Bishop David Kagan, erected the St. Mary Sisters of Bismarck, North Dakota, in response to the desire of women, heeding Christ's personal call, to give themselves completely to Christ through religious consecration, the profession of the evangelical counsels, and to live together in fraternal charity. Mother Mary Joseph, the first member of this new institute, is training the Sisters that lives according to the Spirit of St. Dominic. The St. Mary Sisters are founded to form women into missionaries that go out wherever God calls to begin now Houses of Formation and spread the radiance of religious life beginning in the Northern Great Plains.

The St. Mary Sisters’ novitiate officially begins with two women receiving the habit.