This is the story of a woman who, in the midst of unimaginable suffering, persevered in her Catholic faith.

Catherine Wolfe Donohue’s suffering began in her childhood. She was born in Ottawa, Illinois, in 1903. When Catherine was about 6 years old, her mother died. A few years later, her father also died, and Catherine went to live with her aunt and uncle. When Catherine was 14, her older brother passed away. 

This would be a heavy cross for anyone to carry: to lose three close family members in the first 14 years of life. But Catherine’s story was just beginning.

After graduating from high school, Catherine got a job painting the numbers on watch faces. The watches that Catherine and her co-workers painted had glow-in-the-dark numbers, a feature made possible by the discovery of radium, the new wonder element.

The health benefits of this amazing element were touted everywhere. Radium tonics were popular among the wealthy; the girls who worked at the Radium Dial Company plant were told that the radium they worked with would “put roses on their cheeks.” So Catherine and the other women didn’t worry when they were taught to point the bristles of their paintbrushes by twirling them between their lips. In fact, they felt lucky to get a little bit of this cure-all that celebrities were paying so much money for. 

Time passed. Many of Catherine’s co-workers began to experience various health problems. She herself developed a severe limp that made walking difficult. Doctors couldn’t tell her what the problem was. After nine years of painting watch dials, Catherine was fired from Radium Dial. The reason? Her employer was concerned that Catherine’s limp was causing talk among the other employees. Catherine had been fired for being sick.

About a year later, Catherine married Tom Donohue. Soon after that, she had a son, Tommy. She was very grateful for her blessings, though she was still unable to obtain a diagnosis for her health problems. Her symptoms only got worse — and they were not average medical issues. She suffered from anemia and bone cancer. Her hips locked so that she could no longer kneel in church. As the illness progressed, her skin became so delicate that it bruised at the lightest touch. Her teeth and jawbone deteriorated until part of her jawbone fell out of her mouth. She discovered that her body literally glowed in the dark.

Finally, she was officially diagnosed with radium poisoning — a fatal and irreversible condition. During this terrifying time, she became pregnant and gave birth to her second child, Mary Jane. Catherine stopped all treatment for her illness during her pregnancy for fear of harming her baby. 

Considering the circumstances, it seems that Catherine would have been justified in simply living the rest of her life in as much peace as she could get, spending every possible second with her family before the inevitable end. But there was a problem: the Radium Dial company knew exactly what they were doing to the women who worked for them. The dishonesty of the company executives was brazen, as they ignored medical evidence that radium was harming their workforce, and even falsified the results of autopsies. The company was still employing girls to paint watches with radium, assuring them that it was perfectly safe.

The only way to hold the company accountable for its actions was with a lawsuit. By all accounts, Catherine was a very private person. She was reserved and quiet, wanting simply to be a good wife and mother. So when Catherine filed suit against Radium Dial, it could not have been an easy decision. Radium Dial was a beloved employer, one that helped the economy of Ottawa when jobs were scarce. Suing the company would bring a lot of embarrassing publicity and extra hassle at a time when Catherine needed every ounce of her strength.

But Catherine was determined. She had two reasons for suing: first, in the midst of the Great Depression, with her husband out of work, she needed money for medical bills.

Second, she wanted to protect others. As she herself said, “There’s no hope for me. I have only to wait and I’ll be gone. But if I win this fight, my children will be safe and my friends who worked with me and contracted the same disease will win too.” 

This fight came at a great personal cost to her. Catherine’s privacy was destroyed as her story filled the newspapers. Due to the publicity given to her case, she received a plethora of letters of all sorts, containing everything from sweet expressions of sympathy and money to buy flowers, to suggestions that she was lucky to get warning of her death (as opposed to dying suddenly), and warnings that she should “repent.”

But the loss of privacy, painful as it must have been, was not the greatest cost of the lawsuit: By suing, Catherine risked weakening her already shaky hold on life. A newspaper article describes her husband’s reaction: “‘All this is too late for us. But Catherine wants to do all she can to help the others. Even if the excitement — ‘ Here his voice broke. Too much strain will bring death, her doctors have warned.”

Even if it meant she would die sooner, Catherine wanted to protect those whom she would leave behind.

With all this suffering, how did Catherine carry on? A reporter asked that very question of Catherine and her friends. Catherine responded, “By our faith in God,” surprising the reporter with the “startling effect and strength from the woman in the bed.”

Catherine’s confident answer came from the depths of her heart. As the trial dragged on and Catherine’s health continued to decline, she wrote a letter to a priest named Father James Keane, who had become famous all over the country for publicizing a perpetual novena to Our Lady of Sorrows: 

Dear Father Keane:

The doctors tell me I will die. But I mustn’t. I have too much to live for — a husband who loves me and two children I adore. But, the doctors say, radium poisoning is eating away my bones and shrinking my flesh to the point where medical science has given me up as ‘one of the living dead’.

They say there is nothing that can save me — nothing but a miracle. And that’s what I want — a miracle. Do you think Our Lady of Sorrows would have compassion on me?

The fame of your novena has reached me here, and I know it could help when all else has failed.

Would it be asking too much of you to request those making the novena to remember me in their prayers — to ask the Blessed Virgin for a miracle? I know that’s asking a lot, but didn’t Our Lord himself say, ‘Ask and You shall receive, seek and you shall find?’

I am sure, if the devout remember me, a miracle is not impossible. But if that is not God’s Will, perhaps your prayers will obtain for me the blessing of a happy death.

