A stained-glass tribute to holy women

It hit her during Mass, on one of those days when the priest's homily drags on a little too long.

Student Laura Bunyard turned her gaze away from the lectern in the chapel at Rosemont College to the figures in the stained-glass windows.

St. Barbara, St. Cecilia, St. Ursula, St. Gertrude, St. Joan of Arc, St. Veronica, St. Rose of Lima.

Only then did Bunyard realize that almost all the people depicted in the warm colors of red, blue, and gold were women - saints who burned at a stake, wiped the face of their savior, or languished in jail for refusing to relinquish their virtue.

"So many of these women, I would like to have known," said Bunyard, 22.

Inspired, the Rosemont senior joined a project whose aim is not only to study the 20 women in the windows, but to recount how their images wound up at Rosemont's Immaculate Conception Chapel in what experts say is a rare example of a woman-centric collection of saints in stained glass.

Bunyard and 13 other students are participating in a digital humanities project that is chronicling the construction of the chapel built in 1941 by the Society of the Holy Child Jesus, the religious community that founded the school as a women's college in 1921. Rosemont is now coed.

Depicting female saints in stained glass was an early part of the chapel plan, first spearheaded more than 75 years ago by Mother Mary Ignatius Carroll, the school's second president.

The school will chronicle that project on a website.

"We are such a visual society, and influenced by what we see," said Sharon Latchaw Hirsh, Rosemont's president and a graduate of the school. "If we live with these images in one way or another, they have an influence."

That is likely what Carroll had in mind, said Michelle Moravec, associate professor of history, who is supervising the project with Maggie Hobson-Baker, an assistant professor at the school.

For more than a decade, the church community raised funds to build a chapel. In 1939, the Vatican approved the project, but Carroll did not live to see it. She died that year during a return voyage from Rome. The school's next president, Mother Mary Cleophas Foy, and other school officials broke ground for the new chapel the next year.

Blueprints, photographs, drawings, and letters outline the sisters' plan for a Norman Gothic-style limestone chapel with vaulted ceilings and arches that rise to 40 feet, and the stained windows that reflected themselves and the young women they taught.

"Being a nun is the ultimate feminist experience," said Ellin Hlebik, a 1974 Rosemont graduate who toured the chapel, and its windows, at an open house Jan. 25.

Often, church windows depict the mysteries of the life of Jesus or a saint whom a house of worship is named for, said Sister Jeanne Marie Hatch, Rosemont's vice president for mission. Sometimes there are no images of people at all, Hatch said.

The windows - like those at Rosemont - often relate to a religious community's mission, said the Rev. Joseph F. Chorpenning, editorial director of the St. Joseph's University Press and a coeditor of the book Stained Glass in Catholic Philadelphia.

During five years of study for the 2002 book, Chorpenning's team could find no collection in the archdiocese like that at Rosemont.

In the late 1930s, Foy knew what she wanted and didn't stray from it. She was in constant contact with officials, architects Henry D. Dagit & Sons, who designed the church, and Henry Willet, owner of Willet Stained Glass Studios, who created the windows.

The sisters decided which saints were depicted, the symbolic iconography that would be included in each window, and the expressions on the saints' faces - often scoffing at advice from Willet.

The nuns chose martyrs (St. Agnes and St. Joan of Arc), mothers (the Blessed Mother, St. Monica, and St. Frances), royalty (St. Elizabeth of Hungary), and a woman who went on to become the first Native American saint (St. Kateri Tekakwitha).

"This is a great list. There isn't one who isn't fascinating," said Virginia Raguin, a professor of art history at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., and an expert in stained glass. The sisters "were trying to show what every quality Catholic program of saints does - that God speaks to everyone."

Mother Cornelia Connelly, who founded the Society of the Holy Child Jesus, is the only woman on the window who is not yet a saint. There are also three men: Jesus, as a boy with St. Joseph, in one window, and St. Augustine, in a window with his mother, St. Monica.

At the open house Jan. 25, Dennis Matthews stood beneath the window of St. Cecilia and talked about the work of his father, Harry, who he says was a Willet studio artist who painted the saints on Rosemont's stained glass.

Harry Matthews painted the female saints with languid fingers, flowing gowns, and serene eyes in a style developed when he was an indentured artist with a firm in Ireland, his son said.

At each window, a student from the digital humanities project discussed the saints depicted in the windows above them.

Bunyard chatted with Sister Florence Rice, who spent summers on the Rosemont campus as a student in the 1950s and never noticed that the saints on the window were mostly women.

"These are strong, independent women who stood up for something," Bunyard said. "But it's not just the women in the windows. It's the women behind the windows. You can't have one without the other."

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