Eliza Maria Gillespie was an American Religious Sister, Mother Superior, and foundress of many works of the Sisters of the Holy Cross in the United States.
Background
Eliza Maria Gillespie was born on February 21, 1824 in South Bend, Indiana, United States. She was descended from Neal Gillespie, who was probably born in Argyleshire, Scotland, and Eleanor Dougherty of County Donegal, Ireland, both Catholics, who came to America, and settled in Pennsylvania about 1777. Eliza was born near Brownsville, Pennsylvania.
From her parents, John Purcell Gillespie and Mary Madeleine Miers, she drew much of her deep devotion to religion and charity. A frail and delicate child, she displayed unusual talents from her earliest years. After her father's death, her mother, having removed to Lancaster, Ohio, where she had relatives, married William Phelan, a wealthy landowner.
Education
She attended a select school at home, and then was sent to the school of the Dominican Sisters at Somerset, Ohio.
In 1841, at the age of seventeen, Eliza, with her cousin Ellen Ewing, the future Mrs. W. T. Sherman, was sent to the Visitation Convent school at Georgetown, D. C. She graduated in 1842.
Career
Graduating in 1842, she taught for a while at an Episcopalian seminary in St. Mary's County, Maryland, and then organized a Catholic school at her home town of Lancaster. Intellectual culture, charity, and religious devotion were the dominating ideals of her life.
In 1853 she set out for Chicago, determined to devote herself unreservedly to the pursuit of these ideals by becoming a Sister of Mercy. On the way she stopped to see her brother Neal, a seminarian at Notre Dame, Indiana, where Father Edward Sorin, recognizing at a glance her superior qualities, persuaded her to remain and join the Sisters of the Holy Cross, who had established a convent and academy a few miles away at Bertrand, Mich.
After a novitiate in France, she returned within a year and became the head of the academy. For almost thirty years, as Mother Mary of St. Angela, she remained the superior of the Sisters of the Holy Cross in the United States. With the cooperation of Father Sorin, the ecclesiastical superior, she raised the Community from its humble beginnings to the position of one of the strongest religious organizations of Catholic women in the country.
She knew how to attract and train religious-minded young women, and she gradually widened the opportunities for educational, charitable, and religious work. Removing the academy and mother-house from Bertrand to a beautiful property near the historic La Salle Portage, a mile west of Notre Dame University, she set to work to develop there, in St. Mary's Academy, a school that should be second to none in the higher education of girls.
Contrary to the prevailing view and practise, she believed that this education ought to be fully equal to that of boys, and therefore not only encouraged painting and other fine arts, but also strongly emphasized the development of intelligence and reason.
While thus engaged, she found time and means to establish numerous other academies modeled upon St. Mary's; she supplied teachers to parish schools, edited a series of Catholic school books, and cooperated with Father Sorin in the founding of the Ave Maria, for which she wrote and translated.
In pursuance of her ideals of charity, Mother Angela founded several important hospitals. Her greatest opportunity in this direction came with the outbreak of the Civil War, during which, while continuing to direct the educational and religious activities of the Community, she was busily engaged in supervising the work of her Sisters in military hospitals at Paducah, Louisville, Memphis, Cairo, Mound City, Washington, and other places, as well as their employment on river transports and hospital boats. The services of Mother Angela and her Sisters in the hospitals and on the battle-fields of the Civil War formed one of the brightest chapters in the record of the ministrations of mercy and charity during the great struggle.
Achievements
Mother Angela became an important religious figure who devoted her life and career to providing educational opportunities, especially for women. As an American religious leader, she guided her order in dramatically expanding higher education for women by founding numerous institutions in the United States and providing it with religious works.
She took part in charity by establishing several hospitals, especially during wartime.
Religion
Mother Angela remained a devoted Catholic throughout her life.
