Rome in 1855

In the early months of 1855, Sarah Peter, a 54-year-old widow of means from Cincinnati, Ohio, was touring France and Italy. A philanthropist keenly interested in the arts, she had recently established the Philadelphia Design School for Women, which survives today as the Moore College of Art and Design. In Europe, she was gathering up information about artwork and already successful institutions that taught art and design.

While abroad, Mrs. Peter also found herself drawn to Catholicism—something that ran counter to prejudices she had carried with her since childhood as an elite Episcopalian with many socially prominent Unitarians in her circles, too.

Born Sarah Worthington, her WASP identity could hardly be stronger. Her father, Thomas Worthington, was the sixth Governor of Ohio. Her first, late husband, Edward King, was the son of a Founding Father—Rufus King of New York, after whom her son, a Harvard graduate and a future university president, was named. And her second, more recently deceased husband, William Peter, was a British Whig parliamentarian who was Queen Victoria’s Consul at Philadelphia from 1840 to 1853.

Still, by February of 1855 Mrs. Peter had overcome enough of her native resistance to all things Catholic to be able to respond to hymns and prayers she heard intoned in a church in Rome with the remarks, “Such wails of melody as seem to draw forth the very soul in penitential tears…. [T]he English [i.e. Anglican] service…seems cold after it.” In the letter she wrote to her son at the time, she added that she had befriended several high-ranking Catholic churchmen in Rome and found their conversation agreeable and instructive. In the capital city of the worldwide “Romish Church,” she confessed to her son, she was surprised to “breathe a congenial and kindred atmosphere, not excited, but calm and satisfying.”

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