The Life and Death of Newton College of the Sacred Heart, 1945–75

chapter 15 Jesuits and Madames: The Life and Death of Newton College of the Sacred Heart, 1945–75

James M. O’Toole

When the statesman Daniel Webster (1782–1852), addressing the Supreme Court in 1819, said “It is a small college, sir, but there are those who love it,” he was speaking about Dartmouth, defending its charter from political assault in an important constitutional case. Since then, countless faculty, administra- tors, and alumni have echoed his words, referring, often wistfully, to their own schools. The sentiment becomes even more emotionally charged when the small college in question closes and goes out of existence. We can hear a little of that melancholy in the comment of a graduating senior in Massachusetts, reacting to the news that, in two years’ time, her own alma mater would be no more. “Although necessary,” she told a reporter, the closing of her all-women’s school was still “a blow to women’s education.”1 The institution in question was Newton College of the Sacred Heart. Opened by Religious of the Sacred Heart in 1946 on a bucolic, forty-acre es- tate just outside Boston, it had offered an impressive academic program to an undergraduate student body that eventually numbered about eight hundred. In the boom times of the postwar era, it had expanded its facilities enthusi- astically. A campus that consisted of just two buildings in 1946 had twelve of them by 1970, including several dormitories, a library, a science building, and a large chapel. By then, however, American higher education had changed sub- stantially and, with steadily mounting costs and declining enrollments, the college faced disaster. Instead of simply closing its doors, it sought affiliation with a similar institution, and in March 1974 the presidents of Newton College and Boston College, a mostly male Jesuit university whose campus was about two miles away, announced a “consolidation” of their two institutions. This “merger”—the words used to describe the process were, and to some degree remain, controversial—was more in the form of a friendly takeover or buy-out. In exchange for assuming Newton’s debts, Boston College acquired the entire campus, making immediate use of the dormitories and later relocating its law school to the site. All Newton students became students of Boston College; the

1 “bc Will Take Over Newton Sacred Heart,” Boston Globe, March 12, 1974.

604 O’Toole two alumni bodies were merged; some faculty and staff were retained, others not. Within two years, Newton College was gone. Apart from its alumnae, the memory of it faded quickly. Faculty and students of Boston College today know little of it, even as they refer in shorthand to “the Newton campus” of their university, now a purely geographical desig- nation. But in its own time, Newton College was a thriving institution that, in many ways, surpassed its Jesuit near neighbor. Its history provides a case study of women’s education and coeducation in a time when larger societal attitudes on those issues were changing and changing rapidly. The Religious of the Sacred Heart (R.S.C.J.), often called “Madames of the Sacred Heart” because of the common (usually mistaken) belief that their members came from among the well-to-do, had been founded in France in 1800 by Madeleine Sophie Barat (1779–1865).2 Many in the church saw them as the “female Jesuits,” and they seldom discouraged the comparison. Their schools had a detailed plan of studies, comparable to the Jesuit Ratio studiorum, and as soon as Barat’s associate, Rose Philippine Duchesne (1769–1852), brought the order to the United States in 1818, they opened secondary schools for girls. A century later, some of these evolved into undergraduate colleges. Manhat- tanville in New York, established in 1917, was probably the best known, and the order would eventually have ten colleges around the country, though not all of them were open at the same time. The Madames arrived in Boston in 1880 to start a high school (Academy of the Sacred Heart) only a few blocks away from the original buildings of Boston College (opened in 1864) in the city’s immigrant-dense South End district. Both institutions later moved to more expansive campuses in the suburban city of Newton, the Jesuits in 1913, the Madames in 1925. Twenty years later, as soon as the Second World War was over, the sisters announced their intention to maintain the high school, now renamed Newton Country Day School, but also to open Newton College of the Sacred Heart. In this, they were encouraged by a newly installed archbishop,

2 The order’s acronym, “r.s.c.j,” stands for “Religious of the Sacred Heart of Jesus” (French: “Religieuses du Sacré-Cœur de Jésus”; Latin: “Religiosae Sanctissimi Cordis Jesu”). The title “Madame” initially signified French usage. See, for example, a biographical study of the order’s prominent early figures, Madeleine Sophie Barat and (St.) Rose Philippine Duchesne: Louis Baunard, Histoire de Madame Barat: Fondatrice de la Société du Sacré-Cœur de Jésus. 3. Histoire de Mme Duchesne [Life of Madame Barat: Foundress of the Society of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. (Vol.) 3. Life of M(ada)me Duchesne] (Paris: Librairie Poussielgue frères, 1878). “Madames” became the anglicized form of the French plural “Mesdames.” For background, see Phil Kilroy, The Society of the Sacred Heart in Nineteenth-Century France, 1800–1865 (Cork: Cork University Press, 2012); Kilroy, Madeleine Sophie Barat, 1779–1865: A Life (New York: Pau- list Press, 2000).