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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means and in any form whatsoever without written permission.

Library of Congress Catalog Card # 89-85818 International Standard Book #0-9624104-0-3

Carmelite Press
1313 Frontage Road
Darien, Illinois 60559

Preface: Sister Constance FitzGerald O.C.D. Archivist, Baltimore Carmel
Frontispiece: Martin Barry

Chart of Foundations in the United States: Sister Margaret Kob O.C.D.
Elysburg Carmel (see Appendix H)

Cover design: Sister Marian Steffens O.C.D.
Barrington, Rhode Island

Thomas L. Meehan
Chicago, Illinois

The text of the centennial history includes the first foundation from Baltimore to St. Louis and the foundation from St. Louis to New Orleans. Chapter XXXIV includes the foundation to Canada; in 1875 Carmelites from Reims arrived in Montreal. These early foundations are depicted on the cover design.

Original Copyright 1890 by John Murphy & Co.

     As the Baltimore Carmelites, and with them all the Carmels in the United States, celebrate their bicentennial in this country, it is appropriate to print a new edition of Carmel in America. This history is the one published record we have of the Carmelite Nuns' first hundred years in the United States and it is long out of print. It is still considered a reliable resource by scholars and researchers since no other study, past or present, provides such wide exposure to the valuable collection of documents preserved in Baltimore Carmel, the oldest community of religious women in the original thirteen states.

     In the archives of the Carmelite Monastery in Baltimore is a "Copyright Account" under the letterhead of John Murphy and Co., Publishers and Booksellers, dated January 31, 1891, which records the printing of five hundred copies of Carmel in America on April 3,1890. Father Charles Warren Currier, CSSR, (later Bishop) had agreed with the publisher on May 1, 1889 to prepare a manuscript for publication by August 1, 1889. The Carmelite Sisters of Baltimore were to receive "as copyright twenty cents per copy on all copies sold" because Carmel in America was principally their history, the greater part of it being taken directly from their archives, that is, from annals, correspondence, legal and financial records, and various other accounts.

     Today historians consider Currier's nineteenth century study well done for the period in which it was written. Although he uses few footnotes to identify his sources, he was a responsible researcher. An examination of the archives of Baltimore Carmel shows he must have had open access to all the documents preserved by the community. In fact, these records verify the carefulness of his research.

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     What is notable, however, is the absence of any serious attempt to interpret the historical facts and occurrences. While Currier often rambles on with event after event (professions, elections, confessors, preachers,) very rarely does he relate these happenings to the larger socio-cultural situation. Because the historical development of Carmel is not contextualized, Currier does not reach the conclusions and meanings the material might imply. In consequence, there are numerous pages in this history that may be tedious to all but the researcher or the most dedicated Carmelite nuns.

     This suggests the need for a new history, not only of Carmel's second century in the United States, but of its entire two hundred years and even of its roots in the English recusant community of the Low Countries. With the present emphasis on women's history, there is much, much more to learn about the background, life and early development of contemplative life for women in the American Church. A new hermeneutic of this history will undoubtedly reveal implications critical for the future of not only Carmelite women, but of all religious women. Hopefully, it will facilitate not the restoration of monastic discipline in apostolic communities but the retrieval of the contemplative roots of religious life for women in this country.

     Currier overlooked, possibly quite consciously, some of the conflicts in Carmel's history that the documents reveal and the community's oral history confirms. For example, there is some evidence that controversy surrounded the academy for girls conducted by the sisters from 1831 to 1851. Certainly the sisters did not agree to teach until they were driven to it by acute financial need, even though in 1793 John Carroll had obtained a rescript from the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith encouraging it. The fact that in a community that carefully preserved its records, no documents relating to the school were kept cannot be without meaning.

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     Just how much Mother Teresa Sewall's difficulties were related to the academy is a question for further research. She was a gifted and well-loved woman who had lived with the foundresses at Mount Carmel in Port Tobacco and who taught in the school from the time the sisters moved to Baltimore in 1831 until it was closed at Archbishop Francis Patrick Kenrick's direction in 1851. In 1854 she was elected prioress. The annals, which record both her forced resignation in 1858 from the office of prioress for alleged misconduct and also the elections which necessarily followed, give evidence of considerable difficulty in the community at that time. Kenrick mentioned the situation in the Carmelite monastery in three different letters he wrote to Rome between January 1855 and November 1858.¹

     Baltimore Carmel's oral tradition raises more questions. The community has always handed on the story that the sisters making the first foundation from Baltimore to Saint Louis left in the middle of the night without the rest of the community being aware of the time of their departure. When one puts the results of the community elections in 1858 and 1861 together with this oral history, one suspects that the conflict was only resolved when two sisters in the community, the leadership group from 1858 to 1863, departed for St. Louis. Once they were gone, Teresa Sewall was immediately elected a community counsellor. It seems fairly evident from the annals and death records that the accusation against her was not true. A long entry in the annals about the incident ends abruptly in the middle of a sentence because a page was torn out of the volume apparently to destroy someone's interpretation of events.

