Topic archive
History
Two hundred years and counting! Loretto has responded to the call of God to serve God’s people. From children to adults, from elementary to graduate-level education, from eldercare to advocacy for the homelessness and underserved, Loretto has left its mark on the world as it seeks to “work for justice and act for peace.” Learn more about the history of Loretto.
The story of Loretto is woven together with U.S. beginnings
The Sisters of Loretto with their purely American heritage and spirit are of the very marrow of American history. Florence Wolff SL Editor’s note: In the fall 1976 issue of Loretto Magazine, Florence Wolff SL published “Loretto and the Bicentennial,”…
Remembering Selma, 1965
On March 10, 61 years later, I am celebrating a time in history when many people — clergy, ministers, rabbis, nuns and an array of local citizens — came together to march and protest the fact that people of color…
Bellarmine students use classroom skills to locate and mark graves of Black Catholics
Posted by The Record, April 22, 2026 Bellarmine University students studying geographic information systems last fall mapped and marked the graves of Black Catholics buried in the Archdiocese of Louisville’s St. Louis Cemetery. It was the latest step in an…
America’s Catholic Patriots
The Sisters of Loretto received recognition in this piece posted on the USCCB website as part of the “We hold These Truths” series. When it comes to our Church’s history, we Catholics tend to zero in quickly on canonized saints…
Loretto’s New History Sampler: Treasured Threads, New Stitches
Children love stories. Adults love stories. Words that might give life. Words that bring people together to reclaim their wholeness, words that welcome and can take that inner journey toward new life. Words that are the story. Recorded history provides…
The story of Loretto: Outward and forward in love for 214 years and counting!
Outward and forward in love has been the story of Loretto since its founding in 1812. For the past 214 years, Loretto’s foundational hope has been lived out throughout the life and mission work of thousands of members. I Am…
Framing the Past
In 2024, The Loretto Heritage Center received grant funding from the KY Historical Society, through the Local History Trust Fund, to fuel our project to reframe the most sensitive framed pieces in our artifact collection. This selection included paper documents,…
Face to face with a heart-wrenching truth
‘The history of enslavement by Catholic bishops and clergy, by religious communities and by large swaths of the Catholic laity from 1619 through the Civil War is not well known and ought to be.’ Eleanor Craig SL, CARA award ceremony,…
Loretto Archives documents slave ownership
Click to read all of the articles in the winter 2026 issue of Loretto Magazine.
Two Loretto Magazines
This summer, the Heritage Center received a grant from the Kentucky Historical Society to purchase a dandy new book scanner to scan much of our collection of materials from the Sisters’ schools in Kentucky. The grant was part of the…
Eleanor Craig SL to receive Luzbetak Award for Exemplary Church Research on behalf of Sisters of Loretto
Updated Nov. 11, 2025 to include the official news release Eleanor Craig SL was selected by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) as a 2025 recipient of the Rev. Louis J. Luzbetak, SVD Award for Exemplary Church…
National Archives Month: Highlighting the work and whimsy of our Loretto archivists
October is National Archives Month, and the work of an archivist is serious business! Sometimes what’s needed in order to stay sane in all that seriousness is a good, old-fashioned sense of humor. This week on our socials we’ll follow…