Background
Julia was born on February 13, 1827 at Inver, County Donegal, Ireland, and christened Susan. In 1831 her family emigrated by way of Quebec to Cincinnati where Mrs. McGroarty's brother, Hugh Bonner, was a successful medical practitioner. Buying land at Fayetteville, Neil McGroarty farmed, but soon engaged in turnpike and railroad contracting. Moving to Cincinnati, he was succeeding in business when in 1838 he fell a victim to pneumonia, leaving a widow with ten children who were dependent on the Bonners for support.
Education
Susan's early training in a Protestant private school and a Catholic academy had been so wretched that at eleven years she was unable to read. Encouraged by Bishop Purcell, however, she displayed more interest in her studies at the newly established Sixth Street academy of the nuns of Notre Dame de Namur, whom the bishop had brought from Belgium; but at best her education was only fragmentary.
Career
Susan McGroarty became a postulant, January 1, 1846. A few months later, she took the habit and on August 3, 1848, she was professed as Sister Julia, in the meantime teaching the infant school. In charge of the academy's day school, she displayed an aptitude for teaching and won the full confidence of Sister Superior Louise. Six years later, she was assigned as mistress of boarders to the Academy of Notre Dame, Roxbury, Massachussets, where she stayed until 1860, when she was made superior of a new convent and academy in Philadelphia.
During the Civil War her happiness was shadowed by the deaths of three brothers in the service. As the community she was serving grew, she built a school on Rittenhouse Square (1867), where the patient nuns silenced the opposition of exclusive neighbors who disapproved of a convent in their midst. In 1868-69 she made the first of many visits to Namur.
In 1885, she somewhat regretfully left Philadelphia to become assistant to the aged Superior in Cincinnati, whom she succeeded two years later. In 1888 she assisted in the election of the mother-general at Namur, and visited the European convents in an effort to improve her own academies. She visited the Notre Dame schools on the Pacific Coast which were placed under her management in 1892.
Her death occurred at the Notre Dame convent in Peabody, Massachussets.
Personality
She had the art of winning friends in all stations, numbering among them Archbishops Wood and Ryan and society women like Katherine Drexel, who was interested in her free school for Negroes (1877 - 82).
As superior, Sister Julia was a kind, if firm, mother of the community.
