‘Women & Spirit’ traveling exhibit highlights work of Catholic nuns

June 21, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

BEACHWOOD, Ohio

Catholic nuns founded hospitals, orphanages and more than 110 universities in the U.S., part of their long history of social work highlighted in a traveling exhibit that stops in Ohio this summer.

The exhibit, “Women & Spirit: Catholic Sisters in America,” has drawn more than 6,000 visitors since it opened last month at the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage near Cleveland. It will be here until Aug. 28 and then move on to the Ellis Island Immigration Museum in New York.

Countless organizations owe their beginnings to the work of nuns, including the Mayo Clinic, Alcoholics Anonymous and many charitable groups.

“I realized they were teachers and they worked in hospitals,” said museum director Judi Feniger. “But I didn’t realize the magnitude of their accomplishments, how much they did so quietly.”

Nuns worked in the face of widespread discrimination against Catholics and worked through deadly epidemics and wars. Often, they worked with little money.

“These women didn’t wait around for some bishop to tell them what to do. They just did it,” said Sister Jane Pank of Sheffield Lake, a member of the Sisters of the Humility of Mary.

The exhibit includes a newspaper ad from the 1800s by the Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary that reads: “We offer you no salary; no recompense; no holiday; no pension, but much hard work; a poor dwelling; few consolations; many disappointments; frequent sickness; a violent or lonely death.”

Nuns died trying to save children in an orphanage during a 1900 flood in Galveston, Texas. And Sister Dorothy Kazel of Cleveland, who helped the poor in El Salvador, was raped and killed, along with two other nuns and a lay missionary, by soldiers in that country in 1980.

The exhibit showcases women who were — and remain — self-motivated and independent, which in recent years has bothered the Vatican.