Editor’s Note: This week, we remember Mother Caroline Friess who led the School Sisters of Notre Dame in North America for 42 years from 1850 until her death at 68 on July 22, 1892. The following is excerpted from a publication written in 1992 by Sister Mary Luke, marking the centenary of Mother Caroline’s death.
Josephine Friess, the future Mother Caroline, was born August 21, 1824 in a suburb of Parish of a French mother and German father. She grew up in Bavaria, where she entered the School Sisters of Notre Dame, receiving the name Sister Maria Karolina.
Youthful Missionary
Sister Caroline came to America in 1847 at the age of 23. By mid-1848 she had already traveled by riverboat, lake steamer, wagon, stagecoach, and railroad from their headquarters in Baltimore to Pittsburgh, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, Buffalo, Rochester, Philadelphia and New York. Her guide on this long journey was the Redemptorist Father St. John Neumann. He had invited Blessed Theresa Gerhardinger, foundress of the School Sisters of Notre Dame, and Sister Caroline to accompany him on a visit to Redemptorist missions in cities where they might consider opening parish schools.
Creative Leader
In 1850, Mother Theresa appointed the 26-year-old woman her vicar for North America. By this time there were already 24 sisters, 17 candidates or prospective members, 30 orphans, and about 1,250 pupils in seven schools. She directed Mother Caroline to build a motherhouse in Milwaukee, Wisconsin where Bishop John Martin Henni would welcome them. Mother Caroline, with three other sisters, and a candidate arrived in Milwaukee on December 15, 1850. Three weeks later she began the first SSND parish school in the West in what is now called Old St. Mary’s. She moved quickly. She saw needs and responded to them.
Intrepid Traveler
For ten months of almost every year Mother Caroline traveled thousands of miles back and forth to the east coast, up and down the Mississippi, across the stormy Great Lakes, on muddy country roads, and rumbling railroads. She survived derailments, ferryboat accidents, near shipwreck, and a terrible explosion on a Mississippi steamboat which killed all but 160 of the 500 passengers.
American Citizen
During her first years in Milwaukee Mother Caroline became an American citizen. This land was her land; its people were her people; she loved her Church as the people of God. She worked untiringly to provide schools and orphanages for the children of immigrants. She received women of all cultures and nationalities into her congregation. She helped other religious congregations get started. “We are all serving the same God!” she would say.
Commissary General
In 1881 Mother Caroline was elected to the post of Commissary General of SSND in North America, a new position established to facilitate the government of the congregation. She continued to promote unity and yet meet the needs of a rapidly growing community.
Woman of Prayer
Each of her sisters felt loved by Mother Caroline. The phenomenal growth of the community did not keep her from praying for them one by one. During the last years of her life she prepared a legacy for them in building the Chapel of Perpetual Adoration at the Milwaukee Motherhouse. She died just nine days before the scheduled dedication of the chapel.
The obituary published in the Milwaukee Sentinel, July 23, 1892 noted: “Her energy knew no limit and under her guidance schools were organized throughout the country, until now they number more than 200, with an attendance of 70,000 in seventeen states and twenty-nine dioceses…”
Whatever their ministry – whether teaching fourth grade, staffing a shelter for battered women, continuing a ministry of prayer at a retirement center, serving as administrator at a women’s college – North American SSNDs in all their ethnic and ministerial diversity are proud to claim Mother Caroline as theirs.
They recognize her in the prologue of their constitution, You Are Sent: “Mother Caroline Friess, who through courageous leadership, adapted the congregation to life on another continent, perceptively reading the signs of the times, risking innovative response to the needs of the new world.”
