Pursuing Truth

Front matter

Me a

PURSUING TRUTH

HOW GENDER SHAPED CATHOLIC EDUCATION AT THE COLLEGE OF NOTRE DAME OF MARYLAND

Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Women’s Education and the College of Notre Dame of Maryland

. American Catholics and Female Higher Education: Founding Catholic Women’s Colleges

CHAPTER 1 Founding Catholic Women’s Colleges

Both the “outsider” status of the Catholic Church in nineteenth-century America and its traditionally conservative position on women’s social roles shaped its perspective on women’s higher education. Catholic colleges for men were numerous, but no corresponding colleges for women existed. The national hierarchy, for the most part, still considered higher education for women not only unnecessary but possibly dangerous to “true Catholic womanhood.” Bishops warned that however “noble” in intellectual accomplishments Protestant women’s colleges might be, they were unfriendly toward the Catholic Church and to be viewed with suspicion. Nevertheless, by the 1880s and 1890s, middle-class Catholic women were enrolling in growing numbers in public colleges as well as in private, but non-Catholic, women’s colleges.

The hierarchy was not wrong about the presence of anti-Catholic sentiment in Protestant-supported colleges. Until 1898, Wellesley College’s founder, Henry Fowle Durant, required that faculty members belong to evangelical Christian churches. Although this policy softened to encompass members of other Protestant denominations, the ban on Catholic faculty persisted. In 1896, college president Julia Irvine, supported by trustee and former president Alice Freeman Palmer, defied it by hiring a Catholic for the French Department over the strong protest of Durant’s wife, Pauline. When Irvine proposed to hire a Catholic as choral director of the Beethoven Society, however,

Mrs. Durant appealed to the evangelist Dwight L. Moody, a powerful trustee, who publicly reproached Irvine and her supporters for being willing to “turn the whole college over to the Catholics.”’ And some private colleges made it hard, at times impossible, for Catholic students to fulfill their religious obligations. At the turn of the twentieth century, for example, the Quaker managers of coeducational Swarthmore College, intent on providing a “guarded education,” forbade students to attend church services off campus.’

The growth of Protestant-supported women’s colleges in the late nineteenth century encouraged Catholic sisterhoods to consider developing comparable institutions. For nearly a century, nuns had conducted flourishing boarding academies attracting Protestant as well as Catholic girls. Among the best known was the Georgetown convent school, founded in 1799 by the Sisters of the Visitation in Washington, DC; in 1838 it enrolled one hundred students. By the end of the nineteenth century, it was increasingly clear that secondary-level education was inadequate preparation for careers in the professions, business, government, and social service. Women’s orders like the School Sisters of Notre Dame, with their long histories of high standards in education and growing numbers of young entrants, were well-positioned to fill the gap in higher education for Catholic women.

The School Sisters of Notre Dame

Founded in 1597 by the young Frenchwoman Alix LeClerc (1576-1622) and Rev. Peter Fourier, the Congregation of the School Sisters of Notre Dame, originally known as the Canonesses Regular of Saint Augustine, Congregation of Our Lady, operated schools for girls throughout western Europe until the suppression of religious orders during and after the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. In 1833, Caroline Gerhardinger, known by her name in religion as Mother General Theresa of Jesus, restored the order in Munich, Bavaria, and held office as its first general superior until her death in 1879. A strong leader, she vigilantly protected the order’s right to govern itself and determine its corporate works. In 1852, while seeking church approbation for the sisters’ constitution, she refused to accede to the archbishop of Munich’s dictate that a priest head all the motherhouses of the order. “By setting up [clerical] directors in every motherhouse,” she insisted, “the School Sisters and all their schools and boarding establishments would be placed under male direction contrary to the good of the sisters and the schools.”’

