Our Spirituality

Saint Vincent de Paul, our community’s patron saint, was the son of French peasants. His father wanted a different way of life for him than his family’s traditional role of tending sheep. With this parental goal in mind, he sent Vincent to study with the Franciscans at Dax, France. Later Vincent continued his studies at Saragossa and Toulouse and was ordained a priest in 1600.

A major event came to pass in Vincent’s life, when, traveling by boat, he was captured by African pirates, brought to Tunis, Africa, and sold as a slave. Over a two-year period, Vincent had three “owners” and succeeded in converting his third “master” to Christianity and together they returned to Vincent’s homeland. There Vincent became the almoner for Queen Marguerite of Valois, pastor of Clichy, and tutor to the family of Count and Countess de Gondi. In 1625, this devout couple persuaded Vincent to establish a congregation of priests. Their mission would be to perform charitable works and to preach in the towns and villages.

Vincent wrote the new community’s Rule of Life, and named the congregation, the Institute of the Missions. Its priests, however, soon became known as Vincentians, in honor of their founder, or Lazarists, for the name of their monastery, Saint Lazare Priory. The Vincentians were soon directing seminaries and colleges in various parts of the world and working with the poor in countries like Italy, Poland, Ireland and Scotland.

Though Vincent, marked by his own experience, procured the ransom of over 1200 Christians enslaved in North Africa, his name is most well known for his untiring and effective work on behalf of the poor, sick, aged and orphaned. He built or procured hospitals, homes for orphans, foundlings and the aged, and founded confraternities in parishes to look after the sick poor. Even today there are societies, hospitals, nursing homes, and homes for children that bear his name.

What links Saint Vincent to the Sisters of Providence?

As Sisters of Providence, we see the first thread of Vincent in our lives when he organized the Ladies of Charity, a group of well-to-do women who both assisted him in his work and collected revenue to support his charitable works.

Finding he really needed full-time help, Vincent, with the help of Louise de Marillac, founded the Daughters of Charity, a women’s religious community, for this purpose. He named its members “daughters” rather than sisters because nuns of the day were confined to convent cloisters. He needed the new order to be an apostolic one. His Daughters of Charity would, instead, consider parish churches their “chapels,” and the streets and hospital wards of Paris, their “cloisters.”

Vincent’s Rule of Life for the Daughters of Charity is the Rule we, Sisters of Providence, follow today.

Vincent died at 90 years of age. Pope Leo III declared him the patron of all charitable institutions.

We trace our roots to the Sisters of Providence of Saint Vincent de Paul in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, and further back to Blessed Émilie Gamelin, foundress of the Sisters of Providence in Montreal.

Her mother died when she was only four, and an aunt raised her. In the years that followed she also lost her father and a sister. At 18 she took charge of her widowed brother’s household, using one room as a dining room for the poor. Émilie married Jean Baptiste Gamelin when she was 23, he 50. A wealthy man, he supported her charitable works so she spent her spare time and resources reaching out to the poor. The couple had three sons, but only one survived infancy. And in 1827 Émilie lost her beloved husband and last child as well.

Grieving, she immersed herself in her charitable endeavors. After selling some property, she used its proceeds to purchase a residence for abandoned women of advanced ages. Her first guest was 102 years old! She went on to fill the house with 15 others and then purchased two more houses to provide housing for 30 women. She alone carried the burden of expenses, and when her resources were depleted she trusted totally in help from our provident God.

In time Émilie purchased a large building known as the Yellow House. It was so roomy its elderly guests could work on projects that brought in revenue to help with expenses. When cholera ravaged Montreal, Émilie visited the sick and dying in their homes. She brought six of the children whose parents had succumbed to live in the Yellow House with the elder women. Her work made her a familiar and welcome figure in Montreal. Following the political insurrection of 1837, she gained access to the city’s prisoners facing death or deportation. Every day “The Angel of the Prisons” brought the prisoners food, messages, and gifts from their loved ones. One of her most difficult tasks was assisting at the farewells between the condemned and their families.

