Sisters of Mercy and their colleagues and friends around the world owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Sister Mary C. Sullivan, RSM. Our gratitude depends on much more than her commitment to scholarship and to theological inquiry. Most of all, we appreciate her dedication to life as a Sister of Mercy.

In this essay I wish to explore Catherine McAuley’s concepts of comforting and animating, by which I believe she defined both her own unique contribution to the founding of the Sisters of Mercy, and two essential works of those who would personally quicken the re-founding of the mission of the Sisters of Mercy in this and the next century.

Somehow we know, beyond all doubt, that the eager enkindler of our personal and corporate vocation as Sisters of Mercy is, even now, steadily at work among our dry bones and sinews. More than anything else in this world we wish to surrender to this enflaming. We realize that we are not the source of the ardent shape we hope to become, only the ready tinder: poor, flickering, utterly dependent on God’s designing fire.

The “visitation” of the sick poor was one of the three central elements in Catherine McAuley’s vision of the merciful work to which she and, later, her companions in the Sisters of Mercy were called.i She conceived of this “visitation” as affording to the desperately ill and dying both material comfort and religious consolation. What is especially striking about her service and advocacy of the sick poor is not only her willingness to care for people with extremely dangerous infectious diseases (cholera and typhus, for example), with the consequent risk to her own life, but her overwhelming desire to offer these neglected and shunned people the dignity and Christian solace that she felt was rightly theirs, as human beings with whom Jesus Christ himself was intimately identified.