How Rose Hawthorne Brought Me Back to the Church

For 125 years, Dominican Sisters belonging to an order founded by Venerable Rose Hawthorne Lathrop (Mother Mary Alphonsa, O.P.), the youngest child of Nathaniel Hawthorne, have lovingly nursed the poor dying of cancer at Rosary Hill Home in Hawthorne, New York. According to the Westchester County facility’s website,

The philosophy of care at Rosary Hill Home is to provide a loving, peaceful, home-like environment to our Guest patients. All patients admitted to the Home have a diagnosis of incurable cancer. We strive to meet their physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual needs and to give comfort and consolation, knowing we cannot offer them a cure.

Rosary Hill Home accepts no remuneration from any source for this care, relying instead on donations from the public and the labor of the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne (as the order founded as The Servants of Relief for Incurable Cancer is now known). The free home has always admitted patients—or “guests,” as they are called—of every race and religion. As Alice Huber (who would later join the order as Sr. Mary Rose and, after the death of Rose Hawthorne, become its mother general) found when she visited Rose Hawthorne in 1897 at the more modest free home for the cancerous poor, which Hawthorne had established on New York City’s Lower East Side, it seemed the “perfect work of charity.”

So it would seem. But the State of New York thinks otherwise and is threatening to fine and jail the Dominican Sisters and shut down Rosary Hill Home unless they agree to violate their Catholic faith. According to a press release by the Catholic Benefits Association,

The New York gender ideology mandate requires Rosary Hill Home and other long-term care facilities to house biological men in women’s rooms even over the opposition of a female roommate, to permit residents and their visitors of one sex to access bathrooms set aside for those of the opposite sex, to use false pronouns, to use language and “create communities” affirming patients’ sexual preferences, and to accommodate patients’ desire for extramarital sexual relations. Long-term care facilities are also required to ensure that their staff members are trained in “cultural competency” informed by the State’s gender ideology. 

Because their letters to the New York State Department of Health requesting exemption from these requirements went unanswered, on April 7, 2026, the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne filed suit in federal court against Governor Kathy Hochul and other state officials, seeking relief from the mandate.

News that the home for the cancerous poor Rose Hawthorne founded, where she lived for the last 25 years of her life and where she died, was under attack by the State of New York was startling and distressing. Venerable Rose Hawthorne, whose cause for canonization was opened in 2003, is my heroine not only because she lived a life of heroic virtue but because she brought me back to the Catholic Faith.

Vatican City, 1983: the two friends I’m travelling with, lapsed Catholics both, are incredulous—superior, amused, disdainful—at my insistence (though I haven’t practiced the Faith I was born into for years) on entering St. Peter’s Basilica through the Holy Door, opened by Pope John Paul II this extraordinary Holy Year. They are aghast when, upon our visit to the Colosseum, I kiss the cross on the plaque set into the wall. My companions are experiencing Rome as tourists, not Catholics, and they are appalled to think their doctoral student friend could participate in any action associated with the medieval (i.e., backward, irrational) promise of an indulgence, as is the case with both passing through the Holy Door and kissing the cross.

Isn’t it all what Charles Ryder, the narrator of Brideshead Revisited, calls “an awful lot of nonsense”? Clearly, I didn’t think so. I just chose—when I wasn’t visiting sacred sites in Rome—to live as if I did. And yet, Cordelia, the devout youngest child of the Flyte family in Waugh’s great novel, quotes G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown when speaking to Charles of her family members’ own inconstancy and her confidence that “God won’t let them go for long”: “I caught [the thief] with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.” If I may replace “for long” with “forever,” I can attest to the truth of Cordelia’s assertion.

Although I had stopped attending Mass, going to Confession, and receiving Holy Communion by the time I was in my twenties, I did sometimes find myself in a Catholic church, whether for a wedding, Christening, funeral or, again, as a tourist. During these visits, I invariably felt very emotional—and not necessarily in response to the occasion.