Despite intense episcopal pressure, Mother General Theresa held her ground, and by 1859, Rome had approved the constitution. The congregation would have one general superior, and she would be a member of the order.‘ Like all religious communities, the Congregation of the School Sisters of Notre Dame was hierarchical in structure. From the central generalate in Munich, the mother general and her assistants soon governed an international network of provinces. Election of officers took place every six years at a general chapter. In consultation with the generalate, provincial superiors in provincial motherhouses appointed superiors of local convents and assigned them individual sisters. Soon the network was growing rapidly.

In July 1847, only fifteen years after the order’s reconstitution, Mother General Theresa escorted five volunteers to the United States to begin the order’s work in the New World. After opening a motherhouse in Baltimore, the see city of the Catholic Church’s first archdiocese in the United States, she appointed Sister Seraphina von Pronath, the eldest of the group, its superior. The sisters, who had normal school educations and had passed teachers’ examinations in Munich, initially conducted classes for girls in neighboring German parish schools. With financial support from King Ludwig I of Bavaria and the Bavarian Louis Mission Society, Gerhardinger spent $18,000 on a three-story brick building on Aisquith Street to serve as a motherhouse for the order and a girls’ school. The education of girls was a top priority, she told King Ludwig: “Religious education for the girls is as essential here as their daily bread. . . . Our institute will be the first and only German institute for girls in America.”

In 1850, Gerhardinger transferred the US motherhouse from Baltimore to Milwaukee and appointed twenty-six-year-old Josephine Friess, known in religion as Sister Mary Caroline, as North American vicar general. Friess, born in Paris of French and German parentage, was well-educated and astute. At every opportunity, she championed her adopted country’s people and culture, and encouraged teachers in the order’s many schools to emphasize civic virtues and history. Her favorite song, “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean,” written in 1843, captured her patriotic spirit.° Friess and Mother Seraphina von Pronath both recognized that for the order to succeed in the United States, it had to modify its strict cloister rule, which prevented sisters from freely moving outside their convent walls and posed obstacles to fundraising, teaching, and community development work. Friess traveled to the Munich generalate in 1850 to appeal in person for special consideration for US convents. She had some success in the matter of cloister, but her superiors denied her request that sisters be allowed to use English rather than German in community prayers and annual retreats.”

By the 1870s, the congregation’s rapid growth, as well as the great distances between convents, was making it difficult for Mother Caroline Friess, as vicar for North America, to govern approximately 850 sisters and 90 novices across the United States and, as of 1871, Canada. With the encouragement of Baltimore’s archbishop, James Roosevelt Bayley, in 1876 Mother

Theresa Gerhardinger established a provincial motherhouse in Baltimore. Sister Mary Theophila Bauer, Friess’s longtime assistant, was appointed superior of the new province in 1877. At this time the Baltimore province numbered 116 sisters, 38 novices, and 30 postulants.* The following year, the province admitted another 31 candidates. In 1879, the Munich generalate introduced a commissariat to promote unity among sisters and convents in the two US provinces and “advance mutual aid in the establishment of new houses.” Assisted by a vicar general and four councillors, Friess, as commissary general, would now govern all sisters in the US provinces and report directly to the general superior and her council.’

In the 1870s, Mother Theophila Bauer again appealed for more relaxation of cloister rules. This time, Mother General Theresa made no concessions. She believed that stricter observance of cloister rules was the best way to combat what she saw as “increasing worldliness” among American nuns. “If the sisters in America are permitted to go out, not only to Church, or funerals and processions, but into stores, out into the country, or even driving, they will become completely secularized,” she warned Bauer. Activities like “visits, conversations, entertainments, dramatic performances [are] . . . against the spirit of the order, as are all carriage rides, walks in the country, working in the habit and with men, also going out collecting, playing with little pets: cats or dogs, etc.”!° The cloister rules certainly did not prevent the US provinces from prospering. By 1892, the Congregation of the School Sisters of Notre Dame had become the largest Catholic sisterhood in North America. Its approximately two thousand members educated seventy thousand students in twelve female academies and three hundred parochial schools in the United States and Canada." Two of these schools, both in Baltimore, set the stage for the founding of the College of Notre Dame of Maryland in 1895.