     These examples demonstrate that not only did Currier choose to exclude history that did not portray the Carmelites

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   ¹This correspondence is in the Archives of the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, Congressi, America Centrale, XVII, fols. 140r-v, 233r-v, 454r and 456r.

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in a favorable light, he also failed to reflect on the significance and meanings of particular events, persons, and periods. The early history raises so many questions. For example, how did their Anglo-American background shape the first Carmelite community? The majority of the first sisters came from the wealthy planter families, some of the oldest in Maryland. Like the Jesuits of the eighteenth century, they were not immigrants. Moreover, the sisters were exceptionally literate as is evidenced by the thirteen hundred book archive library preserved in Baltimore Carmel.²

     How did the spirituality of these Anglo-American women, educated into the Carmelite life in the English, Carmelite monasteries of the Lowlands, affect the spirituality of the first Bishops of the country? How did the various spiritualities—Jesuit and Carmelite, Sulpician and Carmelite—influence each other and ultimately the developing Church in the United States? What do the relationships with the Jesuits, the Sulpicians, the first Bishops, Elizabeth Seton, and others, tell us about the place of prayer in the early American Church?

     It is important to realize that one hundred years ago the impact of historical consciousness had not penetrated the Carmelite Order's self-understanding. Moreover, Currier did not have access to the research done in the Order in this century.³ In the first two chapters particularly, Currier sim-

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   ²Since many of these books are marked "the English Teresian Nuns of Antwerp," it is obvious they were brought from Europe when the foundation was made in Port Tobacco in 1790.

   ³See Joachim Smet, O. Carrn., The Carmelites, A History of the Brothers of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Vol 1 (Rome: Carmelite Institute, 1975); Vol. 2 (Darien, Illinois: Carmelite Spiritual Center, 1976); Elias Friedman, O. C. D., The Hermits of Mount Carmel, A Study in Carmelite Origins (Rome: Teresianum, 1979); Bede Edwards, O.C.D., Introduction to the Rule of SaintAlbert (Aylesford and Kensington: Carmelite Priory, 1973); Carlo Cieconetti, 0. Carm., The Rule of Carmel (Darien, Illinois: Carmelite Spiritual Center, 1984).

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ply expressed the understanding of the origins Of Carmel that prevailed in the Order at the end of the last century and well into the twentieth century. While some of this is obviously apocryphal, for instance, "concerning the descent of the Carmelites from the prophet Elijah," it does represent a tradition that fashioned Carmelite identity and development for many centuries.

     Contemporary consciousness, shaped by historical criticism and modern hermeneutics, knows how to appreciate and interpret the myths which these apocryphal texts reveal and to appropriate with fidelity and creativity those meanings which continue to give life and challenge to Carmel. It recognizes, however, that the historical inaccuracies prevalent in the first few chapters of Carmel in America make it unreliable as a resource for many historical facts and dates. These chapters remain, nevertheless, a valuable expression of Carmelite self-understanding in 1890, one link in the long history of the interpretation of the Carmelite tradition. The ambiguities and mistakes only underline the need for an on-going interpretation of the tradition (a hermeneutics of retrieval and suspicion) that utilizes all the hermeneutical insights and resources available to us at the threshold of the twenty-first century.

     All this explains why the reprinting of Carmel in America, under the auspices of Carmelite Communities Associated (CCA), is the first segment of a much larger, three-part project. For the bicentennial celebration, Baltimore Carmel will contribute the second segment of the history project: a critical edition of the Diary of the Trip to America written by Mother Clare Joseph Dickenson, one of the four foundresses of Baltimore Carmel, who came from the Low Countries to Southern Maryland in 1790.