As a child, I was very devout, frequently praying the Rosary, attending Mass not only every Sunday and Holy Day of Obligation and many weekdays but also regularly attending Benediction and other devotions. On my way to St. Nicholas School in the morning, I would stop before the statue of the Blessed Virgin and kneel to pray. Years, even decades, after I had fallen away, just stepping inside a church aroused memories of the feelings that had attended those practices of my youth—but with an added feeling of sadness and profound loss. My heart would ache, and I often found myself in tears. Somehow, I never made the logical leap and concluded that the sadness that invariably found expression in church could also be “treated” there. Rather, I continued to stay away. 

I became an academic and was surrounded almost entirely by unbelievers—“nones” as they are now called—most of them also lapsed Catholics. One English professor I thought surpassingly brilliant told me all religion was “voodoo.” I myself never made a conscious decision to reject Christ or Catholicism—indeed, in times of great need, I still prayed to Him—I just acted as though I had. And yet my mind remained, like that of Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, “supersaturated with the religion” all the while I was away from it. 

Eventually, I left my academic career behind and moved to New York City, where, in 2019, I attended a reading at the American Irish Historical Society. John Loughery was reading from his book Dagger John, a biography of Archbishop John Hughes, a major figure in the American—particularly New York—Catholic Church in the 19th century. (Hughes makes an appearance in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York.)

I bought Loughery’s book as a present for my oldest brother, a devout Catholic. I knew he would find this bit of Church history interesting, particularly because in researching our family tree he had become familiar with many old New York City parishes. Before passing the book on, however, I read it.

Looking back, I can only think that this was the first, slight twitch upon the thread. For in reading the excellent biography I was astonished to learn—in a remark made almost in passing—that in the late-19th century, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop converted to the Catholic Faith, founded a religious order, and was a candidate for canonization. What? This was an incredible, fascinating piece of information; and I, a former English professor, now a writer, immediately thought such a story had the potential to be the basis for a great novel. I was already in the midst of a project, however, so I deferred any action on this one, though the idea of it remained in the back of my mind.

In the fall of 2020, some work was being done in my apartment that necessitated my leaving it for several hours. I wanted to remain close by, so—never one to hang out in Starbucks—I walked around the neighborhood aimlessly for a while before deciding I would bide the remainder of my time visiting two nearby Catholic churches. I had never been inside either one and knew how much beauty could be found in old churches.

My first stop was the Church of St. Catherine of Siena, a Dominican church on East 68th Street. It was very peaceful. No services were being held, and I was almost alone in the lovely redbrick church. After a quick prayer, I sat back and, as usual, the lingering smell of incense, the flickering candles (real, not electric), the holy statues and Stations of the Cross, the altar, tabernacle, and stained-glass windows, started their work upon me. I began to feel my emotions churning.

A Dominican friar walked up the aisle and, stopping at my pew, handed me a large, unlit votive candle. I thanked him and took it to one of the church’s many side altars, lighting it before the statue of St. Teresa of Ávila. Then I knelt and prayed for my parents, long dead, who I felt were with me.

The priest’s gesture moved me and stayed with me long after I had left St. John Nepomucene, the other church on my “tour” that day. I didn’t realize it at the time, but here, I think, was another twitch. Shortly thereafter, I abandoned the novel I had almost completed and started researching the life of Rose Hawthorne.

The more I learned about Rose, the more I admired her and the surer I became that I had chosen the right subject. Work on the novel progressed—but slowly. Around two years into the project, I found I had a strong desire to attend a Latin Mass. I’m old enough (barely) to remember the Traditional Latin Mass, and it had always retained its appeal in my imagination. Moreover, I had studied Latin in high school and college, which added to my wish to hear it spoken. I began investigating which churches in Manhattan celebrated the TLM. I learned there was an upcoming Latin Mass—a Solemn Requiem Mass in the Dominican Rite—at St. Vincent Ferrer, another Dominican church near my apartment, and decided to attend it.

