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When, in 1845, the Austrian missionary, Fr. Caspar Rehrl, arrived in frontier Wisconsin, on a tide of immigrants, children were getting little education as schools were few and the teachers frequently incompetent. Fr. Rehrl, convinced that a religious community working with him would strengthen and preserve the Catholic faith, wrote for assistance to European convents without success. Disheartened, he resolved to found his own sisterhood, naming it after the young Roman martyr, St. Agnes.
It was not until August,1858, that his dream came true with the advent of three young women. During those early years, the women faced both the poverty and hardships of frontier living as well as the challenge of building a community. They struggled with no viable rule, role models, or even effective leadership, as the priest had little time to give to the sisters. By 1870, although the community was growing, it hovered on the brink of dissolution. If it had not been for the leadership of Mother Agnes Hazotte and the support of Fr. Francis Haas, the Capuchin friar who gave the congregation its rule and guidance through its formative years, it could not have survived.
By 1905, the year Mother Agnes died, the community extended as far east as New York, as far west as North Dakota, and as far south as Texas. Sisters were staffing forty parochial schools, a hostel for German immigrants, and had founded their first hospital and established a home for the aged. Later they would establish both a school of nursing, and a college. In 1945, they accepted their first foreign mission in Waspam, Nicaragua.
By the middle of the twentieth century, sisters were experiencing growing tension between the medieval rules under which they lived and the world in which they prayed and worked. When the Second Vatican Council called religious to renewal and adaptation to the modern world, sisters were faced with a profound dilemma. The decision of the Sisters of St. Agnes to make a whole-hearted response to the call of the Church led to several decades of tension. It also led to new life as sisters struggled to be faithful to their heritage as they discovered ways to serve God in a world torn by injustice and poverty.
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