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MRS. DOROTHY (HINDS) DONOVAN
Mothers who opt to raise their young children at home need not feel cut off from the world around them.
“There’s a lot that they can do to help others.” says Dorothy Donovan, 85, a recent recipient of Catholic Charities’ 75th anniversary celebrations aware for her volunteer work. A former president of the Archdiocesan Catholic Women’s League and a Pro-Ecclesia et Pontifice Papal Cross awardee, Mrs. Donovan made an eloquent appeal for volunteer efforts as she discussed her work with The Catholic Register at Providence Villa and Hospital in Scarborough, Ontario. As a volunteer, Mrs. Donovan started at a young age. Music and service to the Church were a large part of her life. “She was 12 when she started playing the church organ in Midland,” says her son, Father Daniel Donovan, a theology professor at St. Michael’s College, the University of Toronto.
When Mrs. Donovan’s family moved from Midland to Toronto, she worked at St. Paul’s parish. She is probably among the first lay women to have worked professional in a parish in the city, says Fr. Donovan.
The past at St. Paul’s asked her to co-ordinate the social services program of the parish. “I had to look after the needs of the children then who might have been having problems at home,” Mrs. Donovan recalls.
She also organized choirs in the parish’s three schools. She taught music in the schools during weekdays, and played the organ and conducted the church choir at Sunday Masses.
At the age of 29, she married Daniel Donovan a policeman and a devout Catholic. The Donovans met through the social work cases the future Mrs. Donovan handled, and also “because he went to church every day.” They bought a home across the street from Holy Name Parish in 1933.
Although she stopped working full-time after marriage, Mrs. Donovan continued to give music lessons at home. Gradually, as her children grew, she became more involved with parish work on a volunteer basis, particularly with music and the choirs. She began initially with the children’s choir. On Sundays, she played the organ at Holy Name parish and at other nearby parishes.
As Mrs. Donovan recalls, when she was first married, young Catholic mothers belonged to the Christian Mothers group in the parish.
In the early days of the Catholic Women’s League, she says, league membership consisted mainly of women from well-to-do families. The younger women who wanted to be involved in parish activities joined the Christian Mothers group. But all that has since changed, she says.
In 1949, Cardinal McGuigan asked Helen Walker, the first president of the CWL, Ontario Provincial Council to reorganize the CWL, “He felt there was a need for a Catholic organization that he could call upon when something needed to be done.” The CWL sub-divisions were organized on a parish basis and its membership widened as more women were drawn from the parishes.
Meanwhile, the influx of Hungarian refugees after the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 drew Mrs. Donovan to the Hungarian Relief Fund effort. Although she gives credit to the CWL members in setting up a clothing depot at St. Michael’s High School, which she recorded in a short history of the CWL Archdiocesan Council, her work with refugees and immigrants to the city had barely begun.
During her term of office as president of the CWL Archdiocesan Council form 1963 to 1965, she was appointed Provincial Convener of Immigration. Her involvement with refugees and immigrants from the Hungarians in the mid – ‘50s soon embraced other large immigrant groups such as Italians, the Portuguese, the Chinese, and later, the other ethnic communities. She worked closely with Monsignor Claude Mulvihill, founder of the Catholic Immigration Bureau and who was Archdiocesan director of the league from 1954 to 1960.
As diocesan president, she started the adoption program for the Catholic Children’s Aid Society, which was later expanded.
But none of her achievements, according to Mrs. Donovan, would have been possible were it not for the unsung volunteers who have helped keep the organizations she was involved with going: “They’re the ones who should be recognized.”
Article taken from The Catholic Register, February 18, 1989 and pictures from our archival binder.
Fr. Denis Carneiro, a priest representing the Archdiocese of Bhopal, India will preach at the masses on September 6th & 7th as part of the Toronto Diocese Mission Co-op program – envelopes will be provided for this special collection.
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