our history
The Dominican Order began in thirteenth-century Europe with the vision and work of Dominic de Guzman. Our specific Congregation traces it origin to Holy Cross Convent, a Dominican cloister for women religious in Regensburg, Bavaria in 1246.
In 1853, four cloistered Dominican nuns left Regensburg and went to New York to minister to German immigrants. Settling in Brooklyn and New York City, these consecrated women responded to calls for religious teachers. Today, twelve independent Dominican Congregations in the United States trace their origins to the orginial Regensburg group.
peninsula of promise
Answering a call for teachers in Michigan, six nuns from the New York group arrived in Traverse City, Michigan in October 1877. One week later, the nuns opened a school in their small wood-framed home. Six students appeared; in two months there were fifty students. Some of those students would be Michigan’s first candidates to the Dominican order.
Additional missions were established quickly. In less than two decades, the Dominican Sisters established a parochial school system that flourished throughout the state for the next century.
By 1885 all the Dominican Sisters in Michigan were organized into St. Joseph Province with Holy Angels Convent, Traverse City, as Provincial House and Novitiate.
The Dominican Sisters came to Grand Rapids in 1888 to administer the newly-founded St. John’s Home, which was a diocesan institute for the care of orphans and children whose parents could not care for them. Through this new ministry, social work and health care were added to the ministries the Sisters provided.
In 1894, the Dominican Sisters became an independent congregation under the patronage of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart. In 1896, they were authorized to change from cloistered Nuns to apostolic Sisters with an active contemplative status.
History of the Aquinata Hall Chapel Windows
Dominican Sisters ~ Grand Rapids Archives
