To Do and to Endure. Jeanne R. Beck

years Catherine regretted that she had left her father when he was so lonely, and felt guilty because his sadness had contributed to his illness. Her remorse was a gnawing grief that she carried for many years. She accepted without resentment the fact that the circumstances of her sisters’ lives had exempted them from physical and financial responsibility for their father. She believed that the task had been hers alone, and in times of discouragement and depression her self-reproach would resurface and become a heavy burden.

      Early in the new year she sold the Alliston house, paid up the debts and disposed of the family’s belongings.²⁸ Now free to follow Father Cameron’s advice, she went to Peterborough to discuss her vocation with the Mother General of the St. Joseph’s Community. It was not a rewarding encounter for either of them. The Mother General was cool and reacted negatively to Catherine’s resolve to teach in the remote areas of western Canada as a sister of St. Joseph. As Catherine admitted later, hers was not an acceptable way to request entry into a religious order. Prospective nuns were not supposed to announce the kind of work they would do, and where they would do it. Such an attitude was defined in the holy rules of all of the religious orders as a grave offence against the vow of obedience. Catherine had never read the Holy Rule of the Community of St. Joseph, which warned that the sisters must “be on their guard against the spirit of independence; they shall set aside all considerations of personal qualities and advantages which they possessed in the world, and shall make no pretention to privileges on account of education or talent.”²⁹

      The Mother General concluded the interview with the firm declaration that “they were expecting to go to Calgary, but they might not remain there … She did not think I should be accepted into their Community.”³⁰ Before she left Peterborough that day, she spoke with Bishop O’Brien, but he did not offer any direction or encouragement. The Peterborough incident, she once ruefully recalled, “deflated me considerably … tired and discouraged, I was in tears the whole way back to Toronto.”³¹ But she recovered enough to make the decision to seek an interview immediately with Father Arthur Coughlan, a Redemptorist priest who was the Canadian Provincial of his order and lived at their residence on McCaul Street, next to St. Patrick’s Church. She sought him out because a few years before, Sister Justina had spoken so highly of him that Catherine had “once talked with [him] about some matters and remembered that he was a very understanding man. I had some confidence in him.”³²

      Father Coughlan was an American who belonged to a missionary order, founded in 1732 by St. Alphonsus Liguori of Naples, whose members had become particularly dedicated to an apostolate of conducting missions in Catholic parishes. Because of a great shortage of clergy, Bishop Michael Power had invited the order to come to Toronto in 1845, and they had soon become famous for their dramatic, effective preaching. Their homilies were carefully constructed to give instruction in doctrine, and at the same time to renew the faith of all who attended their services, particularly those who were lax or lapsed Catholics.

      Father Coughlan was now fifty-one years of age, and had been educated by the Redemptorists since he was eleven. He had entered the seminary when he was nineteen, was ordained in 1892 at twenty-four, and in the early part of his career he had taught English at a Catholic College in Pennsylvania, and worked in parishes in New York and Baltimore. In 1913 Archbishop McNeil had requested the Englishspeaking Canadian Redemptorists (whose headquarters were in Baltimore) to provide a priest to work among the Italian immigrants in Toronto. Father Coughlan, who spoke Italian, was assigned to the task and performed it brilliantly. In 1915 he was made rector of St. Patrick’s Church and secretary councillor of the order’s vice-provincial. He soon became well known for his kindly and practical advice on spiritual matters and was a popular retreat master and confessor for several religious orders. His duties were expanded when the order made Canada and Newfoundland a separate English-speaking Redemptorist Province. Soon after, he took over most of the administration when his Superior became ill. In 1920 he was officially appointed Provincial of his large Canadian Province.³³

      As his order was already working in western Canada, Father Coughlan understood Catherine’s concern, and was impressed not only by her compassionate presentation of the plight of rural immigrant families, but also by her revolutionary solution to provide them with teachers and religious instruction. Like Father Cameron, he too believed she had a vocation, for the spiritual and physical dedication which such a task required could only be sustained through a vowed commitment. The key to her plan of attack was to become a teaching sister working in rural schools in the western settlements outside the orbit of existing urban Catholic schools and churches. In this way she could provide urgently needed school instruction for students of all religious persuasions during the day with her salary paid by the public school board, and on Saturdays and during the summer give classes in religion to the children of Catholic families who had hitherto never been taught the faith. She was insistent that it was folly to wait for the establishment of a separate school system because the western Catholic population was so scattered among the small prairie settlements, there would be too many instances where a separate school, funded by the provincial department of education, would not be viable.

      Father Coughlan advised Catherine that the only way for her to begin this apostolate in the public schools was to join an established order and persuade them that this was a promising field for both secular and religious education. He too was unable to suggest any women’s religious order, other than the St. Joseph’s Community, which might give serious consideration to her plan. He urged her to present her ideas to Mother General Alberta CSJ, in Toronto, because he believed that she was planning to open a Novitiate in Vancouver. If Catherine could enter the order there, she should be more sure of working in the West. Catherine indicated that this was not an order she felt would suit her. Undoubtedly the refusal from Peterborough still rankled, and she had already experienced their strictness and rigidity in applying their Holy Rule during her recent family emergency. Nevertheless, she agreed to apply, especially since Father Coughlan could not think of any alternative.

      She was gratified when Mother Alberta received her kindly; Catherine described her as “capable and friendly.”³⁴ Mother Alberta accepted her as a prospective applicant; however, she added that she was nearing the end of her term of office and did not know what the attitude of the new Mother General would be. As the next group of postulants would not be received until July 1920, and it was now only January, she advised Catherine to make a formal application, return to the West, teach for the rest of the school year, and make plans to enter the novitiate with the next group of postulants. Catherine agreed, for she had to earn money to pay for her living expenses until June, and also for the dowry and trousseau which were required when she entered as a postulant.

      Catherine returned west in February to an excited reunion with Adeline and Mary. She refused an offer to rejoin the staff in Coleman, and took a higher-paying position as the principal of a two-room school in Morrin, seventy-five miles north and east of Calgary. All went well, and as she had to leave for Toronto before the end of June, Father Cameron found a high-school student willing to take on her duties until the school year ended.

      On 2 July 1920 Catherine and four other young women were received as postulants of the Community of St. Joseph, Toronto, at their novitiate at Scarborough-on-the-Lake. The donning of the postulant’s simple black dress affirmed the sudden and severe transition which Catherine was about to undertake. At thirty-six, she was older by at least fifteen years than most of her classmates. For seventeen years she had been an independent career woman who had supported herself and her family. She was a successful teacher who had advanced steadily, by making her own decisions on her career direction and her employers. On occasion she had acted aggressively and confronted her employers when she felt measures should be taken to remedy untenable situations in schools where she taught. When she had left Penetanguishene, very few women teachers in Ontario at that time were principals of such a large school or were earning her salary. By nature she was a plain-spoken person who had never hesitated to take the initiative in a situation if she felt comment or action was required. Did she fully appreciate the great transformation that she was expected to undergo?

      The purpose of the postulancy was twofold. First, it was a period of probation for the candidates, during which their personalities and their beliefs would be scrutinized thoroughly by the Novice Mistress and the Mother General to ascertain