175 years: Legacy of the Holy Cross

Above: Holy Cross and Academy of Holy Angels students teamed up in the 1940s to present a program on the life of Abraham Lincoln on radio station WSMB. (Photos courtesy of the Marianites of Holy Cross Sisters)

By BETH DONZE
Clarion Herald

Not long after Blessed Father Basil Moreau, the founder of the Holy Cross family of sisters, brothers and priests, had sent his first religious men and women to Louisiana in 1849 to staff a New Orleans orphanage, the congregation’s general administration in Le Mans, France, was second-guessing its decision to venture into Louisiana at all.

In addition to enduring the state’s semi-tropical climate and living in near destitution in the fraught decades leading up to the Civil War, Father Moreau’s Louisiana-based Holy Cross priests, brothers and Marianites of Holy Cross sisters were ministering amid recurring epidemics of yellow fever, malaria and cholera, begging the question of whether the congregation should withdraw from the state altogether.

Keeping the faith

The administration voted to stay the course, and in 1870, Father Moreau – by that time resigned from his position as superior general – restated his belief in Louisiana’s potential in a letter of support to his New Orleans-based clergy and religious:

“I have followed you in heart and mind all along, and, if there is one place in which I am deeply interested and for which I have tender affection, it is assuredly New Orleans, because of the trials it has undergone ever since its foundation and because of its fidelity to the mother house,” the priest wrote, urging the Louisiana contingent to persevere. “The cross has been your lot and we must thank heaven for offering us this grace, for this will become a place of great blessing.”

True to Father Moreau’s prediction, the Holy Cross family has been a source of “great blessing” to the city and state during its 175 years of service that has included the care of children and the elderly, the operation of hospitals and its primary vocation of Catholic education.

In celebration of that milestone, the Holy Cross family of sisters, brothers and priests – and those who have been blessed by them in classrooms, hospitals, nursing homes and parishes – will gather for a 175th Anniversary Mass on April 28 at 11 a.m. at St. Louis Cathedral. The principal celebrant will be cathedral rector Father Patrick Williams, vicar general of the Archdiocese of New Orleans and a 1980 graduate of Holy Cross High School.

On a mission to Louisiana

With the Holy Cross family already ministering in Indiana since 1843 and in Montreal since 1847, five Holy Cross brothers and three Marianite sisters took their first steps in the state on May 1, 1849, landing by flat-bottomed boat in Washington, Louisiana, before making the three-day stagecoach ride to New Orleans. They came at the request of New Orleans Archbishop Antoine Blanc to assume the care of young residents of St. Mary’s Orphan Boys’ Asylum, located on the city block bounded by Chartres, France, Royal and Mazant streets. In 1851, the sisters established a separate orphanage for girls – the Immaculate Conception Industrial School – at North Rampart and Gallier streets in the Bywater neighborhood.

By 1855, the Marianites' good works and tenacity in an age of pestilence led Father Moreau to make the Louisiana community a province and to bless its novitiate of two novices and eight postulants at Immaculate Conception, installing Marianite Sister Mary of St. Alphonsus Rodriguez as first provincial.
Marianite schools take off

The Academy of Holy Angels, dedicated in 1865 as a high school for girls, was established at the novitiate site, occupying the corner of North Rampart and Congress streets. The four-story structure, which functioned as a high school through 1992 and is no longer a property of the Marianite sisters, currently is a Willwoods site of 34 apartments for low-income residents.

“Parents paid for the building of the academy building (by donating) bricks. If you look at the building, you will see that all of the bricks are different,”  said New Orleans native Sister Ann Lacour, the Covington-based superior of the worldwide congregation of Marianite Sisters.

“There is also a widow’s walk that the sisters would use to see when boats were coming down the river with fresh produce, and they would send the boys and girls down to the wharf. Many of our earliest students say that the sisters taught them how to make business transactions, and because of this, they had gone on to management positions.”

The sisters' earliest local work in Catholic education – at Sts. Peter and Paul and St. Cecilia in New Orleans – led to the Marianites’ being invited to staff schools outside the city: in Opelousas, Plaquemine, Houma, Franklin, Lake Charles, Morgan City, Arnaudville, Eunice, Algiers and Ocean Springs, Mississippi.

Additional elementary and high schools joined the Marianite family of schools in the 20th century: St. Rita, Incarnate Word, St. Mary of the Angels, St. Andrew the Apostle and Resurrection of Our Lord in New Orleans; Sacred Heart in Ville Platte; St. Julien Eymard on the lower coast of Algiers; St. Agnes in Jefferson; Holy Family in Port Allen; St. Christopher in Metairie; and Christ the King in Terrytown.

Archbishop Blenk High School received the Marianites in the early 1960s; and the sisters were asked to teach at Our Lady of Divine Providence in Metairie and St. Elizabeth Ann Seton in Kenner in the 1980s and ’90s.

By the 1950s, the Marianites were educating more students in the Catholic schools of Louisiana than any other religious congregation, Sister Ann said.

