Catherine Doherty

Catholic lay apostle, social activist, writer, and lecturer.

• Born: August 15, 1896
• Birthplace: Nizhni Novgorod, Russia
• Died: December 14, 1985
• Place of death: Combermere, Ontario, Canada

Also known as: Catherine de Hueck Doherty, Ekaterina Fyodorovna Kolyschkine

Significance: Catherine Doherty was an active Catholic lay apostle. She was a spiritual writer and editor who promoted interracial justice.

Background

Catherine Doherty was born Ekaterina Fyodorovna Kolyschkine on August 15, 1896, in Nizhni Novgorod, Russia, to aristocratic parents Theodore and Emma Kolyschkine. As was customary, she was baptized in the Russian Orthodox Church shortly after birth. Her parents raised her in the Russian Orthodox Church, but because of their spiritual training, they also had an openness to other Christian religions.

Doherty’s father was an international insurance agent, and his work often took his family abroad. While living in Egypt, Doherty attended school at the Catholic convent Sisters of Sion. This schooling instilled in her a sense of spiritual identity. In 1910, she left the school when her family returned to Russia and lived in St. Petersburg. Two years later, when she was fifteen, her family arranged for her to marry her cousin, Baron Boris de Hueck.

During World War I, Doherty served as a nurse on the Russian front. After her service, she returned to St. Petersburg with her husband. However, since she was a baroness, they had to flee in 1917 due to the Bolshevik Revolution, which nearly cost them their lives. They escaped to Finland, where they served in the Allied army. In 1919, they evacuated to England, where Doherty officially joined the Catholic faith.

Following the war, Doherty and her husband immigrated to Toronto, Canada, where their son, George, was born. Doherty took on whatever work she could find to help support the family. During the 1920s and early 1930s, she became active in her spiritual journey in the Catholic church in Canada.

Life’s Work

In Canada, Doherty became dissatisfied and disillusioned with her life. Her hard work had brought some material prosperity, but her husband was abusive and openly unfaithful to her. She turned to her deep-set sense of spirituality for comfort and felt the call of the Gospel to follow Christ more closely. In 1932, she received the blessing from the bishop of her parish to rid herself of her possessions and live among and minister to the poor in the city of Toronto. She subsequently supported herself by begging.

Others joined her in her cause and the Friendship House was opened in the slums of Toronto. She organized community activities and shared with the people the social encyclicals, or letters that explain the moral teachings of the Bible and Catholicism. In addition, she also actively denounced Communistpropaganda. However, in 1936 Friendship House was forced to close.

Doherty’s work with the Friendship House was not finished, and in 1938, Friar John Lafarge backed her to travel to New York to initiate an interracial apostolate in Harlem. As she did in Toronto, she lived and worked with the population she ministered to and built another Friendship House. Her work was so successful with the American Catholic Church that the Friendship House expanded to other areas of the African-American population in cities, such as Chicago, Portland, and Washington DC.

Doherty met with some opposition due to the annulment of her first marriage and subsequent second marriage in 1943. She also had a more liberal view of the teachings of the Catholic Church, and this also led to some disagreements within the Friendship House. Because of this, Doherty and her second husband moved back to Canada in 1947 and retired to the village of Combermere, Ontario, where Doherty intended to continue her ministry as a spiritual writer and lecturer.

Doherty published several religious books, including Dear Seminarian in 1950 and many throughout the following decades of her life, such as Poustinia, The Gospel Without Compromise, and the autobiographical Fragments of My Life. However, Doherty attracted many devout followers who urged her to continue her lay mission work and create another spiritual community. She thus created the Madonna House, which would come to be her most successful spiritual venture. The Madonna House community eventually grew to include branches in Canada, the United States, Europe, Russia, and the West Indies, with more than two hundred priests and lay members.

In 1955, Doherty and her husband took spiritual vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience in the Catholic Church as lay members. In 1969, while on a pilgrimage to Nazareth, Israel, her husband was officially ordained as a priest in the Melkite rite of the Church. Doherty died after a long illness at the age of eighty-nine in Combermere, Ontario, on December 14, 1985.

Impact

Doherty was a spiritual mother to both priests and lay people in the Catholic Church. Her guidance and insight were appreciated by many devout Christians of both Eastern and Western Catholic faiths. The canonization of Doherty as a saint is under consideration by the Catholic Church, and she has been given the honorary Catholic title of Servant of God.

Personal Life

Doherty married Boris de Hueck at the age of 15 in 1912. They had a son, Georg, but their marriage was annulled in 1943 on the grounds that they were first cousins. Later that year, June 25, 1943 she married Irish writer and journalist Eddie Doherty.

Principal Works

Books

Dear Seminarian, 1950

Poustinia, 1975

The Gospel Without Compromise, 1976

Dear Father: A Message of Love to Priests, 1979

Fragments of My Life, 1979

Bibliography

“Catherine de Hueck Doherty” Canadian Religious Conference, 14 Dec. 2022, crc-canada.org/en/biographies/catherine-de-hueck-doherty/. Accessed 26 June 2023.

“Catherine de Hueck Doherty.” Madonna House Apostolate, madonnahouse.org/about/catherine-doherty/. Accessed 26 June 2023.

“Catherine de Hueck Doherty.” U.S. Catholic, 2023, uscatholic.org/calendar/catherine-de-hueck-doherty/. Accessed 26 June 2023.

Fink, John “‘Baroness’ Catherine de Hueck Doherty served the poor.” Archdiocese of Indianapolis, 11 May 2018, www.archindy.org/criterion/local/2018/05-11/fink.html. Accessed 26 June 2023.

“Her Life.” Catherine Doherty, 2017, www.catherinedoherty.org/life/. Accessed 26 June 2023.

McNamara, Patrick. “The Baroness and the Gospel: Catherine de Hueck Doherty.” Aleteia, 29 Sept. 2017, aleteia.org/2017/09/29/the-baroness-and-the-gospel-catherine-de-hueck-doherty/. Accessed 26 June 2023.