Sister-Builders:

“Sister-Builders” put their imprint on the urban landscape of Chicago with Immaculata High School (1922) and Mundelein College (1930), the first skyscraper college in the world.

Editor’s note: Excerpted from Rima Lunin Schultz and Ellen Skerrett, “Sister Builders in Chicago,” American Catholic Studies Newsletter 42.1 (Spring 2015), 14–17. Courtesy of the University of Notre Dame’s Cushwa Center (cushwa.nd.edu).

Photo above: An aerial view of
Immaculata High School 

While Jacques Marquette, who discovered the upper Mississippi River with Louis Joliet, is the first Jesuit to be distinctly connected to the Chicago area, many first associate the city with Fr. Arnold Damen, SJ, given his legacy with several of Chicago’s Jesuit institutions, as well as Church of the Holy Family on the Near West Side. But some might be surprised to learn of the significant contributions Religious of the Sacred Heart (RSCJs) and the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary (BVMs). The sisters’ ordained male counterparts left behind art objects that constituted vivid examples of the Jesuit presence in the Midwest, but the historical record makes it clear that the RSCJs and BVMs collaborated closely with the Jesuits and were responsible for much of the growth of Chicago’s famed Holy Family parish during the 19th century. 

In their ministry, the women religious played an important role in creating a Catholic education system in the frontier town on the shores of Lake Michigan. At a time when married women could not buy, sell, or own property, the RSCJs purchased six acres of land and began the construction of a complex that by 1886 featured two massive brick structures, including a Gothic chapel designed by John Van Osdel. By 1890, 60 sisters taught the daughters of Chicago’s elite in the Seminary of the Sacred Heart on Taylor Street and educated 1,000 poor girls in Holy Family parish, free of charge. That Catholic sisters created and sustained a monumental sacred space in their educational complex raises important questions about the role of religion in urban life. 

The BVM sisters also made pioneering contributions, which further display agency and ownership of the narrative of women’s education in Chicago. From the 1867 establishment of their first school in Holy Family parish, the congregation’s reputation as educators grew steadily, attracting students—and future BVMs, among them Mother Isabella Kane (1855–1935), who played a crucial role in the design of Mundelein College’s art deco skyscraper on Sheridan Road. 

Challenging progressive reformers who insisted that vocational training was the ideal for immigrant children, the BVMs opened St. Mary’s in 1899 as one of the first central Catholic high schools for girls in the nation. Religious life offered talented young Catholic women opportunities to shape a system of education that would enable others to achieve middle class status and professional life. 

These BVM “Sister-Builders” put their imprint on the urban landscape of Chicago with Immaculata High School (1922) and Mundelein College (1930), the first skyscraper college in the world. These institutions, built and paid for entirely by the BVM order, were the result of collaborations between the sisters, architects, artists, and the male hierarchy. In a politic and courteous gesture, the BVM congregation named their unique and modern art deco skyscraper college for Cardinal Mundelein, though his name is not on the document of incorporation. 

Mundelein College went on to nurture Catholic and American democratic values and citizenship for its students and faculty from the Great Depression to the civil rights era. Built at the beginning of the Great Depression, with loans backed by the BVM high school properties of Immaculata and St. Mary’s, the college opened in 1930 to great acclaim. It redefined the shoreline of Lake Michigan as it pioneered in modernizing education for the new American Catholic woman. Just as artifacts insisted on the presence and power of Catholic sisters in an area of the city seemingly dominated by Jesuit priests and progressive reformers, the Mundelein skyscraper, now part of Loyola University’s Lake Shore Campus, reveals as well as conceals the legacy of these Sister-Builders.