WOMEN MISSIONARIES TO BOLIVIA
This exhibit recounts missionary experiences in La Paz from 1960 through artifacts of the Sisters of the Most Precious Blood of O’Fallon, Missouri, preserved in the Archdiocese of Saint Louis Archive. These Sisters have served in Bolivia since 1959.
The missions to La Paz, located in western Bolivia within the Andean Mountains, started with plans and prayers. This 1948 map of the City of La Paz (below) is printed in warm tones and carefully segmented blocks, with faded images of the city filling the background. It was printed in La Paz and used in 1960 by the Sisters of the Most Precious Blood of O’Fallon, Missouri, and the clergy of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, an international association that supports Catholics on mission globally. The missionaries used this map to propose building new churches in Cristo Rey, located within the metropolitan zone of La Paz, and marked in red, blue, and black pen. Proposals to build new churches were sent to the Archbishop of Saint Louis, Reverend Joseph E. Ritter (1892-1967), who approved and funded the designs and costs. This map, the blueprint sketches and appraisals for the Cristo Rey Church newbuild, and several 1960 letters of correspondence between missionaries in La Paz and Archbishop Ritter are preserved in the Archdiocese of Saint Louis Archive. As an example, you may read Archbishop Ritter’s response to a Cristo Rey building plan from February 29, 1960, in which he expresses concern for the seating capacity, allocation of funds, and number of exits.
The map presents the city as a legible, navigable, and rationalized space. With neatly gridded streets, color-coded neighborhoods, traced routes across the urban landscape, and churches marked with small black crosses, the map reveals missionary efforts for organized movement and presence.
Looking closer, the map reveals more about the lived missionary experience. Along its edges are small pinholes, and its surface is marked by deep creases. These features are evidence of folding, carrying, unfolding again, making new marks, hanging up, and repeated consulting. The map was not a decorative object or a single-use reference, but was handled, studied, and likely referenced when planning construction, educational, and ecclesiastical projects.
Certain routes have been emphasized, traced repeatedly in different-colored pens. These routes converge around the parish boundary of Cristo Rey, revealing the missionaries’ plans for where and how to be present in La Paz. The map is less of a representation of the city and more a projection onto it, a vision of how the city may be entered, navigated, and ultimately transformed.
The map reveals intention. Before Sisters walked the streets, practiced their Spanish, learned the rhythms of Latin American feast days and festivals, the city and the Latin American mission existed first in this form: folded, ordered, and marked for movement. The women who carried and used this map did not arrive unprepared. Their time in La Paz was planned, with routes to follow, boundaries to learn, and institutions to locate.
“Roughing It”: The Missionary Imagination
As with most propositions, the women missionaries who traveled to La Paz had experiences that could never be planned. The Sisters in La Paz in the twentieth century represented several orders, including the Sisters of the Most Precious Blood of O’Fallon, who established their mission in Bolivia in 1959 and continue to serve there, and the Sisters of Loretto. The map represents their hopes and objectives. But their letters, preserved at the Archdiocese of Saint Louis Archive, reveal how their on-the-ground experiences were actualized.
Father Andrew Bernard Schierhoff (1922-1986) was a St. Louis priest who lived out his life for nearly three decades in Bolivia, where he was affectionately called Padre Bernardo. On June 17, 1960, Father Schierhoff wrote to Archbishop Ritter in St. Louis from Viacha, located just outside La Paz (letter shown on the right). The letter describes the “rat race” of their local activities and ecclesiastical responsibilities. The priests were occupied officiating marriages, acclimating new clergy arriving in Bolivia from St. Louis, renovating new houses, and building a new convent for the Nuns. He remarks that, “With all this generosity and kindness from St. Louis, we will have to stop writing those long pleading letters.” In the meantime, they are “anxious that the Precious Blood Nuns come here,” meaning, to Viacha after the convent is complete, as they had been “helping us by coming out every week and for big Feasts” from La Paz.
Embedded within this report is a telling phrase. When discussing the Sisters of the Most Precious Blood, Father Schierhoff writes, “There is always a lot of work for them, which makes the Nuns happy, and they have to ‘rough it’ which corresponds with the ordinary idea of mission work which most of us have.”
This was not unintentional language. This phrase showcases a vision of mission work grounded in simplicity, sacrifice, and a chosen hardship. To “rough it” was to embrace a long-standing ideal in Catholic missionary culture, one that valued austerity, resilience, and a willingness to live with less. It suggested a stripping away of comfort to draw closer to both the people in the mission’s province and a deeper spiritual purpose. One way in which women missionaries in Latin America repeatedly experienced “roughing it” was through altitude sickness. The elevation disparity between St. Louis and the Andean mountains led to varying degrees of illness, marked by nausea, headache, insomnia, and reduced coordination. Their letters frequently refer to missionaries on altitude leave, a period of recovery at a lower altitude. Nonetheless, within the framework of Catholic missionary culture, this hardship was not merely expected but also welcomed and meaningful.
The letter, like many others in the Archdiocese of Saint Louis Archives, discusses building projects, property acquisitions, and the logistics of establishing a convent and school in La Paz. Fr. Schierhoff expresses their need for skilled labor, negotiations over land, careful financial estimates, and long-term educational goals for the Sisters to realize. This reveals the balance between planning and infrastructure: the Sisters entered a prepared mission, but their ideals of simplicity and “rough” living coexisted with a responsibility to shape Bolivia through sustainable, organized institutions.
