Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
TREASURES FROM OUR TRADITION
	In 1794, a young Irishwoman befriended two widows aboard ship while emigrating to America. They bought a house in Philadelphia and began to live a community life under the direction of a priest. Soon they relocated to Washington. There, the “pious ladies,” as the neighbors called them, were asked by their priest friend, by then the president of Georgetown University, to begin a religious community. In 1799 they established a branch of the Visitation Order founded by Saint Jane de Chantal and Saint Francis de Sales in the 1620s.
	The unique vision of this order followed a sensible routine, less arduous and more flexible than most traditions, and also accepted widows and older women. Amazingly, this American outpost of the Visitation began without reference to the “rule” of the Order. Most of the European convents had been lost under the “reign of terror,” and the rules and customs of the community could not be obtained. A copy of the rule was discovered in 1812, and in 1816 the pope officially established the monastery. By then, some French nuns had regrouped, and they sent a habit and cross to be copied. (No religious wore the habit in public in the United States until after the Civil War.) From the beginning, the Georgetown nuns had an educational mission, even though they discovered in the “rule” that such work was officially off-limits for the contemplative life. In America, the nuns depended on a school for their livelihood, so the rule was adapted. Today, the Academy of the Visitation is a thriving example of excellence in Catholic education, and the adjacent monastery is the oldest monastic foundation in the original thirteen United States.
—Rev. James Field