Separated by continents and more than a century, Sisters Mary Baptist Russell and Karen Schneider are connected by a thread of Mercy and a tradition of healthcare that represents the very best of what a Sister of Mercy can and should be.
One knew only that she wanted to be a Sister of Mercy and found herself, with no formal training, nursing the poor and destitute through cholera and typhus epidemics in Ireland and San Francisco. The other felt called to be a doctor and worried it meant ignoring her call to be a sister (or vice versa); a malaria outbreak in Guyana tested her skills but affirmed her choice to be both sister and physician.
From the founding of the first Mercy hospital in Pittsburgh in 1847 to today’s long-term care facilities, rehabilitation centers and family care and outreach centers, Sisters of Mercy have served healthcare needs and continue to do so throughout the United States, Belize, Guam, Guyana, Peru and the Philippines.
Mercy and healthcare have gone hand-in-hand since the first Sisters of Mercy began tending the sick and poor in Dublin, Ireland, in the nineteenth century.
Much of what we know about Baptist Russell, as she is often called, comes from her own collected letters. She was born to a loving middle-class Irish family in 1829, raised a devout Catholic, educated to satisfy a curious mind, schooled in Irish politics, and taught by the example of her mother and family to serve the poor.
By the age of 19, having seen the devastation of the Irish famine, she knew she wanted to become a nun and initially sought acceptance to the Sisters of Charity. Her bishop had other ideas, though, and guided her to Mercy, and eventually to the foundation in Kinsale, Ireland. There, she thought she would spend her days as an educator of poor children and young women who needed skills such as needlepoint so as to find gainful employment. But her biggest impact would be in the field of healthcare.
Within six years, she was on her way to the California Mission to serve the Church in a wild land, teeming with immigrants, plagued by sickness and ignorance, and awash in anti-Catholic sentiment. It was not for the faint of heart, and Baptist Russell would soon learn that suffering went hand in glove with success in America.
Having arrived in San Francisco in 1854, after a challenging sea and land journey, Baptist Russell and her seven companions quickly established medical ministries including visitation of the sick—often suffering from cholera, typhus and other infectious diseases—and later founding a hospital.
The role of germs in causing and spreading sickness had yet to be discovered, and patients entering a hospital did so at great peril to their health. But the sisters believed that compassion, clean surroundings and fresh air were critical to the comfort and recovery of those under their care.
Baptist Russell was raised with a discipline of life and a religious fervor that mirrored the life of her new religious community. Love of learning and a belief that education was the way to escape misery was deeply inculcated in her spirit long before she took up her life’s vocation.
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More than 170 years have passed, and Mercy’s commitment to healthcare continues. It can be seen in the way that sisters like Karen Schneider travel the globe to provide medical care for children suffering the dual cruelties of poverty and illness, then come home to Baltimore to do the same.
Karen’s mother was an emergency room nurse in Long Island, but Karen didn’t want to study nursing. It was the 1960s, and Karen’s mother did it all: worked, managed the house, and took care of the kids with little help from her husband. That’s not where Karen saw her life headed. She studied math in college—she jokes that English is her second language—and had a boyfriend “in the wings,” she says, while she was trying to resist the call to become a sister.
She didn’t know Mercy had hospitals, or doctors. She had done her formation in Brooklyn, which had no healthcare ministries, and, just like Baptist Russell, she assumed she would teach, so she added education to her math major and tried to put thoughts of being a sister aside.
“It was just too much, and life would clash,” she says of the dual desires to study medicine and enter religious life. But, Karen says, “I had this call that just would not go away. And you know how they talk about the hound of heaven? It was just something I had to try. And I was going to try for a year, and then in my mind, it wouldn’t fit, and I would leave, and I would be normal.”
Karen says it’s now been 35 years of being “abnormal.” And she would not have it any other way. She speaks easily and frankly of her vocation and laughs often while describing the joys and challenges of religious life. As a med student, she was working 120 hours a week, she says, with one Sunday off each month, when she would sleep all day.
“It was a time where I wasn’t living in community, I was living by myself, I wasn’t able to go to church, didn’t have people to pray with,” she says, all seriousness now. “And at the end of those three years, I almost lost my vocation. I thought, why am I a Sister of Mercy? Why am I doing this?”
The answer, for her, was simple: Return to community life. “Living by myself didn’t work,” Karen admits. “It’s the sisters who call me to slow down.”
During medical school, many of Karen’s classmates signed up for international electives. She wanted to do the same, and preferably at a Mercy hospital. So, she posted a letter to the Mercy Federation office and received, in return, a list. At the bottom, written in pen, was a reference to a hospital in Guyana, almost as an afterthought. That was all Karen needed to see. A brief exchange of letters—the last of which arrived after Karen herself did—followed, and she found herself working in a hospital in the capital, Georgetown, with a private pediatrician.
“It was no different than what I’d see in New York,” she recalls with disappointment. So, the local sisters arranged for Karen to visit the Jesuit missions in the interior of the country, where a malaria epidemic was raging. She was the only doctor there, with exactly one hour of coursework on malaria to her name. “The first hour after I got there,” she says, “a 15-year-old boy died. And that’s when I realized, my God, this is real.”
But nobody else died after that, because she was able to administer IV malaria medications and fluids, and she gained the trust of the residents.
“I loved it. It was the first time as a medical student I felt like I was a doctor and really making a difference,” says Karen, who in the years since has led, and continues to lead, medical students on missions to Kenya, Nigeria and Peru, among other places, focusing on children with conditions, such as hernia and club foot, that are easily caught and corrected in the developed world.
By temperament, Sisters Mary Baptist Russell and Karen Schneider have much in common—bright, charming, easy to laugh and possessed of a sense of adventure that took for travels far from home. But even more than personality, these two women are linked by a deep faith and a lasting commitment of service—to the poor, to the sick and to those most in need.
There’s a saying about Mercy: “It doesn’t wait to see if someone else will go first, but steps out and takes the lead, then looks around to see who else might be ready to help.”
Like her foundress Catherine McAuley, Mary Baptist Russell understood those in need must be helped today, not next week. As it did in their day, the door of Mercy continues to stand ajar, held in place by women like Sister Karen Schneider, ready to welcome those most in need, warmly, without question or hesitation.
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Credits:
All photos were provided to the Sisters of Mercy for use.