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by Margaret Williams, RSCJ
Anyone entering Mother Hardey’s room at Manhattanville in 1857 could have seen a child of four with Asian features and a western name playing in a corner. This was Susie Maclane, born in Macao on June 21, 1852, of an American father and a Chinese mother.
She had sailed from Shanghai around Cape Horn to New York in the care of Attoy, her Chinese nurse. Her guardian, a New York businessman, entrusted her to Mother Hardey. The beautiful objects in her trunk, including an idol made of sandalwood, started the rumor that Susie was a princess.
Mother Hardey promptly had her baptized. Attoy remained at Manhattanville for a short time, and whenever Susie confronted a staircase she would stand still and clap her little hands until Attoy came to carry her up or down.
Susie never saw her parents again, and never, except for brief visits to school friends, experienced life outside convent walls. She was diligent and happy in the junior school, but as she grew older she became restive and troublesome. She sensed that she was different from the other children but no one told her of her own rich racial heritage.
At the time of her first communion at the age of twelve Susie became aware of a religious vocation, and from then on life had happy meaning. On this occasion she wrote a letter to Mother Barat in the name of her companions, and received an answer: “Our Mother General wants you to know that she has seen your picture and feels a great desire to know you, for she loves you very much.”
Mother Hardey used to take Susie with her when visiting other convents, in order to bring some change into a life of perpetual boarding school. Susie went to Kenwood for her higher classes, and upon graduating passed straight into the novitiate. She was then sent to Conflans outside Paris, where she took the habit, returning to Kenwood for her first vows on November 21, 1874.
She spent her years as a young professed at Elmhurst (Providence) where, after committing the storm-raising mistakes of an inexperienced teacher, she “rose” with her pupils from the sixth to the second class (i.e. seventh grade to third year of high school). She had mastered the art of teaching before her profession at the motherhouse in Paris in March, 1880.
Then began a long career as the mistress of studies in house after house of the eastern vicariate. Mother Maclane taught Latin brilliantly and had a gift for making charts and diagrams to facilitate any subject. She took up the newly invented technique of hectographing and installed “jelly pads” in all the schools. So skillful was she that a rumor spread that Mother Maclane was the inventor of this time-saving device. She excelled in teaching penmanship, and with infinite patience succeeded in getting “a perfect letter” from each student. Everything from her own fingers was dainty and colorful, for she was an artist by temperament.
Best of all was her influence on the children, most of whom stood above her in height. “She went straight to God, for straightforwardness was her characteristic. She was the most sincere person I have ever known, for she always took the shortest distance between two points,” one wrote. “Modest, serene and self-forgetful, she made no noise. Yet she was very learned and had the art of communicating her knowledge to others.
“From her I learned patience and a sense of responsibility – in short, how to be a true child of the Sacred Heart. She was a glorious example of true simplicity.”
When she found herself no longer able to teach, Mother Maclane put all her talents and her time at the service of the community and grew old gracefully. It was said of her, “To know Mother Maclane was to know the enormous power for good of a consistently straight mind and an unshakably determined will. As for her charity, it was universal.”
Within the community, a certain psychological constraint, due perhaps to a subconscious racial conflict with herself, from which she had suffered all her life, now disappeared. There awoke in her a tremendous, all consuming zeal for the China she had never known, and which she now openly called “my country.” When the Society made a foundation in Shanghai in 1926, she was already too old to go. In her last years she spent all her energies in working for the Chinese missions.
At the time of her Golden Jubilee in 1930 her friends gave her the funds to support a Chinese seminarian, and she followed his progress with delight. She herself boldly asked Cardinal O’Connell for another jubilee gift: the building of a church in China to be dedicated to the Heart of Christ. Her request was granted.
As Mother Maclane gradually lost contact with events through deafness, she plunged ever more deeply into the life of prayer that she had always loved. After months of semi-consciousness she died at Newton, Massachusetts, on December 20, 1943, in the season when the Church sings the antiphon: “O Oriens.”
from RSCJ Newsletter, X, 4, July 1988
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