To Do and to Endure: The Life of Catherine Donnelly, Sister of Service

Ontario

CHAPTER 1

THE LAND OF HER YOUTH: THE ADJALA COMMUNITY

In many of the Brief Biographical Sketches which Catherine Donnelly wrote throughout her long life, she frequently referred to her belief that the land and the attitudes of the people who tilled it were vital determinants in both an individual’s and a nation’s character and destiny. Thus it seems suitable to begin her story with a description of her own family heritage, of the land and the people of her community.

The area of Ontario where she was born in 1884, and considered her home territory for her first thirty-four years, was Simcoe County. It extended from Newmarket to its southwest boundary at Mono Mills, north to Nottawasaga Bay, east to Lakes Simcoe and Couchiching, and north to the Severn River. In 1794 Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe had discussed purchase of some of that land with the Lake Simcoe Chippewa Indians, and negotiations and treaties were completed by the British government by 1818. The county had been surveyed and was made available for settlement by the time the first immigrants arrived from Northern Ireland in the 1820s. They were mainly farmers, and although they were not destitute, they possessed more optimism and determination than money and worldly goods. In religious allegiance, they were a mixed lot; but Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Quakers and other Protestant groups lived in the new settlements in relative harmony. One contributing factor may have been that the immigrants could acquire more acreage of freehold land than was ever dreamed possible in Ireland. There the tenant farmer had to support his family on five or ten acres of leased land, which he would never be able to purchase. His life was an unending struggle with little prospect of advancement. For these tenant farmers their real security came from their strong kinship ties and a devotion to the religious traditions in which they were raised. This was the glue which held their society together and enabled them to endure, whether their religious allegiance was Roman Catholic or Protestant. However, one legacy from the stormy history of Ireland was that, living as they had in close proximity to their neighbours for many generations, the Northern Irish were very conscious of their own religious and class differences. In some of the early settlements in various parts of Ontario, around Peterborough for example, the old-country tensions and prejudices were carried into the new lands, where they lasted for long years.

When more immigrants arrived during the 1840s at Mono Township, adjacent to Adjala Township where the Donnellys settled, their futures seemed much more hopeful. Uncleared land could be bought from 5 to 15 shillings an acre.¹ The settlers’ social and religious energies would be directed to creating wider kinship groups and building many churches, where they could continue to worship in their own way, and establishing schools to see that their children got an education.

Although Simcoe County was forbidding in its isolation from the bustling city of Toronto, the settlers found it an attractive area for homesteading. As they had travelled north from the city, the ground had risen steadily to the dividing height of land in the area of Newmarket, from where all streams flowed northwest into Georgian Bay. Within three generations this terrain to the north would become one of the most beautiful agricultural areas of Ontario. Its many creeks and rivers wended their way through pretty valleys flanked by rolling hills. Moraines and drumlins caused by ancient glacial action made picturesque eruptions in the landscape. But not all this land was good for tilling. Glacial debris of sand and stone made the moraines unsuitable for grain crops, and these areas would eventually be used for pasture. But before the crops could be sown, the land had to be cleared of a heavy forest cover, and the debris burned. Cedar and tamarack swamps that dotted the area had to be drained. Although money, tools and labourers were scarce, the settlers had to erect barns, sheds and fences to shelter valuable animals, and build houses for their families. These were not tasks for which the Irish immigrants had been trained. Forests in nineteenth century Ulster were protected on estates; most immigrants had never used an axe and knew nothing of land clearing.² Only by co-operation and sharing could they survive the loneliness, the exhausting physical labour, and the climatic extremes of Ontario’s summers and winters.

During the early 1840s the Irish immigrants continued to arrive in a steady stream, but not in such overwhelming numbers that they could not be absorbed economically into Ontario’s towns and countryside.³ It was in 1846, according to one of Sister Catherine Donnelly’s memoirs, that her grandfather Hugh Donnelly, with her grandmother Mary Ann and their children, emigrated from Armagh to Simcoe County. Little Hugh, Catherine’s father, was still an infant. They had left one of the most thickly populated areas of pre-famine Northern Ireland, and were able to secure land on Lot 1, Concession 5, facing the town line between Tossorontio and Adjala townships. Their farm was located on what is now Highway 89, about four miles west of Alliston. The nearest settlement was the small village of Arlington, a mile south. Most of the Roman Catholic immigrants who had arrived earlier lived in this section of the township, for their church had encouraged them to settle in kinship and religious groups.