The Church of St. Vincent Ferrer is magnificent, fully deserving of its frequent description as the most beautiful church in New York City, and I took in all the elements of its Gothic splendor with deep admiration and high emotion as I waited for the Mass to begin. Once it did, I was transported. As it happened, this Requiem Mass was especially elaborate, with a large number of ministers and the striking elements of the Dominican Rite, most of them 800 years old but new to me.

The singing by the Schola Cantorum was glorious, the Gregorian chanting all I could have desired and more. Mass was followed by the powerful rite of Absolution at the Catafalque (a coffin-like cenotaph that is placed in front of the sanctuary for the service). I had gone merely for the aesthetic pleasure of hearing Latin spoken and sung (or so at least I thought), and I received immeasurably more. In the beauty of this ancient tradition of the Faith still imprinted on my soul, I felt the last and most forceful twitch. No more would be required.

In 1899, eight years after her conversion, Rose Hawthorne was living with and nursing poor cancer patients in a home on the Lower East Side she had established for their free care because the rest of the world, believing their cancer to be not only repulsive but contagious, had abandoned them to unrelieved suffering as they waited, alone and unloved, to die. She became a Dominican Tertiary—that is, a lay Dominican—at the invitation of Fr. Clement Thuente, O.P., a Dominican priest affiliated with both St. Vincent Ferrer and that church’s mission chapel at the time, St. Catherine of Siena.

In the months that followed the Requiem Mass, St. Vincent’s was the very church I found myself attending—not every Sunday, but most. Sometimes, feeling a bit like Rip Van Winkle, I was amazed at the changes that had taken place in my absence—such as the appearance of jeans and skimpy clothing at Mass and coats strewn across pews. I almost reached for smelling salts when, on Palm Sunday, I witnessed people sitting back during Communion and drinking coffee; but then I realized that many in the packed church that day were not regulars but “guests” making their triannual appearance at Mass.

For months, I attended Mass at St. Vincent’s, sometimes returning to St. Catherine’s, drawn back ever closer to Jesus Christ, to the Church. But there was still a major obstacle to my full return: I wasn’t receiving Communion because I couldn’t bring myself to go to Confession after so many years. So, I knelt there each week with a weight on my heart as others lined up to receive the Eucharist on the tongue, kneeling at the altar rail just as I had done when I was a child. Much as I dreaded the very thought, there was no getting around it: Confession was required.

I vowed I would go before the next Easter—almost a year away. (Yes, my trepidation was that great.) Thus, on Reconciliation Monday, with Easter fast approaching, I stopped in St. Agnes Church, near Grand Central Terminal (preferring that my confessor be a complete stranger), and made my first Confession in over 40 years. It was every bit as tearful and difficult as I’d feared. It’s wonderful how the Act of Contrition stays with you. When called upon by the priest to recite it, I did—never before with such conviction. I received Communion at St. Vincent’s beautiful Easter Vigil Mass five days later; and I have done so at every Mass since. 

As a child, I had simply accepted every element of my Catholic faith—I didn’t have to understand what I learned from the Baltimore Catechism. But now I was desperate to understand, to know every bit of its history and theology. I remembered almost nothing of the core theology courses I took at my Jesuit college. I had read Cardinal Newman in both undergraduate and graduate Victorian literature courses, but I barely remembered more than the titles of his works and the fact that his prose style was considered superb. How could I know so much (nonsense) about literary criticism and theory and so little about Aquinas and Augustine? 

I began to notice that many public figures were Catholic converts. Every day, I seemed to learn of another. I confess that whenever I did, I felt (absurdly) a bit smug about having had the good fortune to be born into the Faith so many had adopted. Even when I was lapsed, the supremacy of the one true Church seemed to me indisputable and the recognition of that fact by those outside it entirely natural.