The Collegiate Institute for Young Ladies

In 1863, the order opened a boarding high school for girls adjacent to its Aisquith Street motherhouse. The key figure in the development of the Collegiate Institute for Young Ladies, known as the Institute of Notre Dame, was Louise Wegman (1836-86), a native of Rochester, New York, known in religion as Sister Mary Ildephonsa. An incorporator of the 1864 state charter that empowered the order to conduct schools in Maryland, she became the school’s first directress. The school’s vigorously American values, curriculum, and educational methods troubled some conservative sisters, who complained to Mother Caroline Friess in Milwaukee that Wegman was unfit to direct the school: she was a “worldly” young woman who showed insufficient regard for traditional educational methods. While many of their grievances seem petty in retrospect, such as the charge that she allowed students to stage “theatrical plays at examination time,” tensions ran high.” In an effort to resolve the matter, Friess asked Mother General Gerhardinger to consider removing Wegman. But Gerhardinger refused, asking Friess pointedly, “By removing Sister Ildephonsa from the Institute will you not lower its standards?”

In 1870, in response to growing public interest in educating girls beyond the high school level, Mother Mary Barbara Weinzierl and Sister Ildephonsa applied to Mother Caroline for permission to purchase property in Govanstown, a neighborhood northeast of downtown Baltimore, for a second collegiate institute. They anticipated that a large boarding school would attract Protestant as well as Catholic girls from all sections of the country as well as abroad. Friess, who felt that the order ought to concentrate on parochial schools for the children of working-class families rather than on selective boarding schools for girls from upper-class families, “emphatically refused.”'* However, her superiors in Munich disagreed, approving the project and instructing her to assist in its financing.

| College of Notre Dame a N of Maryland al Be | m Loyola University of Maryland Johns Hopkins University m P T BALTIMORE m Institute of Notre Dame < SS Ss: a 0 1 ~ 2 mi a p i z DR Re Patapsco River Sy

Map 1. Baltimore, Maryland. The College of Notre Dame of Maryland (now Notre Dame of Maryland University), as well as Loyola University of Maryland, were once located beyond the city’s northern boundary; the SSND motherhouse and the Institute of Notre Dame are on Aisquith Street downtown. Map by William L. Nelson.

The Baltimore sisters moved quickly to acquire over fifty-eight acres of real estate on Charles Street Avenue for the school. On April 17, 1871, they acquired thirty-three acres, at $800 per acre, adjacent to Saint Mary’s Catholic Church, and in 1873 purchased a $10,000 seven-acre tract called “Sheridan’s Discovery,” containing freshwater springs for drinking water. They also secured the neighboring nineteen-acre Troxall estate and Villa Montrose, a large house on the property, for $45,000.” In 1878, excavation of a swampy section of Sheridan’s Discovery created the Lake of the Lindens, a two-level lake encircled by a carriage drive. The lake featured a bridge spanning the falls between the upper and lower lakes, a boat house, and numerous swans and ducks. A lay sister managed the pump house—as one early student wrote, “fulfilling her monotonous duty in spiritual calm.”'°

Mother Mary Barbara Weinzierl, the Baltimore superior, officially headed the project, assisted by Sister Ildephonsa Wegman, directress of the Aisquith Street school. Wegman took the lead in selecting the school’s site, architect, and contractor. Although a noted Baltimore architect, J. Crawford Neilson, designed the school’s main building, he apparently had nothing further to do with the project; he does not seem to have visited the site or supervised any construction.” Instead the nuns relied entirely on SH & JF Adams, Builders, an established and highly respected local firm that had constructed their Aisquith Street convent school a decade earlier. Samuel Adams assured the sisters that he could get top-quality materials at very low prices and complete the job for $80,000. His commission would be 10 percent of the total cost of the project. In April 1871, the sisters accepted these terms and made a verbal contract with Adams. This was poor judgment, as became evident in December 1872, when Adams informed them that the building’s revised cost was $100,000, a figure that ballooned to $150,000 by February 1873. An alarmed Mother Caroline alerted her Munich superiors to the evolving financial crisis.'*

