Mother Mary Teresa Tallon

Pioneer of the New Evangelization

Julia Teresa Tallon was born on May 6, 1867, on a hops farm in the hamlet of Hanover, near Waterville, New York. Her parents were Irish immigrants who raised their children in the Catholic faith. At nineteen, she entered the Sisters of the Holy Cross and spent years teaching in Catholic schools.

But teaching in parish schools was not where her deepest calling lay. Mother Tallon saw a vast population of baptized Catholics who had drifted away from the faith, as well as countless unchurched families living in the growing tenements and neighborhoods of early twentieth-century New York. She became convinced that the Church needed to go to them, not wait for them to come back.

In 1920, at the age of fifty-three, she founded the Parish Visitors of Mary Immaculate in New York City. The community was something new in American religious life: a contemplative congregation devoted entirely to door-to-door, person-to-person evangelization. The Parish Visitors went out into neighborhoods, knocked on doors, visited families, listened, and invited the lapsed back to the sacraments. They sought out the unbaptized and offered instruction in the faith.

This was the “new evangelization” a full century before Saint John Paul II coined the term. Mother Tallon understood that in an increasingly secular society, the Church could not be passive. Her sisters combined deep contemplative prayer with active outreach, spending hours before the Blessed Sacrament and then going into the streets to share what they had received.

Mother Mary Teresa Tallon died in 1954 in Monroe, New York. Her cause for canonization was formally opened on April 16, 2013, by Cardinal Timothy Dolan of the Archdiocese of New York. The diocesan phase was closed on January 13, 2015, and documentation was sent to Rome on January 22, 2015. The Parish Visitors of Mary Immaculate continue her work today.

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