Our Gateways to the “Inner City” of Cleveland, Ohio
By Cynthia Glavac, OSU
Ursuline Sisters of Cleveland, Ohio
In 1850, we, the Ursuline Sisters of Cleveland, arrived in Cleveland, Ohio, from Boulogne-sur-Mer, France, to establish the parochial-school system. During the next 117 years, we founded the first women’s college in Ohio, 3 all-girls’ high schools, and we staffed 26 diocesan-elementary schools, whose attendance consisted of white children, mostly from the suburban East Side of Cleveland.
However, during our Chapter in the summer of 1966, directed by the Second Vatican Council’s document, Declaration on Christian Education, which had been proclaimed by Pope Paul VI in October 1965, we concentrated on effective means to carry out the directives of the declaration. Of particular focus to us, a teaching congregation, was the statement, “This vocation [of teaching] demands special qualities of mind and heart, very careful preparation, and continuing readiness to renew and to adapt” (Pope Paul VI). Also during that 1966 Chapter, we established, for the first time, a committee whose focus was more inclusive than classroom teaching, the “Social Apostolate” committee.
Keeping in mind Vatican II’s mandate to “renew and adapt” (Pope Paul VI), and also motivated by an awareness of the increasing poverty in Cleveland’s “inner city,” in June 1967, we initiated the St. James Project in collaboration with Father William Cook, the Rector of St. James Episcopal Church. The program actually began several months before, the result of a conversation between our Sister Margaret Clare Miller and Father Cook. That spring, Margaret Clare and a few other sisters had attended Mass in St. James Church to complete a requirement for a religion course they were taking. After the Mass, Margaret Clare and Bill Cook, agreeing that the children of the neighborhood needed a summer program, decided to initiate one that very summer.
The program began on Monday, June 26, and on the Saturday before, 19 Ursuline sisters made house-to-house visits on neighboring streets, inviting parents to send their children to the summer program. About 125 children appeared on the first day; 150 by the end of the week. The five-week, weekday morning program offered arts and crafts, music, films, sewing, outside recreational activities and sports, field trips, tutoring, some religion instruction, snacks, and a government-funded lunch.
The first summer program was so successful that the following fall, 1967, the program expanded to a year-round one of Saturday-morning sessions and to eastern-suburban parishes through the recruitment of student volunteers. For the two following summers, the program continued. The accompanying photo, taken on July 18, 1968, perfectly illustrates these summer programs at St. James. Here, Sr. Mary Jean Raymond is working on an art project with the program’s children. That summer, our General Superior, Sister Annunciata Witz, had assigned seven junior-professed sisters, including Mary Jean, to St. James.
By 1970, the needs of both the summer and year-round programs outgrew the facilities of St. James Church. Sr. Margaret Clare then moved the program to St. Edward Roman Catholic Church on East 69th Street and Woodland Avenue, where, as she said, “The people and problems are much like those at St. James.” She changed the name of the program from the “Saint James Project” to the incorporated “Saint Angela Foundation” after our foundress, St. Angela Merici, and established a Board of Trustees.
I believe the St. James Project was indeed our gateway to the “inner city” of Cleveland. In future years, the sisters served in additional ministries. From 1967 to 1996, they served at the St. Martin de Porres Center, established by the Diocese of Cleveland in the Glenville area (1264 E. 123rd St.) of the city, which continues to provide services to seniors and parents, an afterschool program, shoes and clothing to children, meal delivery to older adults, some financial assistance, and food via a food pantry (Catholic Charities, Diocese of Cleveland).
In addition, we began a new school in Cleveland in the 1960s in collaboration with people of the near West-Side parishes of St. Malachi and St. Patrick. This school, aptly named the Urban Community School, would be an interdenominational elementary school that would meet the needs of children growing up in a multi-racial-and-cultural environment, characterized by poor economic conditions, substandard housing, and crime. Our sisters have had a continuous presence in the school since it opened in the fall of 1968 until now, as one sister serves there. Currently, Urban Community is thriving with an enrollment of about 675 students and a multi-million-dollar endowment.
Now, going full circle, I’d like to conclude with our St. James Project, focusing on Sr. Mary Jean Raymond, the young sister who served full time in this program during the summer of 1968. Mary Jean had begun her teaching ministry the year before, and for the following fourteen years, she served in Cleveland diocesan suburban elementary schools, and she did not think of returning to the city until 1981.
That year, she had heard that the pastor of St. Aloysius – St. Agatha Parish in the neighborhoods of Glenville and South Collinwood had requested sisters to teach in the school. Mary Jean and our directress of education at the time visited the school, as Mary Jean tells it, “on a scorching hot summer night in July. The parish was having bingo, and after I met a few of the parishioners . . . I said to Sr. Eugene, ‘This is where I belong.’”
Mary Jean has been serving at St. Aloysius – St. Agatha ever since—for 41 years—and this past spring she was appointed by our diocese as the “Parish-Life Coordinator,” essentially assuming both a pastoral and administrative role in the parish.
For Mary Jean, the St. James Project was her gateway to the inner city, as she said years later, “It was definitely the work of the Holy Spirit that placed me at St. James.”