The sisters, “shocked beyond expression,” had few options. The building was too near completion to change contractors, and they had widely advertised that the Notre Dame of Maryland Collegiate Institute for Young Ladies would open the following September. Reluctantly, the order’s superiors agreed to borrow up to $30,000 from Adams to ensure that he would complete the building: “We could not see how to do better,” the annals record. They also borrowed from the Equitable Society of Baltimore, “creating ground rents on their land as security.” When Adams presented his final bill in December 1874, the sisters’ lawyer, A. Leo Knott, offered him $10,000 less than he asked. He filed suit, agreeing to arbitration after two years of litigation.” The final settlement awarded the sisters $10,000 plus half of Adams’s commission, “a very great moral gain in our favor,” wrote the convent annalist.” However, in the end, the cost of land, architectural services, and building construction totaled nearly $300,000, leaving the order with heavy debt.

Reminiscent of protests in the 1860s against Wegman’s leadership at the Institute of Notre Dame, conservative sisters objected that she had made irresponsible financial decisions during the construction of the Charles Street school, that the school’s physical scale was pretentious and worldly, and that the building’s exterior was too “elaborately ornamented.”” But Friess recognized that Wegman had aimed to model the school’s architecture loosely on the centralized large building favored by early Protestant-supported women’s colleges. Wellesley’s College Hall, which had opened in 1875, housed “classrooms, dormitories, and administrative offices . . . [as well as] the library, chapel, dining hall, gymnasium and even a large art gallery.”” Friess ignored Wegman’s critics and simply chided her for a few interior features, such as the building’s “wide corridors.””

Despite construction problems, the Notre Dame of Maryland Preparatory School and Collegiate Institute for Young Ladies on Charles Street opened on schedule on September 23, 1873, with 63 students. It was this school that would become the direct predecessor of the College of Notre Dame. For several years, however, the new school was governed as an annex to the Institute of Notre Dame on Aisquith Street.” Boarders from the downtown school moved to Charles Street, and by the end of its first academic year, the new school registered 101 boarding students from “nineteen States and three Continents.”*° Tuition, room, and board charges were $220. Thirty-six sisters, two lay faculty, and five priests made up the staff. Among the nuns were fourteen lay sisters who worked as “housekeepers, infirmarians, and what might be called farm hands [tending cattle, poultry, and bees].”””

As directress, Wegman seized every opportunity to publicize the new school. She scored a coup when President Ulysses S. Grant, whose wife’s nieces, Bessie Sharp and Betty Dent, were attending the school, agreed to preside at its first commencement on June 14, 1876.% To Wegmans delight, the president’s appearance brought national attention to the infant Collegiate Institute.” The day’s events opened at four o’clock in the afternoon with a lavish dinner for the president and Mrs. Grant and about thirty notable citizens, among them Baltimore archbishop James Roosevelt Bayley, Maryland governor John Lee Carroll, Baltimore mayor Ferdinand C. Latrobe, and military dignitaries.” At seven o'clock, the three-hour graduation ceremony began with the national anthem as the processional. The entire school of 124 students, dressed in white and representing three continents and nineteen states, sat on the commencement hall stage. Grant awarded diplomas to the seven graduates, as well as prizes, medals, and crowns to meritorious students from all the classes.*!

Six decades later, a graduate remembered how the ceremonies that day had triumphantly witnessed to the nation’s centennial: “Sister Ildefonsa [sic], intensely patriotic, wished to make the day different from any ordinary Commencement.””” There were, however, conservative nuns who assessed the commencement dinner in honor of Grant as far too extravagant for a convent school.” They reproached Wegman for the debt incurred during the school’s construction, and interpreted her preference for “American” over German educational methods as disloyalty to the order. It was not unusual for nineteenth-century female administrators of church-related schools to be accused of “worldliness.” As late as the 1890s, legendary Bryn Mawr College president M. Carey Thomas faced considerable criticism from “Plain” Quakers for the school’s stunning new architecture, furnishings, and landscaping, features they considered to be deplorable departures from traditional Quaker values.” Wegman’s situation, however, was particularly strained since she resided with her critics in the campus convent.

