Spotlight #9: Eliza Healy (Sister Saint Mary Magdalene)
As Black History Month continues, we're highlighting the story of Eliza Healy, a Catholic nun and educator who lived in St. Albans in the early 1900s. Born into slavery, she would go on to save a struggling convent and school with her dedication, faith, and business smarts.
Eliza Healy was born on December 23, 1846 in Macon, Georgia. She was one of ten children of Irish immigrant Michael Healy and Mary Eliza Clark, a slave on Michael's plantation. The true nature of her parents' relationship remains a mystery; Mary Eliza remained enslaved until her death, but evidence suggests that she and Michael were secretly married, lived together, and taught their children to read and write.
When Healy was just three, both of her parents passed away and she was sent to New York to live with her brother Hugh. In 1851, she was baptized Catholic and sent to boarding school in Quebec. After graduating in 1861, she relocated to Massachusetts. She first lived with her brother Eugene in Boston before moving to a house in West Newton owned by another brother, James. She remained there for 12 years until the 1873 financial crisis destroyed James' investments. The following year, she entered the novitiate of the Congregation of Notre Dame in Montreal to prepare for a career as a teacher and nun. In 1882, she took her final vows and assumed the name Sister Saint Mary Magdalene.
From 1876 to 1903, Healy held a variety of teaching and administrative positions at Catholic schools across Canada. In 1903, she became mother superior of the Villa Barlow convent and headmistress of St. Mary's School in St. Albans, both of which were managed by the Congregation of Notre Dame. When she first arrived, the school and convent were heavily in debt and on the verge of closure. Over the next fifteen years, Healy completely transformed the school and convent. She steadily paid off debts, updated St. Mary's curriculum and teaching methods, and improved health and hygiene practices for students and nuns alike.
A 1920 oral history of Villa Barlow and St. Mary's from our archives states, "[Healy] was a woman of rare and varied gifts, of brilliant mind, highly cultured, broad of view, and wide in her sympathies, a wonderful organizer, an indefatigable worker, an enthusiastic leader... The refining influence of the atmosphere Mother St. Mary Magdalen (sic) created pervades Villa Barlow to-day. The copies of Masters she hung on the walls, the treasures of knowledge shared in its libraries, the exquisite Chapel she planned and executed are tangent lines of beauty that reveal the soul of the great educator."
In 1918, Healy was transferred to another struggling school, the Academy of Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament on Staten Island, in hopes that she could repeat the success she had had in St. Albans. However, it was not to be and she passed away one year later on September 13, 1919.
Photo: Villa Barlow convent, ca. 1900-1930.
Additional sources consulted: African-American Religious Leaders by Nathan Aaseng (2003), American National Biography vol. 10 by John Arthurt Garraty and Mark C. Carnes (eds.) (1990), Notable Black American Women by Jessie Carney Smith (1992).