The closest Catholic church for the area was St. James at Colgan, eight miles south of Alliston. A swamp separated the North Adjala settlement from Colgan, and so the settlers attended Mass at the home of Hugh Ferguson, one of the more prosperous Catholics in Arlington. A priest from Colgan made regular visits for that purpose. When an additional group of Catholic immigrants came into the area following the Irish famine of the late 1840s, the house church was no longer adequate. In 1854 Hugh Ferguson donated two acres of land for the erection of the Church of the Immaculate Conception. The Colgan clergy oversaw the construction of the simple frame building at Arlington, and the church was blessed on 19 July 1857. As the Arlington Catholic population had increased by 1866, the North Adjala parish was separated from Colgan and a new rectory built for the priest next to the church. By 1871 51 per cent of the population of Adjala Township was Irish Catholic. This became a religious and ethnic base on which Catholic culture could thrive and yet not threaten their Protestant neighbours.⁴

In nineteenth-century Irish farming communities in Ontario it was the custom for the youngest son to take over his parents’ farm, with the understanding that they could live with him for the rest of their lives.⁵ According to Sister Catherine’s family memoir of 1975, such an arrangement was made by her grandparents with her father Hugh when he was twenty-five years old. In 1876 Hugh married Catherine Donnelly, aged twenty-three, the daughter of Patrick Donnelly of nearby Essa Township. They were not related, and Sister Catherine noted that she was never sure of her maternal grandmother’s maiden name because she must have died when the children were young. My mother seldom talked about her childhood days, but she seemed to be familiar with facts about people of the Scotch line of Essa township, especially the Haydens and the Ellards.⁶

Patrick Donnelly was married for the second time to a young Protestant woman from the nearby village of Everett. As in his first marriage, he again had three sons and a daughter, and they lived on a farm northeast of Alliston, near Everett. It is perhaps for this reason that Sister Catherine’s mother was living with the Ellard family at the time of her marriage.

In a remarkable document, written when Sister Catherine was ninety-one, she listed the names and locations of her three maternal uncles (Patrick, Thomas, Christopher), the names of their wives, the ten children they had produced, and the names and fate of those children’s children! This is followed by a similar listing of the children and their descendants from her grandfather’s second marriage — a total of over sixty people she could proudly claim as relatives on her mother’s side of the family.

Hugh and Catherine Donnelly had seven children: Mary Gertrude, born in 1880, died when she was eleven; Bridget Ellen, born in 1881, died when she was sixteen; Joseph, born around 1882, died in infancy; Catherine Donnelly born on 26 February 1884, lived until she was ninety-nine; Thomas Ambrose, born in 1888, died in 1892 from sunstroke. (He was the only sibling for whom Catherine listed a cause of death.) Elizabeth Theresa (Tess) was born in 1890 and died at the age of seventy-four; Mary Loretto (Sister Justina CSJ), the youngest child, born in 1894, was eighty-seven when she died in 1981. Sister Catherine’s grandparents, her parents, and five of her brothers and sisters are all buried on a knoll marked by a fine tombstone in the little cemetery adjacent to the Church of the Immaculate Conception, within sight of the old farm property.

In addition to raising their three surviving daughters and caring for Hugh’s mother, Catherine’s parents also took Hugh’s nephew and niece into their family. These were little Hugh Donnelly Jr. and Annie, the children of Matthew Donnelly, Hugh’s eldest brother. Matthew’s wife had died when little Hugh was two years of age and his sister Annie was four. Matthew was an alcoholic … lost his farm and lived alone in Alliston before he died.⁷ Such an arrangement was not unusual at that time in the Irish community, for it was the custom to look after their kinfolk if at all possible. This family situation was described in her typical cryptic fashion by Sister Catherine when she was in her ninety-sixth year, in a letter to her nephew:

Little Hugh, my cousin, was a worker — was needed on the farm. His great joy was horses and a dog. He only got an elementary schooling at the local school. My generous mother was good to him and to our grandmother — Mary Ann (Johnson) Donnelly a convert, who never spoke about her life as a young girl …

Little Hugh left when quite young to seek his fortune in North Dakota. After some years of dray work and jobs he handled well, he married a good woman … There was one little child died very young … I went to see Hugh once at Superior, on my way to Fargo N.D. Tess came … It was in the late 40’s or early 50’s.