     In Carmel in America, Currier clearly drew from the diary to describe the journey to America although he did not actually quote it extensively. In 1965, I transcribed the entire account from the original volume in Baltimore Carmel's

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archives.⁴ Up to this time, however, there has been no critical edition of this distinctive document. The diary is remarkable, not only because a daily record of an ocean voyage written by a woman in the eighteenth century is rare, but also because of the sense of humor and down-to-earth sound judgment it exhibits. It shows us a good example of the interfacing of Carmelite and Anglo-American spirituality. Therefore, Baltimore Carmel plans to publish, for the broadest possible dissemination, a commemorative bicentennial volume of the Diary for 1990.

     The third part of the history project is more extensive, complex, and difficult. Its completion will take a long time. In appointing a history committee, CCA has taken the first step toward a new history of the entire two hundred years Carmel has lived its prayer ministry in the United States. Although more than two-thirds of the Carmels in the country trace their origins to Baltimore Carmel, there are two other important groups of Carmels in the United States: one founded by Mexican Carmels (through the years of political upheaval in Mexico in the early part of this century) and another begun by French sisters. Hopefully, the celebration of the bicentennial will generate a unifying desire among all the Carmels in this country to participate in this undertaking in order to leave behind some record of the growth and development of Carmelite life for women in this century.

     The project is beginning now in the gathering of oral histories from some of the oldest living Carmelite women. As Carmels indicate their desire to participate, questions will be proposed and guidelines will be sent to help communities inventory and gather together the significant documents in their Carmel's history. These documents will then be available for later identification, study, and research.

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   ⁴The transcription and a copy of the original document were first published in Encounter, Vol. 1, No. 1(1965); Vol. 1, No. 3 (1966); Vol. 1, No. 4 (1966); Vol. 2, No. 1 (1967).

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     As I have indicated, Carmel in America already raises its own questions. For example, what have been the motivations for making new foundations? What has distinguished individual foundresses and how have their characteristics passed into the life and tradition of particular communities? What has been the ethnic background, education, and age of foundresses and of those who entered? What and who have been the major influences in the history of each Carmel, what the turning points? What has been the relationship to the local Church, the civic community? These are only a few of many possible questions.⁵

     While it is not feasible to complete this history by 1990, hopefully, a well organized plan and time-line will be in place by that time. If the desire and the commitment can be enkindled to weave the histories of the individual monasteries into THE history of Carmel in the United States, then Carmelites will have truly gifted one another for their bicentennial. They will have come through their long dark night.

     The last twenty years have been a period of change resulting, on the one hand, in division and distrust in the Order, and, on the other hand, in deepened communication and unity. If Carmel can look honestly at its past history in order to interpret it and appropriate its meanings, if Carmel can understand the links between past, present and future, then new energies might be generated for the third century of Carmel in the U.S. This communal effort to interpret the past has the potential to reconcile the divisions that exist and free Carmel for its future, for the flowering of a whole new era of contemplation in this country.

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   ⁵ In her doctoral dissertation published in 1981, Barbara Misner, S.C.S.C., came to some interesting conclusions about the Carmelites in A Comparative Social Study of the Members and Apostolates of the First Eight Permanent Communities of Women Religious Within the Boundaries of the United States, 1790-1850.

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     This is the bicentennial vision of CCA. It is, also, the dream of Baltimore Carnel as it celebrates its own beginnings in this new edition of Carmel in America and experiences anew in its heart all the Carmels that have spread across this land from that one small shoot planted in Southern Maryland in 1790.⁶

     The Baltimore Carmelites want to thank CCA which has undertaken and sponsored this Association project. Marian Steffens, O.C.D., of Barrington Carmel, above all, deserves gratitude. She has urged the reprinting upon CCA for some years, has done the necessary work with tireless enthusiasm, and has directed the project to its completion in this volume.

     Lastly, CCA thanks Ben Hogan, O. Carm., and Terrence Sempowski, 0. Carm., of the Society of the Little Flower and through them our brothers, the Chicago Province of the Carmelites of the Ancient Observance, who have undertaken the printing of this bicentennial volume for CCA. Without their agreement to underwrite the project and handle the technical side of the printing, it would have been impossible. Collaboration with them is a symbol of dreams for the Order of Carmel.

Constance FitzGerald O.C.D.
Baltimore Carmel

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   ⁶In their two hundred year continuous history, the Carmelite of Baltimore have lived in the four following locations: Port Tobacco, Maryland (1790-1831); Aisquith Street, Baltimore City (1831-1873); Biddle Street, Baltimore City (1873-1961); Dulaney Valley Road, Baltimore County (1961-).

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