“For many, many years, we were known as ‘the congregation along Highway 190’ – you could drive from New Orleans to Lake Charles and find a Marianite school,” she said. “So many of our graduates speak to us, not only of the education that the sisters gave, but of the values that were imparted to them and remained part of them – our hospitality, being one with the people, that whole sense that our faith makes a difference in who we are. Hold on to your faith!”

Teaching ‘boys to men’

Meanwhile, the Holy Cross brothers were making their mark in the city’s Ninth Ward, propelled by their vision of “Boys to men, and men with hope to bring.”

A boarding and day school called St. Isidore’s College – the predecessor of Holy Cross School on its original campus site at Dauphine and Reynes streets – was opened by the Congregation of Holy Cross in 1871, providing agricultural skills, as well as English, math, music and geography. As the need for its orphan-focused services declined, the school came under the sponsorship of the Holy Cross priests in 1879, with Archbishop Francis Janssens blessing its new general administration building in 1896 and suggesting a name change from St. Isidore’s to “Holy Cross College.” The school’s operation was formally assumed by the Holy Cross brothers in 1912 – a sponsorship that continues to this day – and that year, two flanking wings were added to the school building’s central core, bringing additional classrooms, dorms, a chapel and dining room, with transportation for day students facilitated by the St. Claude Avenue streetcar line. 

Holy Cross School holds the distinction of being the world’s second-oldest sustained foundation in the Congregation of Holy Cross, second only to 1842-founded University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana.

Today, Holy Cross School, which moved to its current 20-acre campus on Paris Avenue in 2010 after its Ninth Ward campus was devastated by Hurricane Katrina, has an enrollment of 802 boys in grades pre-K4 through 12.

Parish work in Mid-City

The city’s Holy Cross priests responded to a different call in 1872, when Archbishop Napoleon Joseph Perché invited them to organize a new parish – Sacred Heart Church on Canal Street. Although closed in 2005 because of Hurricane Katrina, the parish was known for its outreach to the poor.

Holy Cross Father Pete Logsdon, an associate pastor at Sacred Heart from 1968-1974, said the pastorates of Father Gene Doré and Father Larry LeVasseur, along with the leadership of Archbishop Philip Hannan, were key in “unifying” the parish’s white, African-American and Hispanic faithful.

“Sacred Heart was the center of life in Mid-City,” recalled Father Logsdon, now a senior priest who resides in St. Ignatius Martyr Parish in Austin, Texas. He said he was drawn to become a Holy Cross priest for two main reasons: he had attended the University of Notre Dame, later enrolling in its Indiana seminary; and he liked the ministerial flexibility the congregation offered its priests, brothers and sisters – everything from serving in education to parish administration to missionary work.

“We could do any of those and be supported,” Father Logsdon said.

College campus emerges

The Marianite Sisters’ respected works in Catholic education ultimately led them to leave a major mark in the arena of higher education.

With the need to prepare teachers on the uptick, the Louisiana State Board of Education granted the sisters the right to open a “normal school”  – a college for teachers – for young women on Holy Angels’ campus in 1916. They added a bachelor of arts track in 1938.

In 1947, the all-girls’ college received a gift of 40 acres in Algiers, the site of today’s University of Holy Cross, from the Ernest B. Norman family, moving to its westbank campus in 1960 and opening its enrollment to men in 1967. The university’s 98 fulltime and 94 part-time faculty and staff currently educate 1,104 students who receive associate through doctoral degrees in nearly 20 programs of study, including education, counseling and nursing.

“Right now, in the city of New Orleans, a young man can go from preK-4 to getting their Ph.D. with a Holy Cross education,” Sister Ann said.

Keep cross in view always

Today, 17 Marianite sisters reside at the Covington congregational center on Highway 1081, close to St. Benedict Church, and 22 sisters live in Opelousas. A total of 74 Marianite Sisters live and serve in the United States, France, Africa, Canada and Ireland, Sister Ann said.

Besides education, Louisiana’s Marianites have served in other vital ministries, founding Our Lady of Prompt Succor Nursing Home in Opelousas 1965 – to provide long-term health care and short-term rehabilitation services to the surrounding communities – and adding the neighboring C'est la Vie Independent Living Center in 1986.

Several Louisiana hospitals – Opelousas General, Lake Providence, Methodist in New Orleans and the Charity Hospital School of Nursing – also have been blessed with Marianite administrators, nurses and nursing instructors.

Sister Ann said her own vocation was inspired by her Marianite teachers at St. Cecilia, St. Mary of the Angels, Academy of Holy Angels and Our Lady of the Holy Cross College.

“This is who I am called to be – a Marianite of Holy Cross. I say that every morning,” said Sister Ann, noting that in 1841, when Father Moreau invited Marianite foundress Mother Mary of the Seven Dolors to join him in his wish to form a congregation modeled on the Holy Family – the sisters in the role of Mary, the brothers representing St. Joseph, and the priests emulating Jesus – his main instruction was to always keep their eyes trained on the cross.

“I think for the priests, brothers and sisters around the globe today, Father Moreau and Mother Mary would say to all of  us: ‘You are for the holy cross’ – and that means the cross, our only hope,” Sister Ann said. “We talk about hospitality; we talk about hope; we are about the work of resurrection!”

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