thumb|right|Mother Mary Frances Xavier Warde
Mary Frances Xavier Warde, R.S.M., (1810-1884) was one of the original Sisters of Mercy, a Roman Catholic religious congregation of women founded in Ireland by Catherine McAuley, and the foundress of the congregation in the United States.
Life
She was born Frances Teresa Warde in Mountrath, Queen's County, Ireland, to an upper class couple, John Warde and his wife Jane Maher. Despite her privileged upbringing, she was drawn to share in the charitable work of Catherine McAuley, who had opened a house in Dublin to educate the poor and serve the homeless. At that time, McAuley and her coworkers were a group of lay volunteers, who combined a routine of prayer and service.
When the group's lifestyle caused gossip to arise about their situation, the Archbishop of Dublin stepped in to force the group to choose between being either a religious congregation or a secular charity, they chose to take religious vows. In 1831, after McAuley and two companions had completed a year of novitiate and taken their vows, they formally founded the congregation of the Religious Sisters of Mercy. During that time of seclusion for the founders of the new congregation, Warde supervised the operation of the House of Mercy. She then became the first postulant, taking the religious name by which she is known upon her own admission into the novitiate and her taking of the habit.
After her own profession of vows, Warde was appointed superior of the convent at Carlow in Ireland, and helped establish convents at Naas and Wexford in that country.
Sisters of Mercy in America
In 1843, at the request of Bishop Michael O'Connor of the Diocese of Pittsburgh, Mother Warde and six other sisters left Carlow for America, where they took charge of the cathedral Sunday school at Saint Paul's Cathedral. At the request of Bishop William Quarter, she established a convent in Chicago in 1846. Two years later, she established another at Father Gallitzin's settlement at Loretto, Pennsylvania. She went on to help form schools or houses in Boston, Hartford, Buffalo, New York and elsewhere throughout New England. A woman of strong presence, in 1850 she reportedly faced down a group of "Know-Nothing rioters" at a newly established convent in Providence, Rhode Island.
By the time of her death in 1884, Warde had established over 82 Mercy convents, schools, hospitals, orphanages and other works of mercy in some 20 cities across nine states.
She died at Manchester, New Hampshire, where she had earlier set up night schools for factory children.
Mother Mary Frances Xavier Warde was inducted into the Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame in 2002. The Frances Xavier Warde School, an elementary school in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago, is named after her.
Biography
Ireland
Frances Warde was born in 1810 at Belbrook House, in Abbeyleix, County Laois, Ireland, the youngest of six children of William and Mary (Maher) Warde. After the deaths of her parents, she was entrusted to the care of a maternal grand-aunt who undertook the formation of her religious character according to the method of Fénelon. Naturally of a lively disposition, she was carried away by the frivolities of fashionable life until her scruples led her to confide in her director. She followed his advice in offering her services to the foundress of the Congregation of the Sisters of Mercy, whom she assisted in instructing the little inmates of the recently erected House for Homeless Children. Assuming the plain black habit of the institution in 1828, she conducted the affairs of the home while Mother McAuley and two foundress companions were making their novitiate in the Presentation Convent of George's Hill preparatory to the founding of the new congregation. After their return as professed Sisters of Mercy, she and six companions assumed the garb of the congregation.
In 1837 she was appointed superior of the convent at Carlow, which had been built under her supervision and was the first house of the congregation outside of Dublin. In 1839 she founded the convent of Naas and in 1840 that of Wexford, to which soon after its establishment the public orphan asylum was affiliated. From Wexford, foundations have been sent out as far as Australia. The convent of Sligo was perhaps the most noteworthy of her Irish foundations on account of its flourishing training-school for teachers. In 1839 her niece Joanna Bridgeman joined the order as a postulant, later serving as a nursing pioneer in the Crimean War as Mother Mary Francis Bridgeman.
America
In 1843 Bishop O'Connor of Pittsburgh applied to Carlow for a foundation for his diocese, and Mother Warde with a band of six left for America. When they disembarked at New York in December, the sisters were met by William Quarter, pastor of St. Mary's Church on Grand Street on the Lower East Side. An Irishman from County Offaly, Quarter had just been appointed first bishop of the newly erected Diocese of Chicago. He wasted no time in requesting Warde consider sending some sisters to his diocese as soon as possible.
In 1848 she opened a branch house in the Alleghenies on land given by the Reverend Demetrius Gallitzen within the limits of his Catholic settlement of Loretto. Her educational work in Pittsburgh came to the attention of Bishop Bernard O'Reilly of Hartford. Although in 1850, the "Know nothings" had burned the Ursuline convent near Boston, in 1851 Mother Warde accepted Bishop O'Reilly's invitation of to open a house in Providence, Rhode Island. In 1851, she founded St. Xavier's Academy, the first Catholic secondary school in Rhode Island. A boarding school with day students as well, it served both as a finishing school for girls and a novitiate for the congregation. In March 1855, a mob surrounded the convent, threatening to burn it down if they did not immediately vacate the premises. Bishop O'Reilly and a group of Irish Catholic defenders confronted the mob. Mother Warde exacted a promise from each of their Catholic defenders that no shot would be fired except in self-defence, and the sisters held possession of the convent. One of the rioters had remarked to his companions: "We made our plans without reckoning the odds we shall have to contend with in the strong controlling force the presence of that nun commands. The only honourable course for us is to retreat from this ill-conceived fray. I, for one, shall not lift a hand to harm these ladies."