The Catequistas

The parish of Our Lady of Guadalupe, on Navigation Boulevard in the Second Ward, gave rise to a Catholic religious order made up of Mexican American women. The church held its first Mass on August 18, 1912, as Houston's first parish for Spanish-speaking Catholics, at a time when other congregations in the city seated Mexican families in the back pews or turned them away. Sister Mary Benitia Vermeersch, a Belgian-born nun of the Congregation of Divine Providence, was assigned to its school in 1915 because she spoke Spanish, and under her leadership enrollment grew from 85 pupils to 428 by 1935. Sister Benitia recruited young women of the parish to carry religious lessons to Mexican children attending the city's public schools. Organized around 1930, first as the Society of Saint Teresa, the group became the Missionary Catechists of Divine Providence. The historian Natalie Garza describes it as the first order of its kind in the United States, founded and made up primarily of ethnic Mexicans. Its members called themselves catequistas, wore a black pleated dress with white collar and cuffs, and rode the streetcars to teach in Spanish on porches, in backyards and in small rooms, often fifteen to twenty children at a time. By 1935 forty-one catequistas were teaching more than 1,000 children at fifteen centers, and that year a benefactor funded Providence Home as their residence.

Sister Benitia was transferred to San Antonio in 1938, and the parish dedicated a monument to her on May 22 of that year. The catechists she organized were recognized by the Holy See in 1946 as a branch of the Sisters of Divine Providence, and approved as a fully autonomous congregation in 1989.