Catherine Elizabeth McAuley was born in Dublin, at Stormanstown House, on September 29th, 1778. Her parents, James and Elinor McAuley, were prosperous Catholics, having been successful in the building profession. Their children consisted of Mary, the eldest, Catherine and James. The death of Mr. McAuley in 1783, began the family's slide into financial crisis. Mrs. McAuley, much younger than her husband, was left to raise three small children alone. Attracted to the high life of the Dublin social set, she squandered the family fortune, until at her death in 1798, the family was insolvent, and the children were left dependent on the charity of relatives.
The first person to care for the three McAuley children was a cousin, William Armstrong. A committed Protestant, he actively discouraged the children from practicing the Catholic faith in which they were raised. Of the three, Catherine was the only one who successfully resisted this pressure to convert to Protestantism. In this, the Armstrongs simply acted in accordance with their religious beliefs. Furthermore, Catholicism was proscribed in Ireland in the first half of Catherine's life and was practiced in general by the masses of poor Irish, people the Protestant gentry despised as a class.
In 1803, Catherine moved into the home of other distant relatives, William and Catherine Callaghan. They treated her as a daughter and she lived with them for the next 20 years. As her foster parents got older, Catherine gradually took over the management of the Callaghan estate in Coolock and looked after them in their old age. Both of them were devout Christians and encouraged Catherine in her growing concern for the poor who lived in the vicinity of Coolock and gave her the practical means to help them.
After the deaths of the Callaghans, each of whom became converts to the Catholic faith before death, Catherine became, at the age of 44, a wealthy heiress. She now had the means to realise a long held dream. She set about building her first centre to help and improve the conditions of Dublin's poor. This was in Baggot Street, today the Mother House of the Mercy Sisters. It was designed to contain a church, a school, a workplace and sleeping accommodation for both the poor and those who might wish to help her in her work. The house was opened in 1827 and almost immediately the house and the classrooms began to fill with the poor children of the locality.
Catherine had no plans to found a religious order, for she felt convinced this would force her and her supporters to take vows of enclosure. This, she felt, would make practical service to the poor "where they are" almost impossible. However, the advantages of creating a new religious order with the permission of the Holy See became increasingly clear, so in 1830, on the advice of Rev. Dr. Murray, Archbishop of Dublin, Catherine and two colleagues, Marianne Doyle and Elizabeth Harley, began formal religious training under the Presentation Sisters at Georges Hill, Dublin. They took their religious vows a year later. Thus, the Mercy Congregation was born on December 12th, 1831.
In the next ten years, until her death on November 11th, 1841, Catherine worked successfully to promote and establish many new Mercy communities, dedicated to the alleviation of poverty and giving hope and means of escape to those in its trap. On her earthly departure, she left a thriving community of nearly 150 sisters in fourteen foundations: twelve in Ireland and two in England. Fifteen years later, the Mercy Congregation numbered three thousand in foundations that reached across the globe: Ireland, England, Scotland, Newfoundland, North America, South America, Australia, New Zealand. Wherever they went, the Mercy sisters led the way in setting up essential community services, such as schools, hospitals and other support services for the elderly, the sick and the poor.
For all her organisational talent and her driving vision to to empower the powerless poor, Catherine never lost the personal touch. Even at the end of her life, it is said, she insisted that "comfortable cups of tea" be available to the sisters who kept vigil beside her deathbed.
Catherine's legacy has had far reaching social, religious, and geographical influences. While she emphasised the importance of contemplative prayer as the centre of the religious life, she saw too that prayer must be expressed in building up a just and caring society.
With the advent of the Third Millennium, care for the socially disadvantaged is no longer deemed the exclusive province of religious groups and is now seen as the duty of secular authorities. Only now can we see how innovative, even revolutionary, Catherine really was: a woman far ahead of her time, fired by a vision of practical Christianity in the service of the underprivileged, a vision that the secular world has taken seriously only in relatively recent times.
