Mother Evangelista Fitzpatrick

Mother Evangelista Fitzpatrick was born in Dublin in 1822, according to Edmundo Murray's dictionary entry, which gives her death as 1885 in Australia. She was a Sister of Mercy from the order's Baggot Street house. Fr Anthony Fahy had asked for Irish nuns through his sister, prioress of the Carmelite convent in Loughrea, who persuaded the Mercy leadership to open a school and run an Irish hospital. At Fahy's invitation Fitzpatrick led the sisters who reached Buenos Aires on 24 February 1856. Murray and María José Roger say there were seven; a search summary of Mercy International says four.

From 1857 the sisters ran a school for Irish girls on Riobamba Street, linked to Fahy's Irish College. Murray lists the Irish Hospital (1858), an orphanage, a school for poor children of all nationalities and a convent at Mercedes (1872). Roger adds a house at Chascomús, Saints Peter and Paul, opened in 1865 and closed after the cholera of 1868, and Saint Joseph's at Mercedes in 1872.

The cost was high. Murray records threats and deaths, and says seventeen sisters had died by 1878; search summaries say one sister died of cholera in 1868. In February 1880 Fitzpatrick moved the community to Adelaide, and the Sacred Heart sisters took over Riobamba that May. The Sisters of Mercy returned to Buenos Aires in August 1890, and by the end of 1902 they had taken over St Bridget's, the school opened by the Irish Catholic Association in 1899.