Joe, Patsy, Betty, and Kevin Leary learned their lessons of faith and charity at home

Photo by Margaret Brett Hastings

The story of the Leary family of Boston is rooted in an event so shameful in Boston history that it’s not talked about much, but in the summer of 1834, Protestant thugs burned the Ursuline sisters’ school and convent in Charlestown and drove the nuns out of Boston.

Nearly a century later, in 1928, a young Dorchester woman, Mary Nolan, graduated from an Ursuline school, the College of New Rochelle in New York. In 1946, she collaborated with Boston Archbishop Richard J. Cushing and others to induce the Ursulines back to Boston to establish Ursuline Academy on Arlington Street. She helped raise funds, and sent her two daughters to the nuns’ school. Today, the academy prospers on a 28-acre campus in Dedham, offering independent Catholic education to 430 girls in Grades 7 through 12.

Joe, Patsy, Betty, and Kevin Leary learned their lessons of faith and charity at home

The story of the Leary family of Boston is rooted in an event so shameful in Boston history that it’s not talked about much, but in the summer of 1834, Protestant thugs burned the Ursuline sisters’ school and convent in Charlestown and drove the nuns out of Boston.

Devotion to faith, family, good works fill center of the Judge family universe

Photo by Margaret Brett Hastings
Jim Judge will never forget the day he encountered his future father-in-law, Jack Cahill, on the front stairs of a three-decker on Holiday Street in Dorchester. It was early in his courtship of Mary Cahill and it was a Holy Saturday, the day before Easter. Jack carefully balanced his way down the stoop while carrying an aluminum platter bulging with a freshly cooked ham, a holiday meal prepared by his wife, Maura. As was the case every Easter, and on most holidays, it was a home cooked meal with all the fixings and it was en route to the Pine Street Inn.

A few months earlier, Jack had been abruptly “let go” from his job as a steel craftsman at the All Stainless company. He’d worked there for 19-and-a-half years and was just about to be eligible for a pension when he was cut loose. For the first time since he emigrated to America from Cork City in 1954, he was without a job.