Hugh was a very lovely man and had worked hard to save and own some property. He made a will and left most to his wife’s close relatives, some of whom had been really good to him.⁸

Catherine Donnelly’s memoirs, and my own interviews with present residents of the area, emphasize two noteworthy characteristics of the North Simcoe County Irish community. First, although it was a composed of disparate groups of closeknit Protestant and Catholic families which were separated from each other by religion, they lived in relative harmony and goodwill in Adjala Township.⁹ True, there were annual, isolated raucous incidents. These usually took place on 17 March when the Catholics observed the feast day of their beloved St. Patrick, and also on 12 July when the local Loyal Orange lodges celebrated the 1690 Anglo Protestant victory over the Catholic King James II at the Battle of the Boyne with parades and fiery speeches. (Some cynical Scots viewed these festivities as religiously permissible party times for the Irish Catholics, giving everyone a break in the long forty-day Lenten fast demanded by the Church at that time; similarly, for the Protestants 12 July was an occasion to take a holiday from their farm labours by holding big neighbourhood, midsummer picnics after the parade.) In sum, it was a community in which there was mutual respect with no serious and permanent rancour between the Catholics and Protestants. This was in happy contrast to some parts of Ontario where the two religious groups were so mutually antagonistic that walls of suspicion and hostility kept them apart for many years. Both Catholics and Protestants felt secure in the acceptance and practice of their own faith, to the extent that regardless of their religious differences, they co-operated in community enterprises, aided each other in times of disaster, and formed warm friendships with people outside their own religious and social circles.

Second, in an era when few families were able or willing to educate their children, particularly their daughters, beyond the bare minimum demanded by law, an unusually high percentage of Catholic parents in Adjala struggled to keep their children in school so that they would be eligible for higher education. This was true not only of Hugh and Catherine Donnelly’s daughters, but also of several other families whose children would later become prominent in the secular and religious worlds beyond Alliston.¹⁰ Many of these local children went into the Church’s teaching orders. For example, in this period, Adjala Township produced a higher number of vocations to the Community of St. Joseph than any other area in Ontario.¹¹

The Donnelly family were faithful Catholics and well respected in the Adjala community. Catherine was baptized in St. Paul’s Church, Alliston, and attended Mass every Sunday with her parents at the little mission Church of the Immaculate Conception, only a mile from the farm. However, in the absence of a separate school, she was sent to the local public or ’common’ school. These schools did not ignore religion, for in the nineteenth century there was a profound Christian moral and religious component in the public school curriculum. Appropriate Bible readings and prayers, carefully selected so that particular Christian doctrinal differences would be avoided, began each school day. The School Readers, at all grades, contained passages from the Bible suitable for memorization, and many of the poems, fables and stories were selected to teach Christian ethics.

This continuous exposure to a mixed religious environment as a child would prove invaluable throughout Catherine’s teaching career — one which she often declared far outweighed any religious advantage she might have gained from attending a separate school. She felt that it helped her to understand, appreciate and feel comfortable with people of other religious denominations. Indeed, one of her dearest school friends, Nettie Wright, was the daughter of the local Anglican rector. In return, her beliefs were respected and this positive approach to society resulted in a big share of kindness from such God-fearing, lovable Characters provided by my Creator. In my childhood, neighbours who were Methodists or Orangemen, had been the best mutual co-workers for good.¹²

Catherine credited her mother, whom she frequently described as generous, wonderful and good, with nurturing in her and her sisters a profound love and understanding of their Catholic heritage. She recalled that in her childhood the little church was not open during the week for any religious classes for children (nor was there any local religious order to teach them). They learned their religion at home, from their mother. The services on Sundays lacked the musical splendour of the large town churches, as they had no choir, but the family attended faithfully. In their community, there was no church hall where the little congregation could have choir practice, or organize church groups for the adults.

