Mother Bernardina Matthews

Mother Bernardina Matthews (born 1732, Charles county, Md. [U.S.]—died June 12, 1800, Port Tobacco, Md., U.S.) was an American religious leader, the founder of the first monastery of a Roman Catholic order in the United States. Matthews grew up in a deeply religious home in a time when Roman Catholics laboured under legal disabilities and other discriminations in Maryland. In 1754 she traveled to Hoogstraeten, Belgium, to enter an English contemplative order of Discalced Carmelites....