The Sisters Come To The United States
Soon after this legal recognition, the Sisters spread their service overseas. An American foundation was established within seven years of its founding, to serve German emigrant communities in New York, New Jersey and Ohio. At the same time, as their Superior General, Mother Frances oversaw the foundation of several hospitals and sanatoria in both Europe and the United States for those suffering from tuberculosis, then a widespread cause of death, especially among the working classes.
Over the next fifty years, hospitals were established in several states. In New York City, the Sisters opened and staffed St. Francis Hospital (1865-1966), St. Joseph Hospital for Chest Diseases (1888-1962) and the Frances Schervier Home and Hospital, all located in the Borough of the Bronx. They founded various community hospitals around the nation, including St. Anthony Community Hospital in Warwick, New York (now operated by the Bon Secours Charity Health System), and the former St. Mary Hospital in Hoboken, New Jersey (now Hoboken University Medical Center).
Mother Frances visited the United States in 1863, and helped her Sisters nurse soldiers wounded in the American Civil War. St. Mary Hospital in Hoboken, N.J. was founded for this work. She visited the United States one more time in 1868.
When Mother Frances died in 1876, there were 2,500 members of the congregation worldwide. The number kept growing until the 1970s, when, like many other religious orders, they began to experience a sharp decline in membership. In response to the request of both the European and American Congregations, and the research they provided regarding her life to the Holy See, Mother Frances was beatified in 1974 by Pope Paul VI.
Since the 1990s, the Congregation has transferred the ownership of many of their institutions to other organizations, and at present focuses on health care, pastoral ministry and social services. Currently, this Congregation has communities of Sisters serving in the United States, Brazil, Italy and Senegal.
Read more about this topic: Franciscan Sisters Of The Poor
Famous quotes containing the words united states, sisters, united and/or states:
“The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilization. She began to feel herself as it just after the Civil War. And so it is a country the right age to have been born in and the wrong age to live in.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“The incomprehensibleness of women is an old theory, but what is that to the curious wondering observation with which wives, mothers, and sisters watch the other unreasoning animal in those moments when he has snatched the reins out of their hands, and is not to be spoken to!... It is best to let him come to, and feel his own helplessness.”
—Margaret Oliphant (1828–1897)
“The rising power of the United States in world affairs ... requires, not a more compliant press, but a relentless barrage of facts and criticism.... Our job in this age, as I see it, is not to serve as cheerleaders for our side in the present world struggle but to help the largest possible number of people to see the realities of the changing and convulsive world in which American policy must operate.”
—James Reston (b. 1909)
“In it he proves that all things are true and states how the truths of all contradictions may be reconciled physically, such as for example that white is black and black is white; that one can be and not be at the same time; that there can be hills without valleys; that nothingness is something and that everything, which is, is not. But take note that he proves all these unheard-of paradoxes without any fallacious or sophistical reasoning.”
—Savinien Cyrano De Bergerac (1619–1655)