Religious of the Sacred Heart of Jesus

Status
Not open for further replies.
Cloisters

Cloisters

Well-known member
Last edited:
I think it is misleading to say that the RSCJs have a “bespoke ministry of running schools for rich children.” First, they generally did not educate male children. Second, and more importantly, the education of the rich was so that the schools for the poor could be subsidized. This is made very clear both in Barat’s own writings and in the RSCJ histories. I would begin by recommending Sr. Phil Kilroy’s biography of Barat, and then her history of the first 50 years of the RSCJ congregation, which has a substantial analysis of the community’s teaching philosophy. I would then recommend the history of the RSCJs after Barat by Monique Luirard. It is amazing. And it also discusses the principal mission of the RSCJs–which was only accidentally to educate the affluent.
 
Last edited:
Thank you for the information. I was going off of what I had read in the Dehey tome on American religious orders. I seem to recall that the RSCJs were asked to have schools for the rich children because it wasn’t being done. This stood out in my mind because I had never seen that before. Schools had always been founded for the sake of the poor.
 
I read a bit about St. Madeleine Sophie Barat’s life earlier today.
I felt so badly for her having been made to suffer so much by her older brother, especially him getting angry when she gave him a gift she had made herself, or when she met another cousin who she hadn’t seen in a while and was happy to see her and gave her a hug.
To me the most saintly thing about her was that she managed to overcome all this and still love her brother.
 
Dehey is NOT a reliable source. It is almost a century old, and much of what is in it is sanitized and based on self-reporting by communities at a time when even communities didn’t know their own histories. It should NEVER be used as a source on anything other than, say, dates of arrival in the US.
 
Please be sure to write a book yourself, then. Nobody else in the history of humanity will have the opportunity to visit six dozen religious community archives.
 
I am. It is under contract with Oxford University Press. Meanwhile, I have written about 15 scholarly articles and have recorded a series of 18 lectures on the subject. I simply note that to cite Dehey as authoritative is very problematic.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top