From a study of the events of these fifteen years of searching for the will of God, it would seem that providence was preparing Sister Mary Ignatius for the real task that lay ahead. Purified by trials, she was learning that complete self-emptying, that utter indifference to success and honor which, as a foundress, she would need.  Like Christ and St. Francis she was a pilgrim living in joyful dependence on God during the long novitiate of her early missionary endeavours.  At each new stage of her journey she continued to say her 'nunc coepi'.  (Let us begin).

When God calls free human beings to enter a covenant, God remains faithful to it and now in the designs of providence the time was ripe for the hopes and plans of Sister Mary Ignatius to be realised.  The year was 1873, the place Belle Prairie, Minnesota, U.S.A., when our branch of the Franciscan family known as Missionary Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculate Conception became a reality in a small one-roomed log cabin..  The initial years of guiding the young community were years that called for a depth and breadth of vision that could only have come from a profound faith and a very deep sense that this call to mission was from God and would therefore be sustained by God through even the severest trials. By 1878, the Belle Prairie community could count six professed sisters and a flourishing little novitiate.  Her success only incited her missionary spirit and she turned her attention to the black population of the South, who at that time, were the most underprivileged, deprived and humiliated inhabitants of the United States.  By the summer of 1879 Mother Mary Ignatius and a small community of nine were ministering on the Isle of Hope, Diocese of Savannah, Georgia.  In obedience to the Pope, the novitiate was established in Rome, a symbolic action testifying that our mission was not confined to the peoples of any particular race or country but that it was to extend to the universal Church.

Following the example of Mother Mary Ignatius, our sisters through the years have continued in prayerful discernment to search for the will of God before accepting commitments in the various countries.  In this spirit, in 1898, four years after the death of the foundress on May 6, 1894 a mission was initiated in Fayoum, Egypt. Likewise in 1912 a mission was opened in Montreal, Canada; in 1930 one in Kedron, Australia.  In 1933 a center for vocations to the Institute was inaugurated in Bloomfield, Ireland; in 1949 Australia extended its missionary activities to Papua New Guinea.  In 1970 our sisters from the United States accepted a new challenge in bringing their apostolic services to Bolivia and in 1985 to Peru.  In 1991 the sisters in Canada responded to new missionary challenges in Africa by sending sisters to Chad.

In 1964 twenty-six Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, the spiritual daughters of Mother Mary Elizabeth Lockhart, of Braintree, England, amalgamated with our Institute thus uniting the two communities whose foundresses, Mother Mary Ignatius Hayes and Mother Mary Elizabeth Lockhart, had been closely associated.  In fact, it had been in Mother Mary Elizabeth's community, directed by Cardinal Manning at Bayswater, England, that Mother Mary Ignatius had had her first experience of religious life in the Catholic Church.