The Sisters of the Humility of Mary trace their beginnings in 1854 to Dommartin-sous-Amance, France and to their founders, Father John Joseph Begel and Antoinette Potier, one of his parishioners. She shared Fr. Begel’s view regarding the need to educate the girls in that and neighboring villages. Their efforts were soon joined by those of other women who together requested that Fr. Begel might assist them in organizing themselves into a religious community. The Congregation of the Sisters of the Humility of Mary was given approval by the Bishop of Nancy-Toul in August of 1858.

Restricted in the scope of their ministries by the repressive laws of Emperor Napoleon III, the entire community of nine professed sisters and two novices, led by Father Begel and Mother Anna Tabourat, who had succeeded Mother Madelaine Potier following the latter’s death, emigrated to the United States in 1864. They arrived in the summer at the invitation of Bishop Amadeus Rappe of the Diocese of Cleveland. The motherhouse located near New Bedford, Pennsylvania [now in Lawrence County] and later known as Villa Maria, belonged to Bishop Rappe who sold it to Fr. Begel and the sisters. Thus the HM Congregation from their coming to the US was serving in both the Cleveland and Pittsburgh dioceses.

When a request came from Missouri in the 1870s the sisters were permitted to meet the need for teachers in a French-speaking community. Their ministries also spread into the Diocese of Pittsburgh and to what are now the dioceses of Erie, Pennsylvania, and Toledo and Youngstown, Ohio. Later they were invited to South Dakota. In 1949 when the community was given pontifical status and was no longer a diocesan congregation under the Bishop of Cleveland, the motherhouse was again included in the Diocese of Pittsburgh.

From Villa Maria the Sisters of the Humility of Mary established schools and health care institutions in Northeastern Ohio. Their first hospital founded in 1879 on the motherhouse property was actually an infirmary for injured railroad workers and was known as St. Joseph Infirmary. In 1911 Saint Joseph Infirmary was superseded by St. Elizabeth Hospital, newly opened in Youngstown Ohio. Two more Ohio hospitals, St. Joseph Riverside Hospital in Warren (1924) and St. Joseph Hospital in Lorain (1927) extended the health care ministry of the Humility of Mary Sisters.

A unique ministry of the Sisters of the Humility of Mary was their service from 1922 – 1997 at the Rose-Mary Home for Crippled Children in Euclid Village, near Cleveland.

Since 1996 the hospitals sponsored by the Sisters of the Humility of Mary have been part of Catholic Healthcare Partners, Cincinnati, one of the largest not-for-profit healthcare systems in the United States, and the largest system based in Ohio.

For additional information on the Sisters of the Humility of Mary, please visit their homepage by clicking here.