The terms of sale had permitted the Donnellys to remain on the farm for a time. During the summer and autumn of 1905 Catherine struggled to look after her dying mother and keep the farm household going. During this period Catherine expressed to her mother her gratitude for urging her to attend school in Toronto. The suffering woman knew that she was going to die soon and had accepted it, but she was very distressed about leaving her two younger daughters before they had completed their education. Catherine allayed her mother’s fears about their futures by promising that she would provide for her sisters and see that they completed their education. Although Catherine wrote of her father’s grief and loneliness with pity, and described him as “dear” and “hard-working,” she never referred to him as being helpful or supportive during the long ordeal of waiting for her mother to die from “the wasting disease.” She described her mother as “wonderful, deeply religious, actively Christian, self-sacrificing, a loving mother, loved by our neighbours.”7
A small news item in the Alliston Herald announced that on 20 November 1905,
A sad affliction visited the home of Mr. Hugh Donnelly, Tossorontio, on Monday at noon, when Mrs. Donnelly passed away after a lengthy illness. The deceased was a woman who was held in very high esteem by all who knew her and will be mourned by a large circle of friends. She is survived by her husband, and three daughters, who have the sympathy of the community in their sad loss.8
While still mourning the sad loss, Catherine had to start preparing immediately to resume her teaching career, as her family needed her income. Only two weeks after the funeral, she obtained a character reference from her parish priest, Father I.F. Gibney:
I have much pleasure in testifying to the good moral character of the bearer, Miss Catherine Donnelly, whom I have known for years.
She has good credentials as a Teacher, and I feel convinced that she will give good satisfaction in that capacity.9
In April 1906 Hugh Donnelly and his three daughters moved to Alliston, and James Quayle, to whom the farm had been sold, took over the property. (The Quayle family still owns the land; the old farmhouse was destroyed by fire in 1918.) Catherine did not move in with her family because she was successful in finding a position for the final two months of the year (May and June) at Central Public School in Galt, as the teacher of the boys in the “slow learner class.” This brief teaching assignment she always regarded as one of the most fortuitous of her life, because it was in Galt that she met and arranged to board with the MacDonnell family. Robert MacDonnell was an accountant, and a successful businessman. His wife Irene was a warm-hearted motherly person, and they both took to Catherine immediately. Their two daughters, Achsah and Ruth, were of an age with Catherine, and in her two months’ stay in their home an enduring friendship was created which was a great support and joy to Catherine all her life.
The MacDonnells were all deeply devout Baptists, and Catherine was helped by their sympathy and understanding at such a difficult time in her life. Even more meaningful for her was their sincere acceptance and appreciation of her religious allegiance as an equally devout Roman Catholic. Like her Alliston friends, the Wrights, she found that the faith and moral outlook which they all held in common bonded them together as Christians in a mutual love and respect for each other which transcended their denominational differences. These and other friendships which she had made outside the Catholic community became the source of Catherine’s fervent belief in the value and necessity of ecumenism, which she later declared should be the true destiny of the Christian church. However, ecumenism as she defined it was of the spirit, and not in the outward forms of service or governmental structures of the various Christian denominations. It should be demonstrated by love and co-operation between Christians regardless of whether any institutional unions ever took place. In practical terms, ecumenism meant that neither she nor the Wrights nor the MacDonnells, nor any other of her non-Catholic friends, ever sought each others’ conversion. Rather, they supported each other in the carrying out of their own denomination’s religious obligations as expressions of a mutual faith. These ideas took shape and became part of her own religious philosophy during that spring, in the quiet and peace of the MacDonnell home. But they were rooted in the Alliston community in which she was raised, particularly as exemplified by her parents and her childhood friends.
At the end of June, Catherine moved into the new family home in Alliston. The difficult events of the past year had taken their toll on her. Nursing her dying mother while keeping the farm going, moving the family to Alliston and then leaving immediately for a strenuous teaching position in Galt, and worry about her family’s future and the heavy financial responsibilities which had now fallen on her twenty-one-year-old shoulders had by July caused her to break down “with almost fatal results.”10 “I was worn out mentally and physically for a few months quite convinced that I could never be capable of teaching school. It was almost a complete and incurable breakdown.”11 Catherine never disclosed any of the medical details on how she managed to overcome her illness. She only stated that “God provided and I went through the experience of using my faith and the opportunities God had provided and still provides if we humbly ask Him.”12
By January 1907 Catherine had recovered sufficiently to take a teaching position at the Apto School, a hamlet north of Barrie, not far from Alliston. On 5 January she enrolled Tess in a boarding school in Toronto, the prestigious St. Joseph’s Academy for Young Women, founded by the Sisters of St. Joseph. Catherine paid the fees, although her father was listed in the academy register as guardian.13 Not quite seventeen years old, Tess was like her elder sister in temperament, strong-minded and energetic. Catherine described her at this time as “very clever and lively and attractive.”14
Catherine took young Mamie with her to Apto and arranged to have her enrolled in the school where she was now teaching. Lodging was found with the Loftus family “who kindly took us both to board at their fine home.” There was an elementary school in Allison which Mamie could have attended, but Catherine apparently wished to oversee Mamie’s studies for her Grade 8 elementary school certificate. Mamie had no objections to this arrangement, as she was a quiet, dutiful child whom Catherine always described as gentle, serious and co-operative, but who “perhaps gave in to worry too much at times.”15
The adolescent Tess was harder for her to handle, and Catherine admitted that it was often gentle Mamie who helped advise her. Tess became the centre of the next family crisis when, according to the St. Joseph’s Academy records, after only two weeks in the school, she left. The register stated that she “Took French leave, Saturday Jan. 19, 1907.” She never returned to the school; the next entry in her school record noted that Catherine Donnelly was sent a refund of $61.25 out of a total of $65.50 which she had paid for board and tuition for “Teresa Donnelly” for the term ending June 1907.16 These sums were a substantial portion of Catherine’s income, since her salary at Apto School was probably less than $500.17
Why did Tess leave and how did she manage to do it? Her son narrated her story many years later, beginning with Tess’s impression that
she was in the pipeline to becoming a nun in a Toronto Convent school, something that she did not want to do. One day the Convent school-children were on a field trip on a Toronto trolley, and got off. My mother stayed on until the trolley got to the Toronto train station, where my mother took a train to New York, enrolled in the Mount Sinai nurses school, became a registered nurse and rose to become chief scrub nurse in the Mt. Sinai operating rooms. Probably in 1916, she volunteered to go to France as a Red Cross nurse, and spent no more than a year in hospitals in Nantes and Brest, where she met my father.
Why my mother came to New York is a matter of speculation. I suspect that she thought she would have to distance herself from Aunt Catherine, who I know to be an exceedingly strong-willed person, in order not to be convinced to re-enter the convent school and then the convent. My mother’s relationship with Aunt Catherine was one of great affection and caring.18
This is a near tragic example of the misunderstanding between the two sisters