Story

The Life and Work of Catherine McAuley, 1778-1841
by Mary C. Sullivan rsm

Page 1

The birth of a human person is both an extraordinary and a very ordinary event – holding great, God-given promise in the humble simplicity of human form. Catherine Elizabeth McAuley was born probably on September 29, 1778. Although there is an irresolvable uncertainty about the year, some writers thinking it was 1787 (which is not possible) or 1781, most scholars generally accept 1778 as the year of her birth in Dublin to James and Elinor Conway McGauley, her mother later changing the surname to McAuley. Catherine had a sister Mary, and a brother James who was born a few months before their father's death in 1783.

Catherine's early childhood was characterized by family love, the inspiring example of her father, and filial happiness. Then her father died, leaving Elinor McAuley to raise the three small children. When Catherine was almost twenty, her mother died an uneasy death, conscious perhaps of her own casualness in the Catholic formation of her children.

Having lived for a time with her uncle Owen Conway, and then with a Protestant family named Armstrong, Catherine moved in 1803 to Coolock House, the twenty-two acre estate of William and Catherine Callaghan, an elderly and wealthy Protestant and Quaker couple, where she served as household manager and companion to Mrs. Callaghan. The estate was a few miles northeast of Dublin, and Catherine remained there for the next twenty-five years, until she moved permanently into the House of Mercy she had built on Baggot Street, Dublin – probably by February 1829.

The years at Coolock were a kind of desert retreat. Here Catherine developed her merciful spirit and grew in her personal grasp of Catholic faith and practice, her love for those who were poor and neglected, and her determination to serve them in the manner of Jesus Christ. Though she retained her love of singing and dancing to the end of her life, these were years of growing detachment from the preoccupations, pleasures, and values of the social world around her. She is known to have meditated often on the words of the "Universal Prayer": "Discover to me, O my God, the nothingness of this world, the greatness of heaven, the shortness of time, and the length of eternity."