Bold Move s
feed your family, and hold down a job. “Some of our students arrive with doctoral degrees but no English,” says Sister Irene O’Neill, CSJ, Executive Director of the Sisters of St. Joseph Ministries Foundation, which raises funds to support the CSJs’ ministries. “Some arrive with zero education. Some don’t even know what a number is. Learning In Style is designed with the individual’s needs in mind.” Also at Calvary is a ministry the Sisters founded but no longer operate – InStep, a day care center for low-income families. Altogether these ministries helped create a “Mall of America” of neighborhood social services at Calvary. But Learning In Style needed a new home. Calvary Church – a striking Romanesque Revival church built
in 1883 and registered with the Heritage Preservation Commission – was splitting at the seams. Something needed to be done. That’s when Dick Naughton stepped in. “I fell in love with Learning In Style from the moment I saw what they were doing,” says Naughton, who joined the Ministries Foundation’s Board of Directors in 2000. “I met with Sister Ag Foley, who founded and runs Learning In Style, and I loved what the Sisters were doing. But I had major concerns about them being on the second floor of that facility.” The Calvary Church building, while it has been the scene of tremendous work over its 13 decades of service, has structural concerns that would be obvious
10 Bold Moves Over 16 Decades
Converting an old funeral home into an education center, in the midst of the most severe recession in decades, isn’t the first bold move the Sisters of St. Joseph have tackled. A quick glance through history shows this is indeed how they operate.
1853 When a cholera outbreak reaches epidemic proportions in 1853, the Sisters transform their log cabin school into St. Joseph’s Hospital, Minnesota’s first hospital.
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1894 CSJs begin to officially train nurses in 1894. In 1896, ten Sisters and six lay women graduate from St. Joseph’s Hospital Training School, St. Paul.
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Four Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet journey up the Mississippi to the village of St. Paul in the Minnesota territory, with the intention of teaching school.
Sisters of St. Joseph establish the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul. Today St. Catherine University is the largest women’s university in the U.S. Legend has it that in 1926 Sister Antonia McHugh, CSJ quickly started to build Mendel Hall to prevent Prior Avenue from cutting the campus in two.
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