Sisters of the Most Precious Blood of O’Fallon in the Andes (Bolivia) ; Archdiocese of Saint Louis Archive
The 1948 map of La Paz outlined where the mission was planned; the letters exchanged between La Paz and St. Louis reported its fruition; and the sisters determined whether any of it could actually function. On September 7, 1960, Fr. Schierhoff described the long-awaited arrival of four Lauritas Sisters of Colombia who came “just in time to help with the closing of the Mission here in Viacha” and celebrate the Nativity of Our Blessed Mother. His tone shows astonishment for their work, adaptability, and authority, as they are “all very small and light but work like beavers”. According to Fr. Schierhoff, the Sisters’ presence enabled them to “stir up lots more dust now,” the missionary efforts progressed “a lot easier now with the Sisters helping.” The Superior wrote immediately to request two more. Fr. Schierhoff’s sentiments are meant as praise but also reveal the immediate, visible impacts of the labor of women missionaries.
Each sister brought a distinct specialty: one was trained as a nurse, another as an organist, and a third could speak Aymara, an indigenous Andean language. Fr. Schierhoff asserted that it “seems like we got the very best.” Within days of arriving in Bolivia, the women were not simply assisting the mission; they were expanding and redefining its reach by teaching in the schools and leading devotions in the community. Although arriving for the closing of a mission, the sisters integrated into its most public and celebratory moments. The reception drew over a thousand children, along with town officials, civil and military authorities, and the army band. They were central to the festivity, not as symbolic figures, but as workers whose presence made large gatherings, instruction, and pastoral care possible.
Their impact was not only visible to those in attendance but measurable and shared through letters. In the September 7 letter, Fr. Schierhoff reports “the results of the Mission. We had over a thousand Holy Communions Sunday, the most we ever had in one day. 896 Holy Communions of children. 400 of those were First Holy Communions. In the afternoon we had 392 confirmations of Children and adults spread over four ceremonies.” These numbers are evidence of success, but also of scale. The mission had grown, and that growth stemmed from the labor of women missionaries to Bolivia. Their teaching, organizing, and supplementing the workload demanded by confessions, sick calls, and the preparation of bodies and souls for sacramental life permitted the celebration recorded in Fr. Schierhoff’s letter and the mission’s closing. The mission, once planned against a map, was fulfilled by a workforce of women capable of multiplying and sustaining it.
Mud, Jokes, and Feast Days: The Textures of Daily Life
On January 11, 1960, Sisters of the Most Precious Blood of O’Fallon Mary Christine Foeller and Mary Christopher Fiala, with the help of Sister John Bosco Saunders, the scribe, sent a letter to Bishop Flavin in St. Louis detailing their unexpected experiences in Bolivia and wishing him a Merry Christmas.
In La Paz, the rainy season had turned the roads into “the ooziest kind of mud about shoe tops deep and when dry is an excellent substitute for cement.” Such conditions made even the short walk to Mass an ordeal, with the journey resembling more of a slide down the hill. This letter, unlike others, which are geared more toward celebrating the mission or planning logistics, captures the humor and personality of the Sisters on mission in Bolivia.
At one point, the sisters joke about the cold, damp weather, writing, “we didn’t have a lot of fireworks here for the welcoming of the New Year… most probably the apparent limited use of fire-works was due to the ‘dam’ oops, I mean damp weather.” This playful slip captures both discomfort, although welcomed by the “rough it” missionary culture, and charisma. This Christmas card does not deploy the jargon of formal reports, but reflects the celebratory attitudes the women maintained amidst the challenges. The story additionally reflects the significance of New Year’s fireworks to the sisters, a tradition of La Paz that resonated with their own memories of holidays at home.
Reading across the sources preserved by the Archdiocese of Saint Louis Archives, a story emerges of women engaging in and enhancing a Catholic life already in motion. The highlighted letters, along with others, describe the public spectacles of feast days, processions, and bullfights that united the women missionaries with the local Catholic community. Processions, such as the Corpus Christi celebration detailed in Father Schierhoff’s June 17, 1960 letter to Archbishop Ritter, wound through the city’s plazas with an army band, school children, and large crowds, transforming ordinary streets into spaces of collective, multinational devotion. This visible, communal Catholicism marked the encounters that rewarded the “rough it” attitudes of women missionaries.
Communities gathered, not out of obligation, but as part of a shared religious culture that gave meaning to time and space. Feast days were not interruptions to daily life, but parts of its rhythm. The music, processionals, banners, and crowds were as much seen and heard as privately felt. The twentieth-century women missionaries in Bolivia did not arrive in a religious vacuum nor enact festivities in the city. Instead, they entered a nation where Catholicism was already public, communal, and alive, allowing them to participate, observe, and experience global Catholicism.
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Those interested in missions to various Latin American countries, the logistics of missions, inventories, missionary contracts, building plans, medicine, healing, and other facets of mission, should consider making an appointment with the Archdiocese of Saint Louis Archive in St. Louis, Missouri.