record keeping. It contains one list: arranged alphabetically by the sisters’ first letter of their religious names, then sorted chronologically by the date each certificate was issued. Each entry records a certificate number and date of issuance—the final administrative proof that a sister had completed the required coursework and passed the state examination. The first state certification was recorded in May 1923. But the work recorded in those entries had begun years earlier.

The warning came in late 1919. Reverend Mother Mary James Rogers received a letter from Rev. John E. Flood, Superintendent of Schools. “There is a strong possibility that, within the next two or three years,” he wrote, “the state will demand teacher certificates from all teachers in our schools.” The Department of Public Instruction in Harrisburg was preparing to require parochial school teachers—including the sisters—to pass examinations and obtain state certificates to continue teaching. Sister Assisium had already been preparing for such a possibility through the summer classes she organized at Mount Saint Joseph and through study at Catholic Teachers College. But her own statistics from 1919 reveal the scale of the work that remained. By then, 24 Sisters had earned, or were expected to earn by the summer of 1920, degrees from colleges or universities. Another thirty had earned normal-school diplomas, and 62 had received high-school diplomas. Even so, more than 80 percent of the sisters teaching in Pennsylvania still held neither a certificate nor a degree.

For the next two years, Sister Assisium worked to prepare the sisters for certification. She continued the summer classes and examinations. Sisters continued attending Catholic Teachers College to earn high school diplomas or normal-school certificates and began attending classes at Villanova’s extension college, which, like Catholic University’s program, offered summer and weekend classes for religious women. Sister Assisium met with C. F. Hoban, Associate Director of the Department of Public Instruction, and corresponded with Hollis Dann, who supervised the certification of music teachers. She organized remedial classes at Cecilian Academy for “older Sisters.” In a letter to local superiors, she asked, “Can they, from what you know of their ability, take up English Fundamentals, Composition, And Nature Study?” Then she added, “If you think they can’t say nothing. If you judge they can, ask them if they wish to go, saying because it [is] hard, Rev. Mother will not force it on them. There will be no young Sisters in the class.” Sister Assisium was adapting the educational system she had helped create to a new and increasingly urgent purpose: preparing hundreds of sisters, many of whom had left school decades earlier, to meet a state examination. It was not enough.

By the summer of 1922, as the Congregation met in General Chapter, Sister Assisium admitted that she could no longer manage the certification process alone. Her report on “Sister Studies” was uncharacteristically personal. “I am nominally in charge but must declare the work is not being done by me as it should for I have not the time necessary to plan and push on.” She continued, “I am no longer able to cope with the work or do it as it should be done, but I have a strong hope that some arrangement may be made whereby the work may go blessedly on; it must, or we shall not be able to meet the present and future conditions.”

That arrangement was Sister Rosalia McGlone. Reverend Mother Mary James appointed her head of Mount Saint Joseph Normal Institute, placing in her hands the work that Sister Assisium had begun more than a decade earlier. But unlike Assisium, Rosalia had an institution with additional staff—four sisters who had earned college degrees—and a clear mandate: to get the Congregation’s elementary school teachers certified, not simply to promote education more generally. Sister Rosalia described the purpose of the Institute: “Since 1922, it has … worked schematically to give all the Sisters from the oldest to the youngest … an opportunity for self improvement as teachers, and for State certification.” She began with the professed sisters. “The sisters were called in for courses and certified according to seniority of profession.” The courses followed the standard two-year normal-school curriculum developed by the Department of Public Instruction. Although Sister Rosalia did not record individual classes or grades in the ledger, she documented the systematic progress of the sisters through certification, moving through the teaching force according to seniority. In 1924, Sister Saint Agnes Franklin, who had made final vows in 1902, earned her certificate four months before Sister Saint Rose Tomlinson, whose final vows came in 1903. Sister Geltruda Heyne, by contrast, did not receive her certificate until 1928, after entering religion in 1925. By the time of the General Chapter in the summer of 1928, Rosalia reported that “practically all the Sisters professed by Perpetual Vows are certified”—694 permanent certificates. At the time of the Chapter, another 359 Juniors and Novices remained in the Normal Institute, working toward temporary or permanent certification.