Please,

Mrs. Catherine Wolfe Donohue

This remarkable letter does not just demonstrate Catherine’s great faith in the power of prayer; it also shows that Catherine was resigned to the possibility that her prayers for a miracle would go unanswered. She accepted the fact that she might die. Even in the midst of undeserved, willfully-inflicted suffering, Catherine entrusted herself entirely to the will of God. 

Catherine’s letter to Father Keane made the newspapers. Thousands of people across the country prayed for her recovery. The prayers helped. She improved for a short time. Catherine was still alive when the results of the lawsuit came back: she had won, and been awarded some financial assistance.

Upon hearing the news, she said, “I am so happy. I may not live to enjoy the pension myself, but the lump sums will help my husband, who has been out of work for many months. I hope the lawyers don’t upset it. I hope the other girls get something before they are in the same condition as I am.”

Amid great pain, Catherine was still able to say that she was happy. And her first thought was for her husband and her friends. They were her reason for living, her motivation for fighting.

“I want a claim to life, and to stave off the end for the sake of my husband and children,” she said, when a reporter asked her what she hoped to get out of the lawsuit. “I would spend any money I got on medical care and also contribute a part of what I got to other helpless, penniless girls, to help them fight this case and reimburse the lawyer who has spent his own money to make its medical and legal presentation possible.” 

Catherine was begging for a miracle not out of fear: “I am not afraid to die — but I hope for some miracle that may spare me. I hope that at the end I will be free from pain,” she said. She simply loved her family and wanted more time with them, both for their sake, and for her own. 

“We’re so happy together,” she said of her family. “As long as we’re together it doesn’t seem so bad. We just pretend I’m the way I was when Tom married me.”

But Catherine trusted that, no matter the answer to her prayers, God would see her through whatever lay ahead. She loved to be reminded of his presence: she fingered her scapular medal as she testified in court, explaining how, when she became too ill to kneel in church, she received Communion at her house. She prayed the Rosary nearly every day. When some sisters brought a relic of the True Cross to her house, Catherine wrote joyfully to a friend that “it was almost like having God in the house with me.”

That doesn’t mean she had perfect peace. She was often lonely, scared and frustrated. “People are afraid to talk to me now,” she said. “Sometimes it makes me terribly lonesome — they act as though I’m already a corpse. It’s hard to have so many people around and still be so alone.” But as Radium Dial appealed the court’s decision, and the legal battle continued, Catherine did not despair — she persevered in faith. 

In the end, Catherine did not get her miracle. Instead, she received the other grace she had asked for: she died a happy death, after receiving the Last Rites.

At the age of 34, this woman who had grown up without a mother was leaving her own children motherless. This woman who had watched her father deal with the grief of his wife’s death was forced to leave her own husband to experience the same sorrow.

Catherine’s body was laid out in her house, where sisters from the parish school she had attended prayed the Rosary by her casket, just as Catherine had done almost every day while she was alive.

It is so easy to become angry at the terrible injustice inflicted upon Catherine and other dial-painters who suffered such painful deaths at the hands of company executives who knew the truth about radium poisoning. When I see a picture of Catherine’s children, aged 3 and 5, kneeling in prayer before a crucifix after their mother’s death, I want to go back in time and knock the paintbrush from the hand of every dial-painter. As Catherine’s husband said, “We’ve got humane societies for dogs and cats, but they won’t do anything for human beings. These women have souls.” 

But Catherine’s story is not about injustice. It is not about despair. It is not even about having the courage to fight for what’s right. It is about faith. Faith that the will of God will be done. Faith that suffering will one day end. Faith that this life is not all that there is. 

Catherine’s sufferings were tremendous. But she did not despair. She prayed. She hoped. She trusted. And she accepted when her prayers seemed to go unanswered.

“I am to make a nine-day novena in honor of our dear Lord’s sufferings,” she wrote to a friend. “It rests in his hands, dear. Pray for me, won’t you?” 

“It rests in his hands.” That is the enduring message of Catherine’s story. Catherine’s fight for justice affected the course of history. After her death, and despite multiple appeals from the company, her case was finally won for good. From paving the way for workers’ rights legislation, to increasing public awareness of the dangers of radioactivity so that more caution would be used in nuclear research, Catherine’s positive impact on future generations is immeasurable. But even if Catherine’s lawsuit had been lost, her story would still be worth telling. 

Catherine Wolfe Donohue, orphaned by the age of 14, wrongfully fired, willfully poisoned, suffering so much pain that (as a family member recalled) she had no strength to cry out, but could only moan, could still say, “God has sure blessed me with a good husband and lovely children. They are worth all the pain and suffering after all.”

The peace and joy of this statement, made amid unimaginable circumstances, shines through the years, as this tiny woman, who weighed less than 60 pounds at the time of her death, reminds me that no matter the trials, God is with us. No matter the suffering, there are still blessings to be grateful for. And no matter how dark this life may seem, “it rests in his hands.” For the life to come is “worth all the pain and suffering after all.”

Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord, and may perpetual light shine upon her. And may the souls of the faithful departed through the mercy of God rest in peace.

(For further reading, please see The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women by Kate Moore. I’m also grateful for help provided by the Pearl Payne Collection at the LaSalle County Historical Society in Utica, Illinois, and the Catherine Wolfe Donohue Collection at Northwestern University; and for a personal interview with Kathleen Donohue Cofoid, Catherine Wolfe Donohue’s great-niece.)