Weaving Hope: The Religious of Jesus and Mary in the United States, 1877-2017 by Janice Farnham

Reviewed by: Weaving Hope: The Religious of Jesus and Mary in the United States, 1877-2017 by Janice Farnham Darra D. Mulderry Weaving Hope: The Religious of Jesus and Mary in the United States, 1877–2017. By Janice Farnham. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2020. 398 pp. $42.00. With Weaving Hope: The Religious of Jesus and Mary in the United States, 1877–2017, Janice Farnham, RJM, has delivered a detailed, beautifully written, and comprehensive history of the congregation’s apostolic work in the United States. The congregation’s service in the United States commenced in 1877 when three sisters departed Quebec to staff a Catholic elementary school at Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes parish in Fall River, Massachusetts. At the time, most of the 30,000 workers then employed in the city’s booming textile mills were French-Canadian immigrants. The pastor and families of the parish, concerned that the U.S. church, dominated as it was by an Irish-American hierarchy and clergy, would rapidly strip their children of the French-Canadian [End Page 93] national spirit, religious customs, and language, welcomed the sisters with relief. Additional New England parishes made similar appeals for sisters, and by the turn of the century, the Religious of Jesus and Mary were staffing a host of Catholic schools in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island. The initial flow of RJMs from Quebec into New England would be the first of three major migrations of the congregation’s sisters into the United States, each from a different geographical location. Farnham highlights that the Religious of Jesus and Mary, in contrast to the vast majority of other orders that expanded into the United States from just one national culture, “are one from many.” Although the congregation had originated in France in 1818 as a community of sisters dedicated to girls’ education, by the mid-nineteenth century the sisters had opened convents and schools in India, Spain, and Quebec, and a few decades later, in Mexico and Italy, too. The second flow of RJMs to America would be spearheaded in 1902 when a few sisters went directly from Rome to New York City in hopes of contributing to girls’ education in the American metropolis. In the absence of immediate teaching opportunities for francophone sisters, however, these RJMs pivoted into establishing and running a 140-bed residence for single working women of modest income (that would remain open until the 1960s, serving thousands of women). Simultaneously, RJMs fleeing government persecution in Mexico in the early twentieth century launched educational, catechetical, and residential ministries in Texas and Southern California. Farnham faced enormous research—and narrative—challenges in taking on this multicultural, multi-regional, and multi-lingual history, and meets those challenges masterfully with a narrative structure that might serve as a model for historians of other congregations. In the introductory pages she offers readers a brilliantly incisive summary of the history of the U.S. church from 1877 to the present; Farnham’s seasoned knowledge as a longtime professor of modern Catholicism is evident here. She follows that with a concise overview of the RJM leadership in the form of mini-biographies of the congregation’s mothers general. Having orientated her readers with those summary histories, Farnham turns to her main work of offering detailed narratives of each apostolic endeavor, offering subheadings for each, making this an excellent reference work as well as historical narrative. Farnham employs the metaphor of weaving throughout, likening the RJMs’ apostolic endeavors to the making of an intricate tapestry, “woven of many cultures,” and organizes the history in three periods: the late nineteenth century (“Framing a Loom”), the first half of the twentieth century (Creating Patterns”), and the 1960s onward (“Weaving Fresh Fabric”). Convent annals and the correspondence files of sister superiors [End Page 94] are her main sources, and Farnham includes the names—birth name and religious name—of every sister who served in every locality. No weaver goes unnamed. Readers already familiar with the history of women’s teaching congregations in the United States will recognize some of the dynamics. The RJMs, like most of the thousands of sisters who formed nearly 90 percent of the staff in Catholic schools...

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