Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER XXVI RELIGIOUS ORDERS OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES It is a maxim in church tradition that no people can be said to enjoy completely the blessings of the Catholic Faith until its sons and daughters seek a means of following the evangelical counsels in the life of perfection offered by the religious Orders that have existed in the Catholic Church almost from earliest times. As an integral part of Catholicism, the primary purpose of the religious Orders, Congregations, and Institutes, is personal sanctification. But it is a fact admitted by all historians that the members of these religious communities have never been idle members of society. In the passage of time it has happened more than once that individuals and sometimes whole houses have proven recreant to their ideals; but the story of religious life is so thoroughly a part of the history of civilization that there are few scholars today who fail to recognize the value of these communities in the moral and intellectual advance of humanity. No one but a stranger to the religious life could make the mistake nowadays of accepting the position held by the reformers of the sixteenth century in regard to the utility of these Orders and Congregations. There is no aspect of human need, no work of charity, no phase of education, in which they have not taken a great share. Their care of the sick and the dying; their custodianship of the orphan and of the delinquent; the consoling attention they pay to the aged and the infirm; and especially their devotion to the cause of education— these alone give to the men and women who enter the religious life within the Church the surety of appreciation from all who rejoice in practical evidences of man's love for his fellow-men. When John Carroll became Bishop of Baltimore in 1790, ...