c. 2003 Religion News Service
NEWS YORK _ When literature buffs are researching the life of the author of one of the 19th century’s most influential and important novels, “The Scarlet Letter,” they may come across a fascinating footnote _ the author’s daughter as a candidate for sainthood in the Catholic Church.
The New York Archdiocese formally opened the canonization cause of Rose Hawthorne in February, kicking off a process that, if all goes well, will, in several years, culminate in saintly status for the daughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne.
“We are not at all surprised,” said Mother Marie Edward Deutsch, superior general of the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, started by Rose Hawthorne in 1900. “We have always known our foundress to be a holy woman.”
Still, Hawthorne’s Protestant upbringing and early life of intellectual privilege, with family friends like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, did not make either an easy or obvious path to sainthood.
Born in 1851 and raised Unitarian, she was exposed to Catholicism through her childhood travels to Italy and Portugal. In “Memoirs of Hawthorne,” published in the Atlantic Monthly magazine, she wrote that she was so impressed by Pope Pius IX during a visit to Rome that her mother bought her a medallion with his likeness.
Hawthorne married George Lathrop, an aspiring writer, in 1871, and the couple converted to Catholicism in 1891, influenced by Catholic friends and books by Cardinal James Gibbons. Their relationship was eventually ruined by his alcoholism, which intensified after their 5-year-old son died of diphtheria, and Hawthorne received permission for a separation in 1895.
Soon after, she heard a story about a young seamstress who died of cancer, which at the time was believed by many to be contagious; those suffering from the illness were often abandoned by friends and family and, if in the New York area, sent to Blackwell’s Island and left to die alone.
According to Sister Mary de Paul, archivist of the order of nuns Hawthorne would go on to found, the seamstress’ story spurred her to take a streetcar down to New York’s Lower East Side, at the time a working-class neighborhood home to immigrants crammed into dark, dirty tenements.
In a letter to Emma Lazarus, author of the inscription at the base of the Statue of Liberty, she “alludes to the fact that there’s something in her life she was meant for,” said Sister de Paul. “She had tried writing, but her works were not of great significance; art was out; nothing seemed to be her mission.”
After a three-month nursing course in 1896, Hawthorne moved into a cold-water flat on the Lower East Side and began what would become her life’s mission: caring for those with incurable cancer. Two years later, Alice Huber joined her, and in 1899, the two women opened their first home, accepting no payments from patients or government funds. The following year, they founded their religious order, and for the next 30 years, until her death in 1926, Rose Hawthorne was known as Mother Alphonsa.
Today, the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne have 65 sisters in six houses: New York City; Hawthorne, N.Y.; St. Paul, Minn.; Philadelphia, Cleveland and Atlanta. While the houses attract a number of Catholics, Mother Marie Edward said the order also serves Lutherans in St. Paul, Baptists in Atlanta and Reform and Conservative Jews in several locations.
“We have always encouraged people to have their minister or rabbi come. We don’t proselytize,”she said.
The next step in the process to sainthood, overseen by a postulator, involves the collecting of information and documents attesting to Hawthorne’s “heroic virtues.” Later, if the cause reaches the Vatican phase, two miracles attributed to a candidate’s intercession must be recognized by the church before canonization.
Hawthorne’s postulator, the Rev. Gabriel O’Donnell, has both a professional and a personal connection to the order she founded. As a Dominican priest, he shares a religious foundation. But perhaps an even deeper bond was forged when his brother, also a Dominican priest, died at a Hawthorne house in 1995 after battling mouth cancer for two and a half years.
“My family will be forever grateful for the love and care that he received while a patient there,” O’Donnell said in an e-mail message from Rome.
Reflecting on how Hawthorne, if canonized, might serve as a role model, he said her embrace of religious life might not speak the loudest. “But the gift of self to the service of others, literally without counting the cost _ I think that would touch the hearts of the many hungry people who are looking for an outlet to their idealism and longing for deeper meaning in their often mediocre middle-class lives.”
If canonized, Hawthorne would join five other U.S. saints, three of whom emigrated from other countries.
DEA END CIPOLLA
