Founding Sisters

Sister Mary Alfonsa Ronan was born in Ireland on 30 May 1852.

Carmel Bourke, former boarder and later St Aloysius College Principal (1945 – 1953) remembers her fondly.

Sr Alfonsa Ronan was a lay sister who left Ireland in 1867 to join the Sisters of Mercy in Buenos Aires, being only a girl of fifteen years when she so generously left her Irish home to travel to the other side of the world. She then came out to Adelaide as one of the twenty-four Sisters who came here from Buenos Aires to make the new foundation. Sr Alfonsa lived a serene and hidden life, always engaged in domestic duties and she was a great favourite with the boarders. She used to come down each evening at 6.50p.m. when the Sisters went to tea, to supervise us in our leisure time before the evening study. She had a warm, kindly personality and a delicious Irish brogue and we used to love to get her telling us stories, especially ‘ghost’ stories, which she could tell most effectively, amid little squeals from her audience (Bourke 1991, p. 39).

At the time of Mother Evangelista’s death, Sr Mary Alfonsa claimed to see ‘a beautiful light shining over Evangelista’s head on her deathbed’ (ed. Mclay 1996, p. 46).

Sr Alfonsa died on 19 December 1928 aged seventy-six and is buried at the West Terrace Cemetery, Adelaide.