My great aunt and her fellow Burlington nuns stared down the 1918 flu pandemic

By Michael Patrick O’Brien–

As I stumble through the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, some days I think about a terrible influenza epidemic over a century ago. I learned about the October 1918 “Spanish Flu” outbreak doing family research on my great aunt, Mary Catherine Gleason. She was a nun in Burlington, Vermont, who—along with her fellow sisters—heroically cared for the sick and dying during the pandemic.

Mary was born in upstate New York in 1882, the first child of William Henry Gleason and Margaret Ann Flaherty Gleason. Her grandparents were immigrant laborers and farmers from County Clare, Limerick, and Tipperary in Ireland. Some of them escaped the Great Hunger (aka Potato Famine). Mary was the oldest of eight children, including her younger brother (and my grandfather) Henry Francis Gleason.

Mary attended local Burlington Catholic schools. Her teachers, nuns from the Sisters of Mercy order, impressed her. Catherine McAuley, a wealthy Irish socialite concerned about the extreme plight of the poor in Dublin, founded the order in 1831 and then devoted her family inheritance to trying to solve that poverty problem. The Mercy order came to Vermont in 1874 to teach, and to tend to the poor and the sick. 

In 1902 at age 20, Mary joined the order of sisters that had helped educate her. She took the religious name “Sister Mary Catherine.” Her new home was called Mount St. Mary’s, a red-brick, five-story convent and school with a bell and watchtower that sat on a lush wooded lot at one of the highest points in Burlington. Mary wore the full-blown, traditional, black-and-white habit, wide wimple, and veil the order provided her. (Think of a human-sized penguin for an appropriate visual image.)

The new nun launched herself into convent life and the many charitable and teaching activities of the Sisters of Mercy. Her daily schedule included rising at 5:30 a.m. for prayer and mass, work from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., dinner and evening prayers back at the convent, and then lights out at 10 p.m. This happy daily routine was interrupted in the second decade of the twentieth century, first by food shortages resulting from the outbreak of World War I, and then by a major flu epidemic. The Sisters of Mercy played a major role in responding to the pandemic. One of the Mercy historians provides the fascinating account included below.

“In the fall of 1918, the long shortage of sugar, wheat and other basic foods paved the way for a loss of reserve strength. When the annual colds and grippe developed into a very serious influenza epidemic, the City of Burlington became one vast hospital. The schools were closed and those children who showed no symptoms of the disease went home. All of the sisters who could be spared from the Motherhouse took up residence in the Cathedral Grammar School. Under the direction of local physicians the sisters formed themselves into a compact and capable group of house-to-house nurses. In spite of their grotesque appearance caused by the masks required by those entering infected homes, their presence reassured all with whom they came in contact. The epidemic spread in almost insurmountable proportions. The numbers of deaths mounted; homes were inadequate; hospitals overcrowded; doctors and nurses were scarcely numerous enough to handle effectively all these who needed their care.”

“Two temporary hospitals were fitted out. The one for women and children was located in the Burlington High School building. Sisters from the three local [religious women] communities…undertook the charge. The care and devotion of these Sisters was so effective that not one death occurred among the patients. Several of the Sisters…became seriously ill. At Mount St. Mary one-third of the community and many of the children contracted the influenza, several dangerously so. Only one death occurred, however, that of a little girl whose serious physical condition was aggravated by the influenza.” (Sister Marion Duquette, The Sisters of Mercy of Vermont, 1872-1991).

Interesting how history repeats itself, eh? My great aunt Sister Mary Catherine survived the 1918 epidemic, and later helped spearhead relief to her local neighbors as major New England rains and floods struck in 1927 when she was the mother superior at a nearby Mercy convent in Barre, Vermont. And—tough woman that she was—a decade later she also survived and helped with relief efforts during World War II. She passed away in February 1959 at the Burlington convent and now rests in the wooded cemetery just behind it.

Watching the news about the fight against COVID-19, I cannot help but think we could use a lot more women like my Aunt Mary Gleason and her fellow Sisters of Mercy today.

*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. His book Monastery Mornings (found here), about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah—and about his family’s roots in Burlington, Vermont—was published by Paraclete Press (more information here) in August 2021.