Mary Josephine Rogers

Background

Mary Josephine Rogers was born on 27 October 1882 in Roxbury, Massachussets. She was the daughter of Abraham Theobald Rogers, a well-to-do building contractor, and Mary Josephine Rogers.

Education

When she was three the family moved to Jamaica Plain, where she attended Bowditch Elementary School and West Roxbury High School.

In 1901 she enrolled in Smith College, from which she received the Bachelor of Arts degree in 1905. Rogers' family hoped that she would become a biology teacher, and rejoiced when for two consecutive years after her graduation she was given a fellowship in zoology at Smith. But another absorbing interest had begun to affect her plans - Christian missionary activity.

In 1908 Rogers enrolled in Boston Normal School, which awarded her a teacher's diploma in 1909.

Career

For the next three years after receiving her diploma in 1909, she taught in the Boston public schools, spending her free time assisting with the editing of the Field Afar, the first mission magazine written in popular style, which Walsh had begun in 1907.

In 1911 Walsh and a fellow priest, Thomas Frederick Price, received authorization from Rome to begin the Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America. Later popularly known as Maryknoll, it was established the same year near Ossining, NewYork.

In January 1912 three women who had assisted with the work in Walsh's Boston office offered their services to the organization as secretaries. Rogers joined them in September, by which time their number had increased to seven.

By 1914 the former Maryknoll secretaries were constituted by the Holy See as the Pious Society of Women for the Foreign Missions. In 1920 they were designated a religious congregation, the Foreign Mission Sisters of St. Dominic. At the first general chapter of the congregation, held in 1925, Rogers, now Mother Mary Joseph, was elected mother general. She was reelected at each succeeding chapter until her retirement in 1947. The Maryknoll Sisters opened their first mission, an orphanage and school for Japanese-American children, in Los Angeles in 1920. A year later six sisters left for China. The congregation rapidly enrolled new members and opened new missions--by the beginning of World War II there were thirty-five missions in the Orient and six in Hawaii.

In 1932 Rogers established Maryknoll (now Mary Rogers) College for the training of modern missionaries, particularly in transcultural matters. As a spiritual administrator, she arranged to have experienced sisters from other religious congregations serve as counselors to the Maryknoll novices and postulants. Realizing the central part that prayer must have in the sisters' lives, she established at Maryknoll a cloistered house where sisters who so desired might live a permanent contemplative life of prayer for their fellow missionaries.

In 1952 Rogers suffered a disabling stroke.

On December 12, 1954, her congregation received the designation of Pontifical Institute, directly under the jurisdiction of the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, with the title Maryknoll Sisters of St. Dominic. When Rogers died there were 1, 160 Maryknoll Sisters serving eighty-four missions in seventeen countries in the Orient, Africa, the Pacific islands, Latin America, and the United States.

Views

Quotations: In a letter to Kathryn Maggio (Feb. 16, 1933) Rogers explained: "Missions interested me from my childhood. . When I was a student at Smith College, the mission activities of the Protestant groups moved me deeply to a realization that our American Catholic girls were doing nothing for the foreign missions, chiefly because they knew nothing of them. It was in 1906 that with the encouragement of a Protestant teacher, Miss [Elizabeth Deering] Hanscom, and the cooperation of Father James Anthony Walsh, then director of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith in Boston, that I organized at Smith a mission study club for Catholic girls, and along with them I learned more and more of the Church's need of help in the mission field".

She urged the Maryknoll Sisters to maintain their own individuality, to cultivate, among other qualities, "the saving grace of a sense of humor, " and to remain calm, even joyful, amid severe trials.

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• In his eulogy at her funeral (October 13, 1955) Bishop Raymond Lane stated: "One can safely say that no other has inspired so many women to sacrifice their lives for the high ideal of foreign mission life. "

Connections

Father:

Abraham Theobald Rogers

Mother:

Mary Josephine Rogers

Sister:

James

Mary James Rogers.

founder of Field Afar magazine:

Father James Anthony Walsh