From her mother Catherine learned the skills of keeping a farm home, but it was her father who trained her in the Donnelly tradition of expertise in the care and training of horses. She recalled fondly, My hard-working father was a sort of perfectionist in his farming and care of animals — not a money-maker. I loved to work outside with him handling horses and he taught me very strictly … I owe a great deal to my Father though I did not fully realize it till comparatively recently.¹³

Like most of the rural farm children of that era, Catherine Donnelly received her elementary education at a one-room public school, No. 5 Tossorontio Township, later known as Meadowbrook School. Although these schools are now scorned as inadequate, there was very little else the taxpayers in the rural areas could afford, since the community did not have the resources to build elaborate structures for a scanty, scattered school population. The towns built larger elementary schools, and a high school was built as soon as the taxpayers decided it was a necessity. But only a small percentage of the farms were within walking distance of these centres. When a farm child was ready for high school, the family had to be able to afford some school fees, entail the expense of boarding their child in town, and do without their labour on the farm as well. Although some children might try go to high school on horseback, it was an unreliable form of transportation during the long winter months; snowstorms could block the country roads of Simcoe County for days.

Catherine’s parents were able to send her to Alliston High School, where she went on to obtain her junior leaving certificate (Grade 11) in 1901. She loved school and wanted ardently to become a teacher. Her school principal in Alliston gave a glimpse of her character at that time when he wrote a recommendation for her as she was seeking her first teaching position:

Miss Katie Donnelly attended Alliston Public School … and she showed herself possessed of energy and ability, pluck and determination which carried her successfully through all her examinations in less than the average time … she has been a most fruitful, persevering and clever student … I can with pleasure recommend her to any Board of Trustees in need of a teacher who will fully justify any confidence which may be placed in her.¹⁴

Before Catherine could begin her career as a teacher she had to qualify for a certificate of training from one of the province’s Model Schools. These were special county schools set up after new teaching regulations had been mandated by the province in 1877, to ensure that prospective teachers hired by local school boards had received a minimum of training. Model School courses were a popular substitute for the more lengthy and expensive course offered at the provincial Normal School in Toronto. The entrance requirements were low, as were the fees, and the course only lasted fourteen weeks. It was also usually situated close to the candidate’s home town, which kept residence and travelling costs to a minimum.

Between 1877 and 1907, over 36,000 elementary teachers qualified for a third-class teaching certificate by attending the fourteen-week course. The apprentice teachers received highly practical training in classroom management and teaching methods given by fully licensed and experienced teachers. The certificates, issued by the County Board which ran the Model School, were valid only for three years. Teachers who wished to become fully qualified had to upgrade their certificate to either second or first class by enrolling in the Toronto or Ottawa Normal Schools for advanced professional training.

The most valid public criticism of the system was that only one-quarter of their graduates upgraded their qualifications. As a consequence, fully qualified rural teachers often found they had priced themselves out of a job, as many school boards would hire a less-qualified candidate for a smaller salary. Boards could do this with impunity since teachers’ contracts were only for a year. Teachers’ salaries, particularly those for women, were very low, so the teaching force became a very transient one, as women sought positions with better wages and working conditions. School inspectors complained about the harm caused by the Arabs of Ontario … They have no fixed abode, and are here this year, there the next and nowhere the third. Indeed, fifteen schools in Oro Township, south of Adjala, averaged eleven teachers each in the 1874-1900 period.¹⁵

In the summer of 1901, at the age of seventeen, Catherine Donnelly enrolled in the Model School at Bradford. Even then, she seemed to have the intellectual curiosity and natural ability to communicate ideas with which a good teacher must be blessed. When she graduated in October of that year, her principal gave her an enthusiastic recommendation:

The bearer Miss Donnelly has been known to me since the beginning of the present Model term as a teacher-in-training. Seldom have I met a student as diligent and attentive as Miss Donnelly. Her work in every respect is eminently satisfactory. In teaching she is diligent, pains-taking intelligent and thorough. She will doubtless put into actual practice in her own school those qualities she exhibits as a student teacher.