Given the hierarchical structure of religious communities in the nineteenth century, provincial and local superiors were extremely important in enabling or inhibiting change. They held responsibility for all community projects, and delegated only limited authority to the sisters whom they appointed to head the schools. For Wegman, this proved to be an insurmountable obstacle. Under a cloud within the order, isolated and discouraged, she wrote to Archbishop Bayley on September 26, 1876, to request a dispensation from her religious vows. It was intolerable, she told him, to be “in constant disunion” with her superiors. When she challenged their directives, she felt she was “a disturber of the peace” within the convent, stirring up “disaffection, discord, unhappiness and endless trouble for myself and others.”” Mother Caroline Friess privately conceded that “much that had been said about Sister Ildephonse [sic] was false and untrue.”** On July 24, 1877, Wegman left the Collegiate Institute, and the Baltimore sisters never heard from her again.” Despite her critics, Wegman had developed a flourishing school with a growing national reputation, and her legacy was vindicated when Sister Meletia Foley, who shared her educational values, succeeded her as the school’s directress.

Faculty, Academics, and Religious Life

The Collegiate Institute made advanced academic achievement available to its students from the beginning. From the founding of the Institute of Notre Dame in 1863, directress IIdephonsa Wegman had invited professors from local universities to lecture to students on various subjects. Among the earliest was William E. A. Aikin, MD, a chemistry professor at the University of Maryland Medical School. A graduate of the 1860s remembered his commitment to the new girls’ school: “Every week brought the Ven. Prof. Aiken [sic] from the University of Maryland.”** According to a university colleague, he was “a strict Catholic” and “a man of very striking mien. . . . He wore glasses and a wig, and his long flowing white beard gave him a very venerable appearance.”

Wegman continued this practice at the Notre Dame of Maryland Collegiate Institute in 1873. A number of Johns Hopkins faculty, notably those in scientific fields, were part-time lecturers at the institute.“ Robert Dorsey Coale, an 1881 PhD graduate of Johns Hopkins, was “the first student to enter the Johns Hopkins University on its opening in 1876.”*' He succeeded William Aikin as professor of chemistry at the University of Maryland. He also lectured part time at Notre Dame between 1883 and 1891. The writer and scholar Richard Malcolm Johnston, founder of the Penn Lucy School for boys in Baltimore, “gave yearly courses of [weekly] lectures to the senior classes in the Johns Hopkins University and the Notre Dame School at Baltimore.” Lucien Odend’hal, prominent in Baltimore music circles and, in 1884, the first director of the Johns Hopkins University glee club, taught at the Collegiate Institute from 1877 until 1895, and then at the college until 1933.“

Except for Rev. Dwight E. Lyman, DD (religion), Mademoiselle Conlon (French), and Dr. J. Lopez (Spanish), religious sisters made up the Collegiate Institute’s first full-time faculty. Lyman (1818-97), pastor of the Catholic parish in Govanstown, had served as an Episcopalian priest before his 1854 conversion to Catholicism.” Sister Meletia Foley, as “assistant matron of the senior circle,” taught English, history, and science, and Sister Jeannette Duffy, “assistant matron of the junior circle,” instructed in mathematics and astronomy. Sister Evangelista Meyer taught Latin, German, music, and elocution, and Sister Engelberta Heuer taught art. Students could fulfill their foreign language requirement by taking German, French, or “an extended course” in Latin.*° For an additional fee, they could opt for private lessons in other languages.” Although courses in music and art did not carry academic credit, they were popular electives.

