Faithfullly Woven: Catherine McGrath, Associate of Notre Dame

On Holy Thursday 1989, Catherine McGrath made her commitment as a Notre Dame Associate at the House of Prayer in Carmel. Catherine’s commitment includes a promise to pray for Notre Dame Sisters in Africa, a continent special to Catherine.

Born in Lancashire in northern England, Catherine had completed her teacher training and was teaching in London when she met Dr. Kate Condron, a physician in a nearby hospital. The two women became friends. Kate was restless and searching for solace to better dedicate her medical knowledge. One day Catherine asked her if she had ever considered going to Africa. Soon after, Kate and Catherine with their luggage and crates of medical supplies were on the Union Castle Liner bound to Mombasa via the Suez Canal. It was 1926. Catherine’s school principal was certain she was crazy but amicably allowed her to leave, most likely feeling it was safer for everyone if Catherine in her madness would take herself off to an African jungle!

Meanwhile on the high seas, Kate and Catherine decided it would be wise to make for a country under the British flag. So, after a short stay in Mombasa, they went by train to Kisumu then boarded a flat bottom steamer to cross Lake Victoria for Entebbe. At Entebbe some missionaries were able to help them. Kate had finances to do most anything she wanted, and their goal was to go where other white people had not yet gone, build a small hospital and work for those most needing their services. Their new missionary friends helped them hire a young man, Mutesa, who would be their driver, mechanic and cook, and as it turned out, their wise man and counselor for many years. They purchased a Ford truck, loaded the crates of medical supplies and set out to explore Uganda.

Kate and Catherine’s first years were spent in Gimba where Kate started a maternity hospital. After a while Catherine realized she would be more useful as a midwife than as a teacher. She went to Kampala for a course in midwifery at the Episcopalian Hospital. On returning to Gimba, she not only worked at the hospital, but went out to the surrounding countryside both to treat those unable to travel to the hospital and to train nurses and midwives. Sometimes they would arrive in a village or central area to find four to five hundred people waiting for them with every sort of illness and injury possible in Central Africa. Their work grew and in a few years, they were working with other doctors and nurses.

It was then that a missionary, Daniel Moss, invited them to his mission in Nkufu near the border of Sudan. There were many lepers in his mission, and he had no way of providing medical care for them. The two women moved on realizing their work in Gimba would now go on without them and continuing their goal to go where they were most needed. Daniel Moss had developed a self-sufficient mission with simple houses, a farm and now a dispensary. Kate and Catherine set to work building a hospital and housing for lepers and training nurses and orderlies. Theirs was the first medical care these people ever had. When Kate died suddenly, their work was well established and able to continue without them. Catherine was invited to Carmel by a “Fairy Godmother” who had helped support their work for many years.

Catherine first met the Sisters of Notre Dame in Carmel. She taught at the Mission School and later became a frequent visitor to the House of Prayer and a member of Sister Mary Dominica’s Teilhard study group. After becoming an Associate, she found inspiration in Saint Julie’s letters. She found Julie a remarkable woman, “so down to earth and sensible. She had a real fight in her…and she needed that the way the clergy treated her.”

Catherine had a real fight in her too. At the beginning of her manuscript telling of her days in Africa she says, “After many years of travel to various parts of the globe I have always found that if you want to travel the thing to do is to go. Never wait to have everything planned out. It is thrilling to go, and when you arrive sit back and watch things work out. And you can believe me, they always work out.”

Does that say something to all of us on our journey together?

For more about our anniversary, please see “175 Years in California.”