Neighbors and Missionaries by McGuinness Margaret M.;

Author:McGuinness, Margaret M.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Valley Catholics

By 1951, the sisters ministering in Horse Creek Valley were able to claim that the spiritual side of their work was beginning to bear fruit. They were conducting religious-instruction classes for thirty adults and fifty-eight children and boasted that eight converts had been received into the Church. The social and educational life of the center was also thriving. The sisters were leading five scout troops with eighty-one members as well as conducting a kindergarten in which forty-five children were enrolled.58

The sisters were especially pleased that two local women had converted to Catholicism and entered the congregation. Since the sisters staffed neither elementary nor secondary schools and were ministering in a predominantly non-Catholic area, the two “southern vocations” were visible signs of the success of their labors.

In 1947, Lorraine Gosnell left South Carolina to begin her novitiate at the motherhouse in Nyack. Sister Lorraine—who was given the religious name Georgina but reverted back to her baptismal name—was living with her father when two of the sisters came to visit the family. Baptized and raised Catholic, she had been unable to attend Mass because there was no church in the Valley. The sisters invited her to ride the bus to St. Mary Help of Christians Church in Aiken, and she decided to accept their offer.

A committed Catholic, Sister Lorraine remembered how welcome the sisters made her feel on her first bus ride to Mass. It was cold that day and she had no gloves. Sr. Margaret [Raphael] Hennessey took her hands, she recounted, “and she put them underneath her cape, and held my hands until we got to Aiken.” The sisters, she said, made her feel special. “I felt like the sisters helped me to feel that God loved me. The sisters really pointed out that God loved me.” When Sister Lorraine discerned that she was being called to religious life, the Sisters of Christian Doctrine were the only community she considered; it was “that or nothing.”59

Betty Reames began participating in the activities offered by the center as a second- or third-grader after her mother began work in the mill during World War II. Neither a baptized Catholic nor poor—her father was an overseer in the mill’s carding department—she remembered meeting Sisters Dorothea McCarthy and Margaret Hennessey when shopping with her sister Gladys, who approached the women and began asking questions about their lives and work. Invited to visit the convent by Sister Dorothea, Gladys converted to Catholicism within a year. At the time, Betty neither understood nor condoned her sister’s decision, and she refused to attend her baptism. During this time, the sisters began visiting the girls’ mother, who was dying of cancer. As a result, she came to know the sisters, and, despite her father’s hope that she would wait until she was eighteen to leave her Baptist tradition, Betty was baptized by Father Charles Maloney on May 27, 1950.60

After she entered the Catholic Church, Betty began to learn about Catholic devotional life and culture from the sisters stationed at the welfare center.

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