The Daughters of the Holy Spirit - 300+ Years

The Daughters of the Holy Spirit are a 300 year-old international Roman Catholic Religious Congregation of women, founded in a small town in Brittany, France in 1706. The first Daughters of the Holy Spirit chose to live together to serve the poor, the sick and the children, recognizing in them the person of Jesus Christ.

They were attentive to the calls of the Holy Spirit and entrusted themselves to Mary, their advocate with the Spirit. Throughout the years, the Sisters have found ingenious ways of surviving revolution, persecution and the myriad changes which religious life has undergone since the beginning of the eighteenth century.

Displaced by anti-clerical persecution in their homeland, some Daughters of the Holy Spirit arrived in the United States in 1902. Bishop Tierney of the diocese of Hartford, Connecticut, was the first to welcome the French-speaking refugees; but in a short time, Bishops in Rhode Island, Vermont, western Massachusetts and upper New York State had welcomed these devoted religious women to neighborhoods and parishes impacted by the emigration of French Canadian laborers to the burgeoning textile mills. The Sisters educated countless children and walked countless miles of urban and rural streets, ministering to the sick. From the start, young American women joined these intrepid pioneers and the United States Province was born.

Gradually the ministry of the Sisters expanded to include a variety of pastoral and social services not only in the New England but also in Alabama, central California, Appalachia and the Delmarva Peninsula. Over the years, Sisters from the USA Province have joined Sisters from other DHS Provinces on mission China, Chile and Peru, Cameroon, Nigeria. Burkina Faso, and Romania.

Today the congregation has grown into a dynamic spiritual "Family" with three distinct ways of belonging, allowing women and men of different languages, cultures and backgrounds to unite their gifts and energies in an unobtrusive but life-giving presence among peoples of 13 countries on four continents.