Sister Rosalia moved the sisters toward certification with remarkable speed, but the work was not without obstacles. One was Villanova College. In 1922 and 1923, much of the coursework for the normal-school certificate was taught by faculty from Villanova’s extension program. Because Villanova administered the courses and examinations, Sister Rosalia sent applications for certificates for 299 sisters to the college, expecting them to be forwarded to the state. They never reached the state offices. “In spite of the fact that we paid them $4,787.50,” Rosalia wrote in a report, “that College [Villanova] did not treat the problem of certification in a satisfactory way.” The Normal Institute broke with Villanova’s extension program in 1924 and began teaching its own normal-school classes. This solved one problem but created another: the State of Pennsylvania did not recognize the Institute’s credits. In December 1925, Edwin Jordan, secretary of the Board of Studies of Catholic Sisters College, informed Sister Rosalia that investigations had “reveal[ed] the fact that your Normal School is not recognized by the State Department of Education of Pennsylvania.” Without state or other recognized accreditation, he warned, the credits could not be accepted. Sister Rosalia disagreed in a terse response, but she nevertheless set about securing the necessary recognition. By the end of 1926, the Normal Institute had been accredited by the Department of Public Instruction, Catholic Sisters College, and the University of Pennsylvania.

The ledger records the result. By 1930, more than 1,102 state certificates had been issued to Sisters of Saint Joseph. Rosalia had been so successful in moving the Congregation’s existing teachers through certification that the Normal Institute itself eventually ceased to function as an independent department and became part of the novitiate. There was little need for a separate institute devoted to certifying experienced teachers; by then, nearly all of them had been certified, and the remaining work belonged primarily to the newly entered sisters. No one recognized what Rosalia had accomplished more clearly than Sister Assisium. “I was relieved of that charge, and the students preparing for State Certification were put in charge of Sr. Rosalia,” she wrote in a draft report. Leading the Normal Institute was “strenuous work,” causing “her days and nights of anxiety, only our Lord knows.” But, Assisium insisted, “the Community should know and appreciate her work; and recognize something of its debt to her.”

Coda
Tucked into a box of correspondence of Reverend Mother Mary James Rogers was a curious copy of a registration to the U.S. Copyright Office for a play called And True Love Is; or, (A Poet’s Quest). I had encountered the play before, in a box of material from Mount Saint Joseph Academy. Its author was Rose Elizabeth Wright. There was no Sister of Saint Joseph by that name, so I assumed it was the work of a former Academy student and placed it with the other alumnae material when I processed the collection. The copyright registration was signed by Rose Elizabeth Wright, but a note on the folder that held the registration, written by another sister, identified Wright as the alias of Sister Rosalia McGlone.

The discovery sent me back into the records to learn more about the Sister who had so inconspicuously published a play. What emerged was not simply the story of a poet or scholar, but of a teacher who had traveled an extraordinary educational path herself and then assumed responsibility for extending that opportunity to hundreds of other sisters. The ledgers made that transformation visible. They begin with sisters studying elementary subjects on Saturdays and during the summer, follow some through high school, college, and graduate study, and end with more than a thousand state teaching certificates. Together, they record not a single educational path but a congregation learning, over two decades, how to educate its teachers. At the center of that transformation stands Rosalia McGlone: a Sister who began by discovering, as her fictional Kevin Mor would later say, how much there was to learn—and who ended by helping ensure that hundreds of other sisters had the opportunity to learn it too.

A Note on Sources
This essay is based primarily on six volumes in the Archives of the Sisters of Saint Joseph, preserved in the collection Mount Saint Joseph Normal School and the College Education of Sisters, along with related correspondence, reports, and notes documenting the Congregation’s efforts to educate and certify its teachers. These working ledgers provide the central evidence for tracing the Sisters’ educational experiences from elementary-level study through high school, college, graduate work, and state certification. Additional archival sources include the Letters to the Houses, particularly letters of January 17, 1910, and October 9, 1913, and the Council Minutes. Special thanks are due to Sister Margaret Mary Smith for her work documenting this collection and making its contents searchable, and to Sister Mary Jo Larkin for her transcription of the Council Minutes.

Among the published and unpublished works that informed this essay are Sister Josefita Maria Manderfield y Salazar’s 1925 doctoral dissertation, “The Status of Religious Instruction for Children Under 16 Years of Age, with Specific Reference to Pennsylvania,” particularly her discussion of Catholic education and the growth of Philadelphia’s parochial high schools; Sister Mary Helen Kashuba’s “Assisium McEvoy, SSJ, Education Pioneer,” in Sisterly Love: Women of Note in Pennsylvania History (2015), and Chestnut Hill College, 1924-1999: Tradition and Risk (1999); and Robert L. Anello’s “Intellectual Formation for Professionalism in Catholic Education: Catholic Sisters’ College, Washington, DC,” U.S. Catholic Historian 35, no. 4 (Fall 2017).