It is with the greatest pleasure and confidence I recommend her to the favorable consideration of School Trustees.¹⁶

Catherine was eager to start her teaching career. Her prospects were good; she and her family were well known and esteemed in the township. She had a strong body and a firm will. These were both necessary attributes for a teacher who was going to cope with fifty or sixty children distributed among Grades 1 to 8, in a one-room school which would lack electricity and running water. Catherine was not daunted by the prospect of being on her own in an isolated rural setting; indeed, she was happy at the prospect of living in the country among farmers and tradesmen. Like her, they understood man’s utter dependence on the earth for life, and on the God whom they believed had created it. Throughout her life, her own religious faith would be grounded in her gratitude for the earth and the people who tilled it, and fuelled by the natural beauty which she always found in the Canadian countryside. Many years later this was perceptively observed by one of the Sisters of Service with whom she lived for many years:

Sister Donnelly expressed much of her spirituality in the great love she had for nature. She saw the hand of the Creator in the beauty and songs of the birds, the trees, the animals and all of nature …

She loved going for walks in the bush behind our place with our faithful dogs and appreciated their company both inside and outside the house. She said that they were good therapy and made her think how faithful and wonderful the Creator is.¹⁷

One of Catherine Donnelly’s traits, already evident in her youth, which would endear her to many in the future was her generous and forthright nature. Although she did intimidate some with her dominant personality, she could be a good companion and an excellent raconteur, and was never hesitant about seeking and developing long and lasting friendships with a great variety of people. She made new friends during her summer term at the Model School. Several of her letters many years later recalled young men and women with whom she was still in contact. But her term at Model School was particularly enjoyable because one person taking the course with her was her dearest friend, Nettie Wright, also from Alliston. Seventy-seven years later she described their relationship:

… lovely good and constantly my faithful friend for the rest of her life. She lived to be a little over 90 and her Anglican father and home-training made her strong in morals and ethics. I hear regularly from her niece, Marion Harper — Mrs. J.F. MacKinnon of Toronto, a widow now. Her Mother was Frances Wright, wife of Dr. Harper. Only Marion is left of that bright good family.¹⁸

By January 1902 Catherine had obtained her first position as the teacher, responsible for grades 1 to 8, in the one-room Bandon School No. 10 at Adjala, near Colgan, at the south end of the township. She boarded with the Gunning family and with them attended the splendid Colgan church on Sundays, getting there by horse and buggy. She remained there until January 1903, when she transferred to her old No. 5 School, which she had attended just a few years before. It was a mile from her parents’ home, and she was able to save more of her scanty salary to pay for her forthcoming study year at the Normal School in Toronto to upgrade her teaching certificate.

Reflecting on her first teaching experience among her own people, Catherine remembered that the people of that Adjala area were very kind to me — to any teacher. The pupils were very obedient and respected and loved the teacher. The families were good. They were good to me and God was good to me and to them.¹⁹

CHAPTER 2

LIFE AS A TEACHER IN ONTARIO, 1904–1918

When Catherine Donnelly Left Alliston to attend the Toronto Normal School in September 1904, she left behind the quiet routine of her parent’s farm home, her younger sisters, Teresa (Tess) age fourteen, and Mary Loretto (Mamie) age ten. Her grandmother, Mary Ann Donnelly, had lived with them until her death the previous year, shortly after passing her hundredth birthday. Her mother had cared for her mother-in-law all her married life. Now she herself was not well and needed help to care for their home.

The decision to stop teaching and take the year of study in Toronto to fulfil the required Normal School year had not been an easy one for Catherine. Tess was boarding in Alliston while attending high school, and had a very good teacher. If Catherine left, she would have to stay home, as she would be the only person available to look after their mother. Was it right to interrupt her sister’s schooling and leave her with such a heavy responsibility at that time? In one way, the circumstances were right for her to go to Toronto because she had been asked to share lodging with her friend Nettie, who would also be fulfilling the mandatory year’s attendance at the Toronto Normal School for the Ontario permanent teaching certificate.

When Catherine sought her mother’s advice, the sick woman had replied, No, you go, you know what you can do. They agreed that it was important that she obtain professional qualifications because she could command a higher salary and be eligible for advancement.¹ Moreover, Catherine’s mother had always approved of her friendship with the Wrights, and felt that she would benefit from living with such a congenial room-mate. Sharing a room also meant that Catherine’s meagre funds would go further.