Émilie also put great energy into caring for the mentally ill. Her strong interest in their welfare spurred the establishment of institutions to care for them. As her works mushroomed, the Montreal Bishop saw the need for a community of Sisters to carry on her work. When efforts to interest an established community failed, he decided to establish one. Seven women already working with Émilie formed its nucleus, and on March 25, 1843 they became the first novices of the new community. When one returned home, Emilie took her place, and a year later became their first Superior.

Less than ten years later, Émilie woke a Sister with the news she was facing death after contracting cholera. Her last words were to urge her Sisters to practice the virtues of “humility…simplicity…char…” She lapsed into unconsciousness before completing her last word and died soon afterwards. She was only 51.

Émilie’s community went on to help found the Sisters of Providence of Saint Vincent de Paul in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. In 1873, the young Kingston community sent Sisters to establish a mission here in Holyoke. From that community sprang ours, the Sisters of Providence of Holyoke.

Our foundress Mother Mary of Providence was born Catherine Horan on July 19, 1850 in Belleville, Ontario, Canada. Her childhood was characterized by her untiring devotion to God, her mother and charitable works. At 19, she became a member of the Sisters of Providence of St. Vincent de Paul in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, because of their commitment to the poor, sick, elderly and orphaned and because her sister, Elizabeth was a member of the order.

The first four Sisters from her first community established a mission in Holyoke in 1873. Catherine Horan, now Sister Mary of Providence, came two years later to teach in the all-boy St. Jerome’s Institute. Within a year, she was also the school’s principal. Her faith in God’s providence was strong even in her early years: “My assignment to schoolwork was somewhat of a disappointment to me, as I had been wooed to my vocation by a great sympathy for the poor and an ardent desire to relieve them in their sufferings. However, I was consoled by the circumstance that my charges were of lowly condition.”

She spent what little time her school responsibilities allowed to minister, side-by-side, with her Sisters: begging door-to-door, caring for the ill in their homes, scrubbing floors, laundering clothes, doing whatever was needed, whenever needed. By 1890, she was not only the school’s principal but local superior of the mission and the Sisters’ works to shelter and care for the city’s poor and infirm flourished.

When in 1892, the Bishop of Springfield asked Rome for the Sisters to be incorporated as an independent community in his diocese, legally separate from the Kingston order, Sister Mary of Providence was selected as our first major superior. With her new office, came her new designation—“Mother” Mary of Providence. She and her Sisters spent the next 15 years establishing 20 works of charity in central and western Massachusetts including acute care hospitals, nursing schools and homes for children and the elderly.

After 35 years of selfless ministry in Holyoke, 18 years served as Major Superior, Mother Mary chose to relinquish that leadership role, but continued as councilor and treasurer general for the next 16 years.

In 1923, she was instrumental in establishing the New England Conference of the Catholic Hospital Association, serving for seven years as its first president. From 1926 until her retirement in 1932, she was superior of St. Luke’s Hospital in Pittsfield. Even then she continued as a councilor on our Community’s Executive Council, to work with novices while spending most of her time writing a history of our then 40-year-old Community. Mother Mary of Providence suffered a stroke in 1936 and never fully recovered. She died on January 25, 1943.

Living a life of exemplary service

Mother Mary gave almost 74 years to the service of God. Nearly three-fourths of those years were spent as our community’s major superior or treasurer general. She had labored as teacher, principal, housekeeper, nurse, administrator and businesswoman. While an exemplary religious leader, she also was a compassionate confidant, a gifted writer and beloved friend. She was a mother in the most loving sense of the word, and during her lifespan the humble mission that began in 1873 with four Canadian Sisters increased in number to almost five hundred.

Among her greatest accomplishments is the fact that she left the work of her order in the hands of women well attuned in a vision, that even today, so closely resembles her own.