United States Catholic Catechism for Adults

6 MAN AND WOMAN IN THE BEGINNING THE CREATION OF MAN AND WOMAN, THE FALL AND THE PROMISE —CCC, NOS. 355-421

THE HOUSE OF MERCY On the night before she died in 1926,Rose Hawthorne Lathrop (now known as Mother Alphonsa) wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Times about her work with penniless patients with terminal cancer: Many people know nothing of our work with the cancerous poor, and if accosted by a person asking for a donation would give a sum out of politeness, mentally asking, “What unheard of thing is this?” We are practical

enough to want everyone to know what it is and to give a bit because their hearts are touched, to help us build this house of mercy. 5 This angel of mercy, foundress of the Servants of Relief for Incurable Cancer, was born in 1851, the youngest of three children of the famous novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife Sophia (Peabody). Soon after Rose’s birth, the family moved to Liverpool, in England, where Nathaniel served as the American consul. At the end of his service, the family spent two years in Italy before returning to New England. Nathaniel died four years later. Sophia took the family back to Europe. At age twenty, Rose married the nineteen-year-old George Lathrop in London in 1871. The young couple moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts,

5 In Diana Culbertson, OP, ed., Rose Hawthorne Lathrop: Selected Writings (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1993), 83, 183.