Mother Catharine Muth

On May 26, 1884 a nun from Jersey City traveled all the way out to Caldwell by horse and buggy taking a huge step in making her dream come true!

Mother Catharine Muth, the nun in question, was a Dominican who had led a group of her sisters from their monastery in Brooklyn to Jersey City to establish a community to help educate the children of the German immigrants.

As she witnessed the poverty and poor health of the children and her sisters living in 19th-century city squalor, she courageously moved her frail sisters and eventually the novices to Caldwell, “the Denver of the East.” She dreamed of Caldwell becoming a place to care for the orphans and a place where Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament could be a part of the nuns’ community prayer life. Soon the nuns had a school in Caldwell while continuing their work in Jersey City. In time, Mother Catharine led a congregation with 15 missions, 150 sisters, and 23 postulants (women desiring to be sisters).

Soon a new Motherhouse, designed to resemble the original monastery in Regensburg, Germany, began to take shape as the sisters hauled stones and bricks up the hill from the railroad station below. The original building had porches on the first and second floors so that infirm sisters could enjoy the fresh air. The Chapel, on the second floor, offered the sisters prayer space in a cloistered setting. Their austere life of prayer included familiar monastic practices: rising to chant the Office in the middle of the night, abstaining from meat several days a week, and observing the months-long “Dominican Lent.” Their new response to Mission added new apostolic responsibilities:

• Farming the land and feeding themselves and their students with the harvest fruits of their labor,
• Teaching children from elementary through high school, and
• Giving students lessons in painting, sewing, and music before and after school.

When it became apparent that their rigorous lifestyle in America – a combination of both cloistered and apostolic ministries and responsibilities – was detrimental to their spiritual and physical well-being, the sisters became “Third Order Dominicans,” that is, not cloistered nuns, but apostolic sisters. The needs of the Mission (bringing Good News or the Holy Preaching to others) demanded that some of the cloister rules and practices be sacrificed so that the sisters could teach and care for the people to whom they were sent. Mother Catharine would not have chosen to do this if it had not been demanded by the evolving congregational life and mission. However, she wisely counseled her sisters to “build a cell within your heart where you can converse continually with the Beloved of your soul.”

Life’s demands, the needs of God’s people, and the health of the sisters were paramount to Mother Catharine. After the pattern of Jesus who lived the Paschal Mystery perfectly, she died to her own desires and lived in ways new to her.

This courageous woman, our foundress, had a vision for her congregation: to be contemplative women in the service of God’s People, especially recent immigrants.