Civil War Mother Catherine Spalding

Mother Catherine Spalding

“In 1832, the cholera began its devastations throughout Kentucky. In Louisville, several families were stricken. The Rev. Robert Abell, a brilliant and distinguished clergyman of the city, who at the time was found day and night by the bedside of the sick and dying, acting as nurse, physician, priest, advised the Board of Health to ask for Sisters of Charity as nurses . . . Many members of the community longed to respond; those selected were Sisters Margaret Bamber, Martha Drury, Martine Beaven and Hilaria Bamber. Before their departure from Nazareth, Bishop Flaget called Mother Catherine, the Sisters, and Father David into the church, saying: ‘Come, my children, offer yourselves to God.’ They knelt in silence a few moments, then the bishop read aloud a short act of consecration and thus the heroic band went forth to death-haunted posts . . .

From house to house they passed, nursing wherever they were

needed, but particularly among the poor . . . To Mother Catherine’s care were entrusted numerous orphans bereaved by the plague. Her compassionate arms received one after the other till the sheltering capacity of the little school was taxed to its utmost.”

http://www.archive.org/stream/sistersofcharity00mcgiuoft/sistersofcharity00mcgiuoft_djvu.txt