July 9: Hawthorne's Daughter

Welcome to the American Catholic Daily Reader podcast. Today is July 9th, and our story is Hawthorne's Daughter. As a child, Rose Hawthorne lived a charmed life. Adored by her famous father, author Nathaniel Hawthorne, she spent her childhood in Europe and grew up surrounded by the literary elites of the day.

As an adult, however, she endured a difficult marriage to an alcoholic, the loss of her only child, and a stalled career as a writer. Hawthorne found the strength to endure those trials in the wake of her and her husband's 1891 conversion to Catholicism. Her husband did not find the same. As his drinking grew worse, Hawthorne obtained her bishop's permission to separate.

She then created a new life for herself, caring for cancer patients in the slums of New York. In the early days of her work, she explained that choice, writing, The distance up Fifth Avenue sometimes seems as far and as frozen as the road to the famous mines of Alaska. Or so it seems when I stand in my little rooms, very nearly at the end of my money for the time being, and ask myself, what am I trying to do down here among the poor?

To make impossible the homeless condition of incurable cancer patients. To make impossible their semi-neglect in homes that are To take the lowest class we know, both in poverty and suffering, and put them in such a condition that if our Lord knocked at the door, we should not be ashamed to show what we have done.

Following the death of her husband in 1898, Hawthorne took the Dominican habit. With her friend Alice Huber, she founded a religious order, the Servants of Relief for Incurable Cancer, now the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne. And in 1901, as Mother Mary Alfonza, she opened a home for cancer patients in Hawthorne, New York. There, on July 9, 1926, she died, and there, as well as in Philadelphia and Atlanta, her order continues her work, providing free care to terminally ill cancer patients. Mother Alfonza's cause for canonization opened in 2003.

Mother Mary Alfonza Hawthorne turned personal suffering into a mission of care for the terminally ill, reminding us that adversity can deepen empathy and motivate service. Today, offer help or comfort to someone who is overlooked or suffering in your community.

Thank you for listening to the American Catholic Daily Reader podcast. Join us tomorrow, July 10th, for another story of faith and courage in America.