Rose Hawthorne Lathrop

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Daughter, Servant of the Dying Poor

Rose Hawthorne was born in Lenox, Massachusetts, in 1851, the youngest child of the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, and grew up between New England, England, and Italy. She married the writer George Parsons Lathrop in 1871 and published stories and poems of her own. Sorrow marked her life: her only child, Francis, died of diphtheria in 1881, and her marriage disintegrated under George’s alcoholism. In 1891 the couple was received into the Catholic Church at St. Paul the Apostle in Manhattan; they separated, with Church permission, in 1895.

Learning that New York’s destitute cancer sufferers, then widely believed contagious and shunned, died abandoned on Blackwell’s Island, Rose took a nursing course at the New York Cancer Hospital in 1896 and moved into the Lower East Side tenements to nurse them herself, free of charge. In an 1897 newspaper appeal she wrote that she wished to serve the cancerous poor because they are avoided more than any other class of sufferers.

After George’s death in 1898 she could enter religious life. With her co-worker Alice Huber she opened St. Rose’s Free Home in Manhattan and, on December 8, 1900, founded the Servants of Relief for Incurable Cancer, today the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, taking the name Mother Mary Alphonsa. Her rule remains in force: patients pay nothing, ever.

She died in her sleep at Rosary Hill Home in Hawthorne, New York, on July 9, 1926. Her sisters still operate free homes for the terminally ill. Cardinal Edward Egan opened her cause in New York in 2003, the diocesan phase went to Rome in 2013, and on March 14, 2024, Pope Francis recognized her heroic virtue, declaring her Venerable.

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