Following the practice of southern female seminaries, in the 1870s the Collegiate Institute awarded four “degrees”: major and minor mistress of liberal arts and major and minor mistress of English literature.“ These differed mainly by course of study and level of foreign language mastery. The most demanding, the major mistress of liberal arts, required completion of the liberal arts course, the study of two foreign languages for three years, and a demonstrated ability to speak both fluently. The minor mistress of liberal arts degree required completion of the liberal arts course and two foreign language courses with distinction, plus a demonstrated ability to speak one of these fluently. Students who qualified for a major mistress of English literature degree satisfactorily completed the English language course and three years’ work in two foreign languages. Students completing the English language course plus three years’ work in one foreign language received the minor mistress of English literature degree.”

The Collegiate Institute aimed to provide a rigorous liberal arts curriculum as its cornerstone. However, since parents wanted their daughters to become proficient in the domestic arts, the curriculum also included courses in plain sewing, embroidery, and cooking. “The time thus occupied is not spent in vain, as it enables the pupils to attend wisely and faithfully to what is necessary to the comfort and happiness of home,” noted the 1874 catalog.” While it may have been popular with parents, neither faculty nor students showed much enthusiasm for the domestic science program. A valedictorian from the 1880s revealed the school’s emphases when she called on her peers to “step forth to fight our part in life’s arena” and to seek “influence and honor” through “commendable achievements.”*' She made no reference to women’s place in the home. By 1893, the Collegiate Institute offered no home economics courses, and just two elective vocational courses, one in elementary bookkeeping, commercial law, and related topics, and another, a “teachers’ course,” for advanced students interested in becoming schoolteachers.”

In its lack of emphasis on “vocational” subjects, the school differed from many female schools of the late nineteenth century. The School Sisters of Notre Dame viewed the domestic arts and other practical subjects as marginal to the central purpose of their preparatory schools and collegiate institutes. Mother Theresa Gerhardinger warned teachers against spending excessive time on vocational subjects: “The children learn trivialities soon enough; they grow to like this sort of thing, and thereby lose their inclination for doing useful and necessary things”—a category that pointedly did not include the domestic arts.”

Although a majority of Collegiate Institute students were Roman Catholics, there was always a good representation of Protestants in the student body. The first Jewish student, Harriet Rosenthal, graduated in 1890. In 1876, non-Catholics did not take religion classes, “unless otherwise desired by the parents,” but by 1881, they were expected to “attend instructions on Christian Doctrine, unless otherwise stated by the parents.” ” Eighteen-year-old Frances Benjamin Johnston, a non-Catholic and later a leading American photographer, enrolled at the Collegiate Institute in 1882 and received her major mistress of English literature degree in June 1884. Her biographer attests that while at the school, “Johnston was examined on a wide range of subjects” but never took a course in religion.” Even so, the school’s intensely Catholic atmosphere occasionally disturbed some Protestant parents. In 1887, a Methodist family withdrew their daughter from the school because they felt she “had been unduly influenced to become a Catholic.” While administrators denied the charge, the annalist allowed privately that “some of the Sisters had probably been too persistent in speaking upon religious questions and points of doctrine.””

Whatever students’ religious backgrounds, all were held to the same strict behavioral and sartorial standards. The American public and popular press, secular and ecclesiastical, held long-established views regarding proper female decorum and dress. During the 1870s, students at the institute wore black dresses or black skirts and blouses. The only accessories permitted were a brooch and simple earrings. Rules of student conduct were quasi-conventual, with outside visitors restricted and visits monitored.** Every Sunday evening, Directress Wegman presided over an all-school assembly, called “Judgments” by students. After a few opening remarks, she read aloud the names of students whom faculty had observed violating rules of social etiquette as well as school regulations during the preceding week. Students, who knew that Wegman would not mention major moral failings during Judgments, did not fear public shaming on serious matters, which were dealt with privately. For the most part, they enjoyed her inimitable descriptions of the social gaffes of their comrades. A student described a typical 1874 Judgment: “When she commences with her ‘all those who’ etc. ‘stand up,’ one rapidly reviewed the week and according to how guilty they might have felt, they knew whether they would be one of the ‘stand uppers’ or placidly enjoy the evening. After all, whether one stood up or not, it was an adventure.” As another put it, “We called it Judgement [sic], but few of us feared it.”