Many years later Catherine recalled the importance of this decision to seize the opportunity to deepen her relationship with the daughters of the Anglican rector:

Nettie Wright was just 2 days younger than me and was a great Christian — one of great physical beauty too — as well as spiritual strength. Nettie Wright and her sister Amy too, were at Alliston School with me and were my best friends — continuing through my life. Nettie Wright and Amy were faithful admirers of the S.O.S. work and often said so. Nettie died May 28, 1974, 90 years old. They were truly Christians of a very noble type.²

Catherine worked hard in Toronto, and was enjoying her year when, shortly before she was to write her final examinations in May, she was unexpectedly called home. Her mother’s illness had been diagnosed as tuberculosis. The doctor said he could do nothing to save her and she required more care. Catherine was devastated; now she would not be able to complete her school year. Nevertheless, she prepared to leave Toronto immediately. Her problem was solved by the compassion of the Normal School principal, William Scott, who was sympathetic when she told him her plight. Her marks to date were excellent, and so he granted her full credit for the year’s practical work, waived her final examinations, and certified that she would receive the Ontario permanent teaching certificate in June. To the end of her days, Catherine Donnelly always recalled his kindness with gratitude.

Catherine returned to Alliston to a deeply disturbed household. Apparently she had not comprehended the hopelessness of the situation when the doctor had discovered the then fatal disease a few months earlier. As her father reeled from the shock, friends and relatives persuaded him that he would not be able to carry on the farm without his wife, or make the arrangements for his two younger daughters to attend high school in Alliston. Their mother had always attended to such things. He had decided to sell the farm and move into Alliston.³

The major factor in making this decision was probably his concern that his fifty-acre farm was heavily mortgaged,⁴ and it was unlikely that, at the age of fifty-nine, he would ever be able to pay his debts. In her memoirs, Catherine never mentioned the crushing mortgage, but she did refer many times to the shortage of money when she was growing up, and attributed it to her father’s bad business ventures, and the periodic economic depressions which afflicted the Ontario farm economy in the late nineteenth century. According to the old provincial directories, Hugh Donnelly was a woollen factor as well as a farmer — that is, a person who dealt in wool futures by buying up the fleeces from the farmers before the mills had established the yearly buying price. If the woollen factor received less money when he sold the wool to the mill than he had already paid the farmers, he could be in serious financial trouble.⁵ Land records in the Ontario Archives show a continuing series of smaller loans against the Donnelly property for many years, and even though they were paid off, they indicate a chronic cash shortage.

Even in her old age Catherine still recalled the sale of the farm with sadness. She felt that if she and her sisters had been given the chance, they could have managed to run the farm and thus keep the land and the old homestead she had loved. As she ruefully remarked to her nephew, I thought I could teach near home and come home on weekends. The neighbours didn’t think it would do for us girls to be out harvesting and ploughing — everyone thought so.⁶ Yet in the circumstances of farm work and teachers’ incomes in 1905, the local Alliston neighbours were probably right.

The terms of sale had permitted the Donnellys to remain on the farm for a time. During the summer and autumn of 1905 Catherine struggled to look after her dying mother and keep the farm household going. During this period Catherine expressed to her mother her gratitude for urging her to attend school in Toronto. The suffering woman knew that she was going to die soon and had accepted it, but she was very distressed about leaving her two younger daughters before they had completed their education. Catherine allayed her mother’s fears about their futures by promising that she would provide for her sisters and see that they completed their education. Although Catherine wrote of her father’s grief and loneliness with pity, and described him as dear and hard-working, she never referred to him as being helpful or supportive during the long ordeal of waiting for her mother to die from the wasting disease. She described her mother as wonderful, deeply religious, actively Christian, self-sacrificing, a loving mother, loved by our neighbours.⁷

A small news item in the Alliston Herald announced that on 20 November 1905,

A sad affliction visited the home of Mr. Hugh Donnelly, Tossorontio, on Monday at noon, when Mrs. Donnelly passed away after a lengthy illness. The deceased was a woman who was held in very high esteem by all who knew her and will be mourned by a large circle of friends. She is survived by her husband, and three daughters, who have the sympathy of the community in their sad loss.⁸

While still mourning the sad loss, Catherine had to start preparing immediately to resume her teaching career, as her family needed her income. Only two weeks after the funeral, she obtained a character reference from her parish priest, Father I.F. Gibney:

I have much pleasure in testifying to the good moral character of the bearer, Miss Catherine Donnelly, whom I have known for years.

