CV NEWS FEED // The Holy See Press Office on Thursday announced that Pope Francis has approved the heroic virtues of Mary Alphonsa Hawthorne, the convert daughter of American author Nathaniel Hawthorne, making her a “venerable” and putting her on track to become the next U.S. saint.

A Vatican press release described Hawthorne, who went by Rose, as “the founder of the Dominican Sisters of St. Rose of Lima, born on May 20, 1851 in Lenox, MA and dead in New York city on July, 1926.”

Rose Hawthorne was the second daughter of the famous author of “The Scarlet Letter.” She married writer George Parsons Lathrop in 1871. In 1876, the Lathrops had a son, Francis. After pursuing a literary career, she converted to Roman Catholicism along with her husband in 1891.

According to a biography published by Catholic New York when her cause was sent to Rome, 

the journey that led Rose Hawthorne, born into a cultured Protestant New England literary family—through the devastating loss of her only child and a failed marriage—to the squalid, teeming streets of New York City’s Lower East Side at the end of the 19th century as a single Catholic woman caring for impoverished, terminal cancer patients, is essentially a faith journey.

The publication highlights that the woman who would become Mother Alphonsa was born one year after the publication of her father’s novel “The Scarlet Letter,” and “had the rare opportunity at that time to travel to and live in Europe because of her father’s literary and diplomatic careers. She was first exposed to Catholicism in Europe.”

“She met her husband, George Lathrop, in Germany and they were married in 1871,” the biography continues: 

George would soon become assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly. They moved to New York in 1891 and there they converted to Catholicism, scandalizing Protestant America. Anti-Catholicism was still virulent in those days, even among cultured classes. Their only son died at age 5, and George turned to alcohol for solace. Meanwhile, Rose became more devout as the marriage disintegrated.

With their separation, she embarked on a life of service to the poorest. In the fall of 1896, having completed a three-month nursing course, she rented a three-room, cold-water flat in the slums of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. There she began her vocation of nursing to the poor.

When Mother Alphonsa died on July 9, 1926, she had worked among the poor cancer sufferers of New York’s worst slums for 30 years.

Mother Mary Francis Lepore, O.P., current superior general the order Hawthorne founded, told Catholic New York that “the fact that she had all that suffering” means the venerable woman “can speak to so many people.”

“She can speak to mothers who have lost children, people in troubled marriages,” Lapore continued:

There is so much in mother’s life, so many people that her life could inspire and help. She’s a gift to us but it’s like a quiet hidden gift in a way. I think if we were to make that gift of her life known, her heroism, her courage and trust and love of God, I think it would be a great gift to all the Church as well.