OLDEST SISTER OF CHARITY.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XVI, Issue XXII, 30 May 1896, Page 626

OLDEST SISTER OF CHARITY.

PHILADELPHIA has the distinction, according to a writer in Donahoe’s Magazine for March, of being the residence of the oldest sister of charity now living. She is Sister Gonzaga, the mother emeritus of St. Joseph’s Asylum. She hashad a most remarkable career. She was born in Baltimore in 1812 and her name in the world was Mary Agnes Grace. She became a sister of charity in 1827, and in company with several other sisters opened a school at Harrisburg. She made her final vows in 1830, and then went to Philadelphia to St.

Joseph’s Home, with which her subsequent life had been intimately connected. The beginning of the Civil War marked the most eventful epoch in the career of Sister Gonzaga and developed her extraordinary qualities of administration. The Satterlee Military Hospital was established in Philadelphia, and as a result of several interviews with Secretary of War Stanton, Sister Gonzaga, with forty sisters of charity from different parts of the country, assumed charge. In those three momentous years they nursed and cared for upwards of 48,000 soldiers. The sick and wounded comprised both Union and Confederate soldiers.

Sister Gonzaga, although in her eighty-fourth year, still retains clear and vivid recollections of those trying times. She rarely introduces the subject herself, but once it is brought into conversation she talks with enthusiasm upon it. The hospital was one of the largest in the country, and everything was arranged upon a generous scale. On the 12th April, 1877, Sister Gonzaga celebrated the occasion of her golden jubilee in the sisterhood.