Dominican Sisters of Grand Rapids
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Dominican Congregation of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, better known as the Dominican Sisters of Grand Rapids, is a religious congregation of sisters of the Dominican Third Order established in 1877, with their motherhouse located in Grand Rapids, Michigan. They were founded to provide education to the children of the Catholic populations of Michigan and other regions of the American Midwest. As of 2017, they had 209 sisters in the congregation.[1]
The nuns of the Dominican Second Order, had been founded by St. Dominic de Guzman in 1206 as an enclosed religious order. At the start of the 19th century, the German monasteries of the Order which had survived the Protestant Reformation were ordered by Prince-Bishop Karl Theodore von Dahlberg to provide free public education.[2] With this expertise already established in their way of life, in 1853 four choir nuns, accompanied by two lay Sisters, volunteered to go to America from their Monastery of the Holy Cross (founded in 1233) in Regensburg, Bavaria, in order to minister to the needs of the German immigrants then pouring into that nation. Settling in Brooklyn, New York, the nuns accepted girls as students whom they taught within their cloister. They flourished and established small monastic communities around the region where they taught in the parishes of the Diocese of Brooklyn and the Archdiocese of New York.[3]
In 1877, the nuns responded to an invitation by Caspar Henry Borgess, the Bishop of Detroit, to provide education to the children of his diocese. Six nuns of the community left for Michigan, where they settled in Traverse City in October of that year. The success of the community in New York was repeated in Michigan, and small groups of nuns were quickly established throughout the state, where they taught children in tiny monasteries, their living quarters often doubling as classrooms. By 1885 the numbers of Dominican nuns in Michigan had grown to such an extent that they were organized into St. Joseph Province, with Holy Angels Convent in Traverse City serving as the Provincial Motherhouse.[4] This community served the Native American population of the region.[2]
The nuns became independent of New York in 1894 and were established as the Congregation of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart. The General Motherhouse of the new congregation was located in Grand Rapids. Two years later, the nuns were reorganized by the Holy See as a congregation of Religious Sisters of the Third Order of St. Dominic, no longer being restricted to a monastic enclosure.[4]
