Our Roots - Pioneer Sisters
Letter From Another Time: A Portrait Of Mother M. Teresa Moran
Pioneer Founder of the Northwestern Province and Third Mother General of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace
by Rosalie McQuaide, CSJP, 1999
“I believe, however, that it [the mission] will be yet an immense success for I leave it in the hands of sisters who are capable of making it such.” (Mother M. Francis Clare, Founder and First Mother General of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace)
Preface
More than 100 years ago, Sister M. Teresa Moran and Sister M. Stanislaus Tighe stepped off the boat at Fairhaven (now Bellingham) in the Territory of Washington. Assignment: to establish a hospital for miners, prospectors, loggers and families in that frontier region. Their lives and works -- trekking through the woods, soliciting funds in miners’ camps, building community with loggers and their families, all the while courageously and responsibly actualizing the mission of peace -- inspire us who follow after, and we ask: how did they do it?
Teresa Moran’s leadership qualities were quickly evident, and soon after establishing the Sisters of Peace in the Northwest, she was elected Mother General of the congregation, a position in which she served from 1902-1919. Her remarkable skills and warm, engaging personality kept her in the forefront of community life until death in 1949 at the age of 93.
As a writer, she continued the tradition of Margaret Anna Cusack, founder of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace. Moran’s History of the Northwestern Province offers many glimpses of pioneer life and provides valuable information about the foundations made by the Sisters of Peace in the Northwest. In later years, she wrote Lest We Forget, a collection of obituaries of the early sisters of the congregation. But for insight into the remarkable person who was fondly referred to as the “short” Teresa, we turn to her extant letters. We imagine receiving these letters ourselves, and we open our hearts and minds to this outstanding leader of religious women as
we look to the new millennium.
The documents below are a biographical account of the life of this pioneer Sister of St. Joseph of Peace, written as though Mother Teresa was telling her own story. Excerpts from her letters are interspersed with the narrative. Mother Teresa Moran established the Sisters of Peace in the Northwest United States and served as Mother General of the Congregation from 1902-1919.
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