History of the Dominican Sisters~Grand Rapids
Fact Sheet, March 2014
• The Dominican Order began in thirteenth-century Europe with the vision and work of Dominic de Guzman. Our specific Congregation traces its 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.
• Answering a call for teachers in Michigan, six nuns from the New York group arrived in Traverse City, Michigan in October 1877. Less than one week later, the nuns opened a school in their small wood-framed home. Six students appeared; in two months there were fifty students.
• Additional missions were quickly added. In less than two decades, the Dominican Sisters staffed a parochial school system that flourished throughout the state for the next century.
• The Dominican Sisters came to Grand Rapids in 1889 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.
Read more by clicking on the link Dominican Sisters GR FACT SHEET – March 10, 2014