LOREtto
Welcome to LOREtto, a blog created by Loretto Heritage Center to share insights into the rich history of the Loretto Community. Learn more about our Heritage Center and archives.
by Ayla Toussaint and Mary Frances Lottes SL It’s November, which means it is election month in the US! This blog post was written with the help of one of our past Sisters, Sister Mary Fran Lottes. We share this story as an example of how the Sisters of Loretto take a strong interest in…
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Throughout Christianity, there have been stories of people who have seen signs of spirits, demons, and other malevolent beings. The frequency of these experiences, the imagery in them, and how people received them has changed throughout the centuries, but the beliefs and messages behind them have not. This post focuses on two accounts of Loretto…
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I am a white female who grew up in a St. Louis suburb featured in the CBS documentary “16 in Webster Groves” (1966), a critique of the insular life of suburban kids that is still used in sociology classes and reviled by the present upper-middle class residents of Webster. My parents were educated middle class…
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By Susanna Pyatt As Jewel, Pearl, and Ruby Rogers completed their education at Loretto Academy, their secret plans conflicted with the intentions of their father. Frank wanted his daughters to open a music school. The eldest three sisters, however, planned to be baptized in the Catholic Church and join the Sisters of Loretto, plans which…
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By Susanna Pyatt Marcia, the Heritage Center assistant, discovered an intriguing story while processing the personnel files of the three Rogers sisters. Sister Elvira, Sister Benedicta, and Sister Casilda Rogers had only basic documents in their respective files, providing just the standard brief outlines of their lives. That is, except for lengthy narratives each sister…
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By Roger Goose, Guest Contributor to the LOREtto Blog It’s a bright sunny day in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It’s June 2018, the 21st as I remember, and I am with my wife and two friends, Don and June, having a week’s vacation away from work. Today I am at a loose end—Don has a…
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By Susanna Pyatt Come to the Heritage Center to check out our latest museum update! We’ve added a digital interactive about the history of the habit of the Sisters of Loretto. In the past two centuries since the community was founded, the Sisters have had four major alterations to the style of their habit and…
Read MoreIn honor of the twelve days leading to Epiphany, the Heritage Center posted photos tied to the song “The Twelve Days of Christmas” on our Facebook page. Visitors checked back each day to see what new stories we had to share. There was such an outpouring of positive response that we decided to post a…
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By Susanna Pyatt1 When I and the other staff at the Heritage Center opened a trunk said to be full of old chalices in November last year, we little expected what else we would find! The trunk had belonged to Father Charles Nerinckx and contained not just antique church goods, but also two chests of…
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By Ayla Toussaint The first part of this blog post was written for us by Loretto’s second archivist, Sister Matilda Barrett! Found in the archives vault, this short chapter recounts the story of Loretto’s shortest mission: Belen, New Mexico – Our Lady of Sorrows Convent – (1900/9/28-1900/10/5) The shortest-lived Loretto foundation, if one may call…
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By Susanna Pyatt In 1867, three Sisters of Loretto – Sisters Kostka Gauthreaux, Alphonsa Thompson, and Isabella Trealler – set out from Kentucky and Missouri to follow the Santa Fe Trail to New Mexico. There they would join other Sisters in the growing work undertaken by Loretto in the American Southwest. The three Sisters traveled…
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By Susanna Pyatt One of my favorite objects in the Loretto Heritage Center collections is an embroidery sampler signed “Victoria Whitehair, Osage Mission, 1859.” Victoria stitched the English alphabet five times in different styles on a linen background, interspersing her lines with decorative patterns. She joined other female students across Europe and America in creating…
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