AIKENHEAD, MARY, Servant of God. — Foundress of the Irish Sisters of Charity. Born in Cork (Ireland) on 15 January 1787 to a Catholic mother and an Anglican father who converted on his deathbed; died in Dublin on 22 July 1858. Aikenhead converted shortly after her father’s death (1802), and after her mother’s death entered a convent in York under the name of Mary Augustine. After three years she took her vows and settled in Dublin, where in 1815, with the help of Alice Walsh, she opened the first house of the Sisters of Charity, which she led as superior general. She later founded additional convents in Micklegate, Bar, and York; at her death there were six such houses, besides a refuge for penitent women and St. Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin, the first in Ireland to be run by nuns.
During the plague of 1832 and on other occasions she and her sisters devoted themselves to nursing the sick, one of the primary tasks to which her congregation dedicated itself. The beatification process for this benefactress of Ireland was introduced on 20 March 1921.