Commontide
Anglican Commemoration
Martyrs of Memphis
September 9 · d. 1878
also known as Constance and her Companions, Memphis Yellow Fever Martyrs, Sisters of Saint Mary (Memphis)
In the summer of 1878 yellow fever fell on Memphis, Tennessee, and everyone who could afford to fled. A community of Anglican nuns, the Sisters of St. Mary, went the other way, back into the dying city, to nurse the sick that no one else would touch. Four of the sisters and two priests caught the fever and died at their work. Their leader, Sister Constance, is remembered for her last word, spoken into the heart of the plague: "Alleluia."
In August of 1878 the worst thing that could happen to an American city happened to Memphis. Yellow fever, a disease no one then understood and no one could cure, swept in off the river and turned the place into a charnel house. Those who could afford to fled by the thousand, and the trains out were mobbed. Within weeks the city was a ghost town of the dying, the poor and the trapped left behind with no doctors, no nurses, and no one to bury the dead. And into that emptying city, against the current of everyone running out, came a small band of Anglican nuns.
They were the Sisters of St. Mary, a young religious community of women who kept a school and an orphanage in Memphis, and their leader was Sister Constance, the superior of the house. When the fever came, Constance and another sister were away in the cool of the North, safe. They came back. They came back on purpose, into a city where nursing the sick was very often a sentence of death, and they turned their convent and the cathedral into a hospital and a refuge for the fever's orphans. Day after day, through the worst weeks, the sisters went from bed to bed and house to house, nursing the sick, feeding the children whose parents had died, sitting with the dying so that no one died alone, and carrying out the dead when there was no one else to do it. Two priests of the cathedral, Charles Parsons and Louis Schuyler, worked beside them, and died beside them.
It could only end one way. The sisters knew, every morning they went out, that the fever would very likely take them too, and one by one it did. Sister Constance fell ill in early September and died on the ninth, worn out with nursing the city that had been left to die. The word on her lips at the end was not a complaint, and not a plea for rescue, but a shout of praise: Alleluia. Sister Thecla died three days after her, Sister Ruth a few days after that, Sister Frances in October, the two priests among them. Six of them gave their lives in those weeks, nursing strangers in a plague they were free to flee.
Memphis never forgot. When the fever had burned itself out and the survivors crept back, they found that the nuns the city had half pitied had been, at the end, almost the only people who stayed. The Sisters of St. Mary carved the names of their dead, and Constance's last word, into the high altar of the cathedral, where they are read to this day: the four sisters, and over them, Alleluia. The church keeps them every September as the Martyrs of Memphis, and they have become, for a later age that has known its own plagues, the very pattern of what the church is for, to run toward the dying when everyone else runs away, and to do it singing. They went down into the worst of it for love, and the last thing one of them had to say about it was Alleluia.
The Martyrs of Memphis are firmly documented, in the contemporary newspaper accounts of one of the worst urban epidemics in American history, in the diocesan and church records, and above all in the necrology and the unbroken memory of the religious community that lost them. In the summer of 1878 a yellow-fever epidemic struck Memphis, Tennessee; perhaps five thousand people died, and the great majority of those who could afford to leave fled. The Sisters of St. Mary, an Episcopal religious community founded only a few years before, kept a school and orphanage there, and when the epidemic came the sisters, several of whom had been away, returned and stayed to nurse the sick and shelter the orphaned. Four of them died: Sister Constance, the superior, on 9 September; Sister Thecla on the 12th; Sister Ruth on the 17th; Sister Frances on 4 October. Two priests of St. Mary's Cathedral, Charles Parsons and Louis Schuyler, died with them.
The commemoration rests not on miracles, of which the community claimed none, but on a plain and costly choice: to stay, and to come back, when staying meant a high probability of death, for the sake of the poor and abandoned who had no one else. That is the ancient meaning of martyrdom, a witness sealed with one's life, and the church has recognized it as such. In a later age the Martyrs of Memphis have been read freshly, both as an example of women's leadership in the church's ministry and as a model of the church's vocation in time of plague; when new epidemics have come, Christians have turned again to the four sisters who walked toward the fever, and to the Alleluia on Sister Constance's lips, to remember what the gospel asks. Their names and her dying word are carved on the high altar of St. Mary's Cathedral in Memphis.
Constance and her Companions, the Martyrs of Memphis, are commemorated on 9 September, the day of Sister Constance's death, in the calendars of the Episcopal Church and other Anglican churches; their liturgical color is the red of martyrdom. The Community of St. Mary, which still exists, has kept their memory unbroken since 1878, and St. Mary's Cathedral in Memphis is their shrine: the four sisters' names, and Sister Constance's last word, Alleluia, are inscribed on the high altar, which is itself a memorial to them.
They are honored as patrons of those who nurse the sick and of the church's ministry in epidemic and disaster, and their feast has gained a new force in an age reacquainted with plague. They are remembered too within the long history of women's religious life in the Anglican Communion, as an early and luminous instance of vowed women exercising a public, sacrificial, and finally fatal ministry of mercy. Their commemoration is, in the end, very simple: a remembrance of people who stayed.
Further reading. The story is told in the histories of the Community of St. Mary and of the great Memphis epidemic of 1878, and in the standard accounts of the Episcopal Church's calendar of saints.
Online resources. A full account of Constance and her companions, drawn from the contemporary records, is at the Social Welfare History Project.
Almighty God, you gave your servants Constance and her Companions boldness to confess the Name of our Savior Jesus Christ before the rulers of this world, and courage to die for this faith: Grant that we may always be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in us, and to suffer gladly for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Readings for a Martyr
Jeremiah 15:15–21Psalm 34Revelation 7:9–17Luke 12:4–12