Lloyd Levin might seem an unlikely guide to the pristine realm of the Sisters of Christian Charity, Daughters of the Blessed Virgin Mary of the Immaculate Conception. In the 1970s he appeared in these pages as an alternative-lifestyle guru, a silver-tongued champion of gays, swingers, and recreational drug users who was spearheading a scheme he called All Together, Inc., an organization intended to weld society’s diverse naughty people into a lucrative market segment and sell them insurance. But today he’s a partner in an agency that’s presiding over a sale of the nuns’ possessions, recounting the history of their alternative lifestyle with the same enthusiasm he once displayed for smokers and swappers.
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According to her biographers, Pauline von Mallinckrodt was born in Minden in 1817 and raised in luxury. Her father was a high-ranking Prussian official. Both her parents came from aristocratic families, but they had what then constituted a seriously mixed marriage: her father was Protestant, her mother devoutly Catholic. Despite a government decree that children take their father’s religion, Pauline was raised in her mother’s faith. This had a dampening effect on her father’s career, but the Mallinckrodts’ life was still a round of dinner parties and balls, and their palatial homes were regularly visited by political movers and shakers. Among them was a fledgling lawyer named Otto von Bismarck who, like many of their young male visitors, cast an interested eye on the charming Pauline (apparently more of a charmer than a looker).
Like many affluent women of the 19th century, young Pauline visited the poor in their homes and nursed their sick, but in 1840 she came up with a concept that boosted her charity work to another level: with her own money, she opened a day-care center for poor children in the city of Paderborn, the first of its kind. She started with eight kids and a year later had close to a hundred, including a number of blind children who in particular drew her attention. By the end of the decade she had been instrumental in establishing the first state schools for the blind, and she’d created her own rapidly growing order of nuns dedicated to education. During the 1850s and ’60s, her Sisters of Christian Charity expanded to other towns, opening a series of schools. In the early 1870s, however, with her former friend Bismarck in power, all educators who belonged to religious orders were booted from German schools. As a result, members of her order began to emigrate to the United States in 1873, serving poor parishes that needed help. In 1916 they built their headquarters on what is now Ridge Road. Initially a training school and college for nuns, the imposing yellow-brick building also housed Mallinckrodt High School, a Catholic school for girls, from 1923 to 1960. In 1968 Mallinckrodt Junior College opened to lay students, and from 1982 to 1991 it operated as a four-year school.
