It has been 75 years since the Sisters of Providence Foundress Mother Mary of Providence, formerly Catherine Horan, passed away. On the second anniversary of her January 25, 1943 death an unidentified Sister of Providence expressed the Community’s continued feelings of loss: “Two years have elapsed since we laid her to rest…and it seems but yesterday…so close has she been to us in the interval. Every day brought us some reminder of her…her nobility of character…her understanding heart…her sympathetic and tolerant disposition, and her maternal solicitude for those in trouble.”

Mother Mary of Providence was only a 25-year-old when she first stepped foot in Holyoke. She arrived in 1875 while a member of the Sisters of Charity of the House of Providence in Kingston, Ontario. She initially was assigned to teach a classroom full of young, rambunctious boys at the all-boy St. Jerome’s Institute. The next year she was named school principal and in 1880 appointed superior of the mission. When in 1892 the Vatican acquiesced to the Springfield Bishop’s petition for Sisters based in his Diocese rather than the Kingston Diocese, 30 of the mission Sisters became an independent Congregation in the Springfield Diocese with Mother Mary as their Major Superior. In the first 15 years of her 18-year tenure, she led the Sisters in establishing 20 works of charity.

Her accomplishments were many. In addition to teaching and nursing, she saw to it that the Sisters were well educated as nurses and other health professionals, and that the hospitals and nursing schools they established adhered to the highest medical procedures and standards. She and Mother Ann Valencia, CSJ, the Sister charged with opening St. Francis Hospital in Hartford, advised and supported one another in both women’s efforts to make their respective Congregations’ hospitals second to none. Today, those two hospitals are members of Trinity Health of New England.

Mother Mary was instrumental in founding the New England Conference of Catholic Hospitals Association serving as its first president for seven years. When her term as Major Superior ended at her own request in 1910 she remained as first assistant to the new Major Superior as well as Congregational treasurer so was involved in the Sisters’ new projects including the building of Providence Mother House. As local superior of St. Luke’s Hospital in Pitts-field, she helped plan its new facility and helped nurse during the devastating flu epidemic of 1918.

“Retired” in 1932, she became heavily involved in dedication plans for the new Mother House, taught novices, and responded to Major Superior Mother Mary Consilli’s request that she write the Congregation’s history and her own autobiography. She titled that document—“A Memoir.”

Upon her death, the local press printed this tribute.

“There has been no one just like her among religious orders in Holyoke. There will not be one because the day of the pioneer is gone. Springfield can scarcely count its debt to her…While bishops and priests planned, the actual work…uncompensated [sic] labor of Christian charity fell to her and her sisters in religion.”