She has good credentials as a Teacher, and I feel convinced that she will give good satisfaction in that capacity.⁹

In April 1906 Hugh Donnelly and his three daughters moved to Alliston, and James Quayle, to whom the farm had been sold, took over the property. (The Quayle family still owns the land; the old farmhouse was destroyed by fire in 1918.) Catherine did not move in with her family because she was successful in finding a position for the final two months of the year (May and June) at Central Public School in Galt, as the teacher of the boys in the slow learner class. This brief teaching assignment she always regarded as one of the most fortuitous of her life, because it was in Galt that she met and arranged to board with the MacDonnell family. Robert MacDonnell was an accountant, and a successful businessman. His wife Irene was a warm-hearted motherly person, and they both took to Catherine immediately. Their two daughters, Achsah and Ruth, were of an age with Catherine, and in her two months’ stay in their home an enduring friendship was created which was a great support and joy to Catherine all her life.

The MacDonnells were all deeply devout Baptists, and Catherine was helped by their sympathy and understanding at such a difficult time in her life. Even more meaningful for her was their sincere acceptance and appreciation of her religious allegiance as an equally devout Roman Catholic. Like her Alliston friends, the Wrights, she found that the faith and moral outlook which they all held in common bonded them together as Christians in a mutual love and respect for each other which transcended their denominational differences. These and other friendships which she had made outside the Catholic community became the source of Catherine’s fervent belief in the value and necessity of ecumenism, which she later declared should be the true destiny of the Christian church. However, ecumenism as she defined it was of the spirit, and not in the outward forms of service or governmental structures of the various Christian denominations. It should be demonstrated by love and co-operation between Christians regardless of whether any institutional unions ever took place. In practical terms, ecumenism meant that neither she nor the Wrights nor the MacDonnells, nor any other of her non-Catholic friends, ever sought each others’ conversion. Rather, they supported each other in the carrying out of their own denomination’s religious obligations as expressions of a mutual faith. These ideas took shape and became part of her own religious philosophy during that spring, in the quiet and peace of the MacDonnell home. But they were rooted in the Alliston community in which she was raised, particularly as exemplified by her parents and her childhood friends.

At the end of June, Catherine moved into the new family home in Alliston. The difficult events of the past year had taken their toll on her. Nursing her dying mother while keeping the farm going, moving the family to Alliston and then leaving immediately for a strenuous teaching position in Galt, and worry about her family’s future and the heavy financial responsibilities which had now fallen on her twenty-one-year-old shoulders had by July caused her to break down with almost fatal results.¹⁰ I was worn out mentally and physically for a few months quite convinced that I could never be capable of teaching school. It was almost a complete and incurable breakdown.¹¹ Catherine never disclosed any of the medical details on how she managed to overcome her illness. She only stated that "God provided and I went through the experience of using my faith and the opportunities God had provided and still provides if we humbly ask Him."¹²

By January 1907 Catherine had recovered sufficiently to take a teaching position at the Apto School, a hamlet north of Barrie, not far from Alliston. On 5 January she enrolled Tess in a boarding school in Toronto, the prestigious St. Joseph’s Academy for Young Women, founded by the Sisters of St. Joseph. Catherine paid the fees, although her father was listed in the academy register as guardian.¹³ Not quite seventeen years old, Tess was like her elder sister in temperament, strong-minded and energetic. Catherine described her at this time as very clever and lively and attractive.¹⁴

Catherine took young Mamie with her to Apto and arranged to have her enrolled in the school where she was now teaching. Lodging was found with the Loftus family who kindly took us both to board at their fine home. There was an elementary school in Allison which Mamie could have attended, but Catherine apparently wished to oversee Mamie’s studies for her Grade 8 elementary school certificate. Mamie had no objections to this arrangement, as she was a quiet, dutiful child whom Catherine always described as gentle, serious and co-operative, but who perhaps gave in to worry too much at times.¹⁵

The adolescent Tess was harder for her to handle, and Catherine admitted that it was often gentle Mamie who helped advise her. Tess became the centre of the next family crisis when, according to the St. Joseph’s Academy records,