Each semester, on the first day of class, I invite students to introduce themselves and to share if there is a particular reason they enrolled in our course. In spring 2016, I heard my all-time favorite response from a young woman in the middle of the row on my far left. “My name is Nicole McAlee and I am from Media, Pennsylvania,” she said. “I am a senior, and I signed up for this class because Sister Lucy told me I wasn’t allowed to graduate from Notre Dame unless I took a class from Professor Cummings.”
Worlds collided. Sister Lucy Schluth, R.S.M., had been my history teacher at Cardinal O’Hara High School in Springfield, Pennsylvania. The school is named for John O’Hara, C.S.C., former archbishop of Philadelphia and, in a connection very meaningful to me, a former president of the University of Notre Dame. To generations of O’Hara students, Sister Lucy is a legend. Nicole graduated from O’Hara 23 years after I did, but she, too, had taken A.P. U.S. History with Sister Lucy.
Learning history from Sister Lucy is an experience not easily forgotten. It may be a cliché to say that a good teacher can make history “come alive,” but that is literally what Sister Lucy often did when she would act out pivotal scenes from the American past. I vividly remember her playing the role of both Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton in their epic duel, counting out the paces carefully and using her fingers to mimic aiming the gun. Years later, when I was watching Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton, it occurred to me that I was probably the only person in the theater who could legitimately say they were watching the second-most entertaining rendition of that dramatic episode!
Sister Lucy and I kept in touch over the years, and she was tickled when I started to research and write about the historical study of Catholic sisters. In May 2009, soon after I published New Women of the Old Faith, she wrote me a long letter to say that she had read it with pleasure and pride. She told me that her community, the Philadelphia Mercies, purchased copies as gifts for the Sisters of St. Joseph, the Franciscan Sisters of Glen Riddle, and the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, three other communities of women religious who figure prominently in that book. She remembered that after she entered the Mercies in 1964, it was routine for her to teach classes of anywhere between 55 or 80 students. Noting that she was also attending college part-time throughout that period, she wondered “how I did it and maintained my sanity, I don’t know.”
Sister Lucy was more than just a history teacher, to me and to many. During my years there, O’Hara was one of the largest Catholic high schools in the country. There were thousands of students, and Sister Lucy seemed to keep tabs on all of us, as well as the faculty and administrators. For years, she advised O’Hara’s chapter of the National Honor Society, and she taught me a lot about leadership when I was its president during my senior year. At the same time, she taught me how to stand up for myself. I remember moping in her office during a particularly dispiriting time; I had received an honor many people didn’t think I deserved, and their disparaging comments were getting me down. I had hoped Sister Lucy would offer me sympathy; instead, she gave me a spine! Stop feeling sorry for yourself, she said, and just concentrate on proving the naysayers wrong.
“Women religious have always been ahead of their time,” Sister Lucy wrote in her 2009 letter to me. “The Catholic Church owes a great deal to the hard work and dedication of many religious women. There would be no Catholic schools, Catholic hospitals . . . without them.” Sister Lucy was right, as usual, and the more I study and teach about the history of Catholic sisters, the more I appreciate that their story is also the history of U.S. education, health care, social work, women, immigration, urban life—and of America itself. One of my great privileges serving as Cushwa director was supporting research on these subjects. In 2013, when Sister Karen Kennelly, C.S.J., asked me to bring the Conference on the History of Women Religious under Cushwa’s umbrella, I told her I could only pledge to do so for the duration of my tenure as director. I hoped, however, that the relationship between Cushwa and CHWR would endure beyond that, and indeed it has. This would not have been possible without the commitment of Darren Dochuk and David Lantigua, and without the support of Notre Dame’s Development and Investment teams as well as a number of generous benefactors.
The members of the McAlee family are among those benefactors. As delighted as I was to learn of Nicole’s connection to Sister Lucy on that winter day in 2016, I am even more thrilled that she and I have since become good friends, along with Nicole’s brother, Stephen, and her parents, Larry and Michele, all also O’Hara alumni. When the McAlees wanted to make a substantial gift to the University of Notre Dame, they decided to designate it to support the Conference on the History of Women Religious—and to name it in honor of the woman who brought us all together. The Sister Lucy Schluth Endowment for Excellence will support the study of women religious in perpetuity.
The McAlees hosted a beautiful luncheon last July that was both a personal and professional highlight of my career. Sister Lucy beamed when we presented her with a plaque recognizing the new endowment. Guests included many Sisters of Mercy, Sister Lucy’s family, my father and my husband, and faculty and administrators from Cardinal O’Hara High School. I was invited to say a few words about Cardinal O’Hara—the man, not the building—and we all gloried in the rich connections between Notre Dame and the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, past and present. Even more importantly, I was able to thank Sister Lucy publicly for inspiring my love of history and for modeling teaching and mentorship. It makes me so happy that her name is now attached to the Cushwa Center and Notre Dame.
Kathleen Sprows Cummings is professor of American studies and history at the University of Notre Dame, where she directed the Cushwa Center from 2012 to 2023.
This article appears in the spring 2025 American Catholic Studies Newsletter. Learn more about the next Conference on the History of Women Religious by visiting cushwa.nd.edu/chwr2025.
From left: Tom Cummings, Kathleen Sprows Cummings, Sister Lucy Schluth, R.S.M., and the McAlees (Nicole, Stephen, Michele, and Larry) in July 2024.