Mother Benedicta founded Sisters of St. Dominic of St. Catherine of Siena in 1862
The Congregation of the Sisters of St. Dominic of St. Catherine of Siena was founded in Racine, Wisconsin, by Maria Benedicta Bauer and Maria Thomasina Ginker in May 1862. The two had traveled from the monastery of Heilig Kreuz (Holy Cross) in Regensburg, Bavaria, in 1858, intent on establishing a motherhouse and school to teach the children of German immigrants.
After nearly two years of teaching in Williamsburg, New York, with sisters sent there earlier from Heilig Kreuz by Mother Benedicta herself, they had attempted foundations first in Nashville, Tennessee (1860), and then in Green Bay, Wisconsin (1861).
The first, however, had never come to be because of the disarray of the German community in Nashville. The second had failed after only a year because the German Catholics of Green Bay were too poor to support even the simplest of schools. But by 1862 the two Regensburg nuns had already gathered ten companions, and with the purchase of property in Racine they began a foundation which would in 1877 be formally incorporated into the Dominican Order.
Commitment to Immigrants
This foundation, as so many others of the era, grew out of the movement of cloistered European nuns who sent members to the United States to work with immigrants of their own ethnic backgrounds. Maria Benedicta Bauer's work in this country was marked from the beginning by a determination to Americanize.
She emphasized in all of her advertising for her schools that both English and German would be used. As she had in her schools in Bavaria, she recruited as students especially children of the working class. The latter emphasis continued strong in the community after Mother Benedicta's death in 1865. Efforts at adapting to the American culture, however, were much weaker in her successors, and for years the Racine Dominican community remained heavily German, especially in its internal life.
The point of formal affiliation of the congregation within the Dominican Order in 1877 brought a critical turning point for the sisters, who up to this point had assumed that they would remain members of the "second order" or cloistered branch of the Order, maintaining schools connected as closely as possible with their houses as the foundresses had in Bavaria. They were discovering, however, that in this country this was in most cases impractical or even impossible.
It was the Master of the Order who insisted that they choose either to live a fully cloistered life without schools or to change their status to that of sisters with simple rather than solemn vows. Though the latter meant giving up their status as canonically recognized "religious" within the Roman Catholic Church, the sisters chose to remain faithful to the purpose for which they had made the American foundation. They were the first of the American houses founded out of Heilig Kreuz in Regensburg to make that difficult decision - which all of those American congregations eventually made.
In 1892 the congregation adopted its first Constitution designed specifically for this now non-cloistered teaching community.
Though written (typically for the time) not by the sisters themselves but by their chaplain, it was nevertheless unique to them. But when non-cloistered sisters were canonically recognized as "religious" in 1900, and norms for such groups were published by the Vatican soon thereafter, Racine Dominican Constitutions were rewritten in a mode that made them all but identical to the constitutions of all other non-cloistered sisters. The community's distinctive identity for years survived mainly in the form of its habit and its devotions.
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