Loretto Roots tours past, present and future

Last month, Interchange included an article about a recent Loretto Roots trip from Loretto Motherhouse to Maryland, following the journeys of early Maryland Catholics and the first Loretto members. Several articles about earlier Loretto Roots trips have appeared over the years, including one describing a trip from the Motherhouse to Santa Fe in 2019. A 2002 trip led PJ Manion to write a travel guide for Community members who wanted to drive the routes taken by Sisters of Loretto from Kentucky to Santa Fe. As part of the Loretto Roots history project initiated in January 2022, Annie Stevens and Barbara Ann Barbato embarked on field work research in the Lower Mississippi River Valley. In the May 2023 Interchange, Annie summarized what a Loretto Roots trip is all about: “We not only visited sites where Loretto had lived … but we immersed ourselves in the landscape, culture and history as told by local people today.”

Another Loretto Roots journey is being planned for late spring or early summer 2025. The focus will be early Loretto in Missouri along the Mississippi River. Leaving the Motherhouse, the first stops will be Reelfoot Lake, Tenn., and New Madrid, Mo., sites of the 1811-12 earthquake which shook up Loretto’s earliest members at the very beginning of the Little Society of the Friends of Mary Beneath the Cross of Jesus. Imagine receiving the habit as aftershocks shook the ground beneath your feet!

After a quick stop at Sikeston, Mo., for “throwed rolls” and fried chicken, we will head northward on the west side of the Mississippi to Cape Girardeau, Mo., and Loretto’s St. Vincent’s Academy, opened in 1838, just four years after the Academy at Loretto Motherhouse opened in Rhodes Hall. St. Vincent’s parochial school was opened soon after. The parish records still hold evidence of Loretto slave-holding in the area, as well as records of students who became Loretto members, like Vicki Quatmann and Judy Popp. Vicki’s younger sister, Cathy Quatmann Stoverinck, still lives in nearby Jackson, Mo. We hope she’ll share some of her extensive knowledge of area history and show us where the Cherokee Native Peoples crossed the county on their Trail of Tears.

From Jackson, we will continue north through Apple Creek, the site of a very early Loretto school. We’ll check out the museum at St. Joseph Church for evidence of Loretto presence. Then, it’s on to the jewel of this Loretto Roots tour, the first Loretto foundation beyond Kentucky, Bethehem School and Convent, established in 1823. “Bethlehem was just a stone’s throw from the seminary of the Vincentian Fathers in the Barrens, and the two establishments shared a great deal over the years: mutual support, affection for the Rev. Charles Nerinckx who was buried at Bethlehem, the skills of scholars and music of students and the traded labors of each establishment’s slave families.

A short distance north of Bethlehem is Sainte Genevieve, which calls itself “the oldest permanent European settlement west of the Mississippi” (true, if you don’t count the Spanish settlements farther west). Ste. Genevieve is where Father Nerinckx died in 1824, just a couple of months after he left Kentucky. It is also the 1837 site of another early Loretto school, in a building that still stands, in a town filled with the charm of the earliest French settlement.

From Ste. Genevieve we’ll take a ferry to the Illinois side of the Mississippi, where three historic sites around Prairie Du Rocher recreate the feel of the time before Loretto when the Rev. Badin and Father Nerinckx traveled to this farthest western reach of their missionary territory to minister to French-speaking settlers. French Canadians were the first Europeans to make contact with Mississippian Native Americans, the first to govern the land that is now Illinois and the first to build forts there.

Finally, turning eastward toward the Motherhouse, we’ll go by way of Vincennes, Ind., a French settlement captured by the British, which became the target of Revolutionary War soldiers from Kentucky. We’ll follow their heroic march across the wetlands of Illinois in deepest winter to the monument that celebrates their victory in Vincennes. From there, we will go home by way of a small log-cabin stage station with great fried chicken, likely a place where Father Nerinckx’s stage coach stopped on his way from Loretto to Bethlehem.

The hoped-for result of the trip will be Loretto Roots planted more firmly in our hearts and in our shared experiences.