From Collegiate Institute to College

The order’s leaders in the United States had learned some hard lessons from the conflict that had ultimately overwhelmed Ildephonsa Wegman. The newly appointed superior of the eastern province, Mother Theophila Bauer, relocated the motherhouse from Aisquith Street in downtown Baltimore to the new Collegiate Institute campus on North Charles Street.“ In 1877, as president of the order’s corporation (its board of trustees) and de facto president of the school, Bauer appointed one of the teachers, thirty-year-old Sister Mary Meletia Foley (figure 2), to replace the recently departed Ildephonsa

FiGURE 2. Meletia Foley as a normal school student. Photo from NDMA.

Wegman as directress of studies. Foley (1847-1917), from Wauwatosa, Wisconsin Territory, was the tenth of twelve children born to Irish immigrant farmers. After graduating from Saint Mary’s [Collegiate] Institute in Milwaukee, founded by Mother Caroline Friess, she joined the order in 1868. She taught for two years at the Institute of Notre Dame on Aisquith Street before joining the Collegiate Institute faculty on North Charles Street in 1873.

The Collegiate Institute in the 1880s

Theophila Bauer and Meletia Foley strove to develop the school’s program and campus according to the professional values they had shared with Ildephonsa Wegman. To enable Foley to work effectively, Bauer released her from some obligatory community duties in the convent horarium, an exceptional privilege that continued when she was appointed dean of the college in 1895. As a result, one of her successors remembered, “on the whole, the [religious] Community saw little of Sister during the school year.” Her relative distance from the local community did not diminish her effectiveness, however. Well-liked and more politically astute than her predecessor, Meletia Foley proved to be an effective directress who concentrated on building a school that fulfilled the order’s mission to girls: “The system of education pursued is designed to develop the mental, moral, and physical powers of the pupils; to make them refined, accomplished, and useful members of society.” The fact that Mother Theophila Bauer collaborated closely with Foley on school matters and approved of her ecumenical ethos and independent spirit discouraged open criticism by sister-faculty of her leadership style or her “too worldly” professional aspirations for students.

In an era when Catholic and Protestant educators rarely interacted, the sisters resolutely pursued ways to forge ties with mainstream educators. The school’s proximity to several universities proved a key benefit. Foley’s relations with Johns Hopkins administrators and faculty were extraordinarily cordial in the 1870s—90s. Baltimore marveled when Johns Hopkins president Daniel Coit Gilman addressed the Collegiate Institute’s graduating class in 1890. According to the Baltimore Sun, it was “the first time known in which anyone but a Catholic clergyman has been invited to speak at this or any kindred institution in charge of a religious society of that faith.” Certainly it was a rare event for that period in the United States. Gilman gracefully praised the historic role played by female religious orders in the education of women. Although he emphasized that “the whole duties of women were in a different sphere from that of men,” he acknowledged that “many ladies, by means of their pen, had acquired fame, and examples were not wanting where females had governed kingdoms with marked ability.”

By 1876, with the debt on the Collegiate Institute building still very high at $268,700, concerned Munich superiors had instructed Friess to “sell the whole property . . . for the price the debt came to.”® Friess, who strongly opposed boarding institutes, moved quickly. The Religious of the Sacred Heart of Jesus had expressed an interest in purchasing the property, but Archbishop of Baltimore James Roosevelt Bayley refused to allow this particular order to work in his archdiocese. With no other immediate offers, Friess halted her efforts to sell the property. But she did not give up hope that another opportunity would soon materialize.“ Her 1884 response to Baltimore provincial superior Theophila Bauer’s proposal to expand the Collegiate Institute was unequivocal: “I have read your plan. It sounds very inviting; however, it is not acceptable. Dear Sister Theophila, now no more boarding schools. . . . Institutes are connected with great outlays of money and need special personnel. Parish schools are more necessary, more serviceable, and the principal work of our congregation. .. . Institutes of today do not conform at all to our work.””