Cornelia Connelly

A Society Founded on a Breaking Heart

Cornelia Peacock was born in Philadelphia in 1809 and in 1831 married Pierce Connelly, an Episcopal clergyman. In the mid-1830s, en route to Rome via New Orleans, Cornelia was received into the Catholic Church; Pierce followed in Rome. Her path then took an extraordinary turn: Pierce resolved to become a Catholic priest, which required Cornelia’s formal consent to a permanent separation. She gave it. A wife and mother of five, two of whom died young, one of them, two-year-old John Henry, from burns in a horrific accident, she eventually entered religious life herself.

In 1846, in England, she founded the Society of the Holy Child Jesus, a congregation devoted to the education of girls, rich and poor, with a humane, joy-centered pedagogy far ahead of its time. Her motto was three words: actions not words.

Her greatest trials came from her own former husband. Pierce abandoned the Church and sued her in the English courts for restitution of conjugal rights, a sensational case not finally dismissed until 1857, and he alienated her children from her. She governed her growing Society through poverty, litigation, and ecclesiastical conflict until her death at St. Leonards-on-Sea on April 18, 1879. She once described the Society as founded on a breaking heart.

Her sisters brought the Society to the United States in 1862, where it runs the Holy Child Network of Schools today. The cause, promoted by her Society and opened in 1959, led to the decree of June 13, 1992, in which Pope John Paul II declared that she practiced the virtues to a heroic degree. Beatification awaits an approved miracle.

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