I was pulled up a bit short, however, when I realized that many—perhaps most—of these converts clearly knew far more about Catholicism than I—a “cradle Catholic”—did. I must put the term “cradle Catholic” in quotation marks because I never heard it until recently and it sounds so strange to me.

Growing up, everyone I knew—seemingly the whole of Jersey City, where the Holy Name Parade was still a major annual festivity and people always identified themselves by parish—was “cradle” Catholic. Was there another kind? Such a qualifier would have been so unnecessary as to be meaningless.

I didn’t know any converts—only historical ones like St. Paul and, again, Cardinal Newman. That saying about a fish not having a word for water comes to mind. It seemed, in fact, that most apologists who weren’t clergymen were indeed converts. Again and again, I came across articles, talks, YouTube channels, and podcasts about Catholicism by converts whose erudition put me to shame.

By the time I finished the first draft of the novel, not only did I wonder if I had the expertise to acquit myself adequately when it came to writing about Catholicism but my “reversion” was causing me another unexpected problem. I now worried that Rose Hawthorne wouldn’t approve of the license I had taken with her story—making up scenes and dialogue, some based on biographical fact but others created entirely out of whole cloth. Historical fiction has obviously done as much with hundreds of the dead, saints included—many of whom were alive much more recently than Rose Hawthorne and the other real people who appear in my novel—but still I fretted.

Now that I was formally a parishioner at St. Vincent Ferrer and St. Catherine of Siena, the two churches being one parish, I also grew concerned that something I wrote would meet with the disapproval of the Dominican Friars there—and in fact everywhere. And then there were the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne—would they approve? The way out of my dilemma was obvious. It crossed my mind that maybe this book was never meant to see publication, that all along its supernatural purpose had been simply to bring me back the Church. Now that that purpose had been fulfilled, should I put Hawthorne’s Daughter in a drawer and return to the novel I had abandoned when I started working on it?

The fact that I could even consider such a thing was incredible, given that I had spent four years working on this book and, naturally, had the same desire most writers have to see their books in the hands of as many readers as possible. Moreover, as I had begun to learn about Rose Hawthorne, another, more powerful motive for my wanting to see this novel published had superseded that egotistical one: the desire to spread her story far and wide by reaching those who would be likelier to pick up a novel than a biography.  

The importance of such a goal was brought home to me last year when I watched an interview on EWTN with Cardinal Marcello Semeraro, the prefect for the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints.  When the interviewer, Andreas Thonhauser, asked how it had happened that the canonization of Carlo Acutis, who died in 2006 at the age of 15, was approved so quickly, Cardinal Semeraro attributed that speed to the teenager’s popularity:

the more people know about a venerable or blessed person, the more they will ask for his or her intercession…. If I don’t know anything about a person, I don’t call on him….  So the knowledge of an exemplary figure, even a saint, is important for a miracle to happen.

If there are no miracles, there can be no canonization, which explains why some venerable or blessed figures wait centuries and some are never canonized. When I was in grammar school, we prayed daily for the canonization of Mother Pauline, foundress of the Sisters of Christian Charity, who died in 1881. Pauline von Mallinckrodt’s cause for canonization was opened in 1926, and Blessed Pauline, as she is now known, was beatified in 1985; but she has yet to be canonized—perhaps, then, because she has not been prayed to by millions as has Carlo Acutis.  (I was pleased to learn that the Sisters of Christian Charity also taught Pope Leo XIV at St. Mary of the Assumption in the 1960s, so he might well have prayed for Mother Pauline’s canonization too.)

Rose Hawthorne Lathrop—Mother Mary Alphonsa, O.P—was declared Venerable in 2024. Hearing the Cardinal’s remarks, I knew I had to press on with my plan to see Hawthorne’s Daughter published so more of the world would learn of this extraordinary holy woman and her saintly work of caring for thousands of the dying poor, work still carried on by members of the order she founded. Although I haven’t notified the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, in my heart I believe my return to the Church is a kind of miracle in which Venerable Rose Hawthorne played no small part.