Servant of God Catherine Doherty

Catherine de Hueck Doherty (née Ekaterina Fyodorovna Kolyschkina; August 15, 1896 – December 14, 1985) was a Russian-born Catholic activist who founded the Madonna House Apostolate in 1947. She was a pioneer in the struggle for interracial justice, spiritual writer, lecturer, and spiritual mother to priests and laity. She was born in Russia to wealthy parents and came to Canada after escaping the Russian Revolution. During the Great Depression, she founded Friendship House, which served the poor in Toronto. After its closure, she opened Friendship House in Harlem, New York, in 1938, serving the needs of the black community there. In 1947, Catherine and her second husband, Irish American journalist Eddie Doherty, moved to the village of Combermere, Ontario, where the Madonna House Apostolate, a Catholic community of laymen, laywomen, and priests, developed and flourished. Among her more than thirty books, many of which blended a profound spirituality of East and West, was the spiritual classic Poustinia. "A woman in love with God," she strived and taught others to live the Gospel without compromise. Doherty's cause for beatification has been introduced in 2000, granting her the title Servant of God. Shortly before the turn of the century, Catherine was born in Nizhni Novgorod, Russia, to Theodore (Fyodor) and Emma (Thomson) Kolyschkine. Baptized in the Russian Orthodox Church, she received from her parents an upbringing permeated with the riches of Russian Orthodox spirituality as well as an openness to other religions, especially Catholicism. Catherine spent much of her childhood in countries where her father, a successful international insurance agent, had been posted. In Egypt she attended the convent school of the Sisters of Sion, where some of the key aspects of her spirituality were formed. The family returned to Saint Petersburg in 1910, and two years later, at the age of 15, Catherine married her first cousin, Baron Boris de Hueck (1889–1947).