The Beginning
In 1869, Mary Caroline Dannat Starr’s heart opened wide to the “cry of the children” living on the streets of New York City. Even as she sought deepening spirituality to cope with vast suffering and multiple tragedies in her life as child, wife and mother, she gathered women friends to help respond to the needs of abandoned, neglected and abused girls and their families.
With Monsignor Thomas Preston supporting Mary Starr's spiritual journey, in 1870, she created the Association for Befriending Children. She also opened the House of the Holy Family in lower Manhattan, a residence with outreach services providing education and employment preparation. It's home-like environment offered hundreds of immigrant children and their families the support they needed to to heal and grow, and move on into independent and productive lives. The founding mission had begun. A few years later, on July 2, 1886, a new religious institute, the Sisters of the Divine Compassion (RDCs), was officially founded. Mary Caroline Dannat Starr, names Mother Mary Veronica, became its first General Superior. The mission of compassion would continue.
During the early 1900s, as the Congregation grew, the Sisters continued to expand their educational mission. In responding to the needs of the growing Catholic population, the Sisters built Good Counsel Elmentary and High School, as well as Good Counsel College/College of White Plains (which merged with Pace University in 1977), on their White Plains property. 
In the 1940s and 1950s, as large groups of women joined religious communities in the United States, the ever increasing RDCs lived and worked throughout the Archdiocese of New York, opening, administering and staffing numerous parish schools in Manhattan, the Bronx, Westchester, Putnam and other northern counties, while also providing education and pastoral ministries to the adults and families. 
New Ministries Evolve