In the balmy summer of 1860, our four foundresses bravely journeyed by way of stagecoach, train, and steamboat from Somerset, Ohio to Nashville, Tennessee to start an all-girls boarding academy they would fortuitously entrust to the patronage of St. Cecilia. Around this school our community grew and flourished in our commitment to Catholic education and the Dominican ideal, to contemplate and to give to others the fruit of our contemplation.

Today in the apostolate we serve approximately 18,000 students in over fifty schools. One of the ancient roots of the word “apostolate” includes the word stel-, meaning “to put in order.” As spiritual mothers, we help our students flourish through the ordering of their minds and hearts to Truth and Charity. Father Ferdinand Valentine, O.P. remarks, “Experience, however, would seem to testify beyond question [that] through their labors in countless schools…the sense of motherhood among religious Sisters thrives and grows ever stronger under the impulse of grace.”¹ Even our retired sisters continue to actively participate in the apostolate through their prayers, offering a Holy Hour each morning in front of the Blessed Sacrament for all the sisters laboring in the Lord’s vineyard.

In his apostolic exhortation Evangelii Nuntiandi, Pope Paul VI says, “Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses.”² To witness to a life transfigured by the grace of God is our role as consecrated religious wherever we are and whatever we might be doing. Our identity informs our mission; therefore, our thoughts are never far from those whom we serve and love in the apostolate. May we witness and preach with Dominican zeal for the salvation of souls!

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1 Quoted in With Love and Laughter: Reflections of a Dominican Nun by Sister Maryanna, O.P. (Hanover House, 1960).