Catholic Sisters in the American Civil War : The “Nuns of the Battlefield” and the Changing Image of Catholicism

During the American Civil War, at a time of significant anti-Catholic feeling, Roman Catholic nuns helped the sick and wounded on both sides despite opposition from Church hierarchy and even from their patients. Nursing sisters volunteered readily, but were often held back by bishops who argued that the sisters would neither find the time nor a priest for regular masses when in the field with the armies. When they did serve, they were sometimes greeted by verbal and even physical abuse on the part of those they sought to heal. Even Dorothea Dix, Superintendent of US Army nurses during the Civil War, preferred other nurses over sisters because of her staunch anti-Catholicism. Despite such opposition, many physicians replaced secular nurses with nursing sisters to improve treatment as the latter were the only persons with any experience of institutional nursing in the ante bellum period. Recognition of their contributions led to a greater acceptance of Catholics in general, and of nursing sisters in particular, who acquired a symbolic function: on hospital ships sisters were even placed on deck to show the peaceful mission of the vessel. So effective was their work that nuns went on to serve during the Spanish-American War, working alongside secular nurses now assigned as a special, quasi-military unit for the first time. The nursing sister changed the discourse concerning Catholicism part, impacted built environments with the subsequent expansion of the number of convents, and even inspired sculpture, in the form of a monument erected in 1924 to the over 600 sisters who served during the Civil War