Loretto members joined the 3000-plus crowd to celebrate Nerinx Hall’s 100 years. A few highlights from the evening were performances by students displaying their talents in music, theater and dance. A special drone light show lit up the sky above…
Sister Barbara Ann (formerly Sister Mary Bernard) Barbato SL died peacefully Aug. 7, 2024, at her home in St. Louis, with her dear housemate Annie Stevens CoL by her side. Barbara Ann had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer about 18 months ago and…
Two centuries after his death in 1824, Reverend Charles Nerinckx, priest-founder of Loretto, is commemorated in a cover essay I was invited to write for American Catholic Studies journal. With my recent research for the Loretto Roots enslavement project in…
As part of my Loretto Roots research in the spring of 2022, I read Professor Shannen Dee Williams’s new book, “Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle” (Duke, 2022). She described the African American Oblate…
For the first five decades of its existence in the antebellum South, the Sisters of Loretto at the Foot of the Cross, as an early American religious congregation, participated in the system of enslavement of human beings of African descent.…
Inspired by Libby Comeaux’s Loretto Roots research, Barbara Ann Barbato and I traveled across Missouri in June, heading west to Kansas and Oklahoma where Loretto taught Osage children in the 19th and 20th centuries. We visited museums, churches and people…
Barbara Ann Barbato and I spent a week of March driving through history along the lower Mississippi River Valley, where Loretto established convents and schools during the 1820s-1840s. We not only visited sites where Loretto had lived (few actual buildings…
In 1997 The Sarah Community (TSC) was founded by five women’s congregations in Saint Louis, Mo., to meet the retirement and long-term care needs for their members and the general public. Since then, several Loretto residents, most recently Concha De…
On April 5, a large virtual gathering of Webster University scholarship students and donors celebrated together and shared stories. Among the participants was Barbara Ann Barbato, long-time Webster faculty member, who noted how energizing it was to see current students…
From its historic home campus in Webster Groves, Mo., Webster University continues to carry on its Loretto founders’ commitment to provide educational opportunities for those who had not been served. Starting with a small class of women in 1915 (five…
Since the last residents of the St. Louis Loretto Center moved in 2017 and the property was sold to Nerinx Hall, many people have asked, “What’s happening on the Nerinx campus?” Over the past year, as plans for demolition of…
On the 257th birthday of Charles Nerinckx, Oct. 2 of this year, the St. Louis Loretto Community and more than 600 students and faculty of Nerinx Hall gathered to celebrate our shared past and our deeply-linked future. Beginning with an…