Born: 13 February 1827, Ireland
Died: 12 November 1901
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Susan McGroarty
This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Deirdre Bryan. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
McGroarty, Julia (Susan) (1827–1901), nun and educator, was born 13 February 1827 in Inver, Co. Donegal, second daughter and third among ten children of Neil McGroarty, farmer, and his wife, Catherine (née Bonner). In spring 1831 her family emigrated to the USA and settled in Cincinnati, Ohio, to where her mother’s two brothers, mother, and sister had previously moved. Her father farmed for a while in nearby Fayetteville, Brown County, but he moved the family into Cincinnati when he began to work as a railroad and turnpike contractor. After he died of pneumonia (1838), her mother’s brother Stephen Bonner, a prominent Cincinnati physician, assisted in bringing up the large family.
McGroarty attended local schools, where she did not distinguish herself. She relied on her excellent memory to do her lessons, but had not learned to read by the age of ten. When she was thirteen, the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, a Belgian order, opened a day and boarding school in the city. McGroarty enrolled and became a successful student. She entered the community on 1 January 1846 as their first American postulant and was professed on 25 April of that year, when she took the religious name Julia after the order’s founder, Julie Billiart. During her two-year novitiate she taught in the order’s infant school, but after taking her vows (3 August 1848) was placed in charge of the Cincinnati day school. In 1854 she was appointed mistress of boarders at the new Notre Dame school in Roxbury, Massachusetts.
In 1860 McGroarty became the first American superior of the order and took charge of the new Philadelphia Academy. She established a night school for immigrant children and, in 1870, a free school for African-American children. In 1885 she was recalled to Cincinnati to assist the provincial superior, who was ill. At the latter’s death McGroarty became provincial superior, with responsibility for the order’s twenty-six houses. She sought to improve the academic standards of its schools by standardising the curriculum and, in 1888, publishing a common course of studies.
McGroarty’s legacy is her pioneering work to make higher education accessible to catholic women denied admission to catholic colleges and universities. When she and her associate Sister Mary Euphrasia planned, in 1897, to open a college for women of all faiths near the campus of the Catholic University of America (CUA) in Washington, DC, the hierarchy objected. Cardinal Satolli, prefect of the congregation of studies, was particularly uncomfortable with the idea of locating a women’s college close to the CUA. McGroarty persevered, and James Gibbons (d. 1921), archbishop of Baltimore, assured Rome that the rumours about the college were ‘utterly false or grossly exaggerated’. A sister told Kathleen Sprows Cummings, ‘Sister Superior prayed and Trinity was started’; but it was McGroarty’s sharp business sense and her ability to recruit and work with lay support that made Trinity possible. She purchased 33 acres in the Brookland section of the city; the cornerstone of the college was laid by Gibbons on 8 December 1899, and the twenty-two students (from eleven states and the District of Columbia) who enrolled in the college’s first class started on 7 November 1900. McGroarty did not live to see them graduate. She died 12 November 1901, at the age of seventy-four, while visiting one of the convents in Peabody, Massachusetts. Her remains were returned to Cincinnati, where she was buried in the chapel of the Summit, one of the Notre Dame schools she founded.