Lurana Mary Francis White (1870-1935) was a Roman Catholic nun, a convert from the Episcopal Church, and co-founder of the Society of the Atonement.

Her family remembered that as a girl she admired St. Thomas Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury, whom King Henry II martyred for his faith in 1170.

[7] In 1894, when she was 24, she told her family she wanted to join the Anglican Community of the Sisters of the Holy Child Jesus, and, very much against her mother's will, she entered the congregation in 1895 as a novice.

Through lay friends of her original community she learned of the work of an Episcopal priest, Father Lewis Wattson, who ministered in Omaha, Nebraska.

They began a correspondence that continued from early 1896 to late summer 1898, and agreed to establish respective congregations for women and men under one umbrella, based on the vow of poverty.

Then on December 15 they formally founded the Society of Atonement at what is now Graymoor, New York, focusing on Christian unity between Episcopalians and Catholics.

Two years later, in 1909, after much discernment and negotiation, the Society of the Atonement became the first religious community since the Reformation to collectively enter the Roman Catholic Church.

"[19] A public argument ensued with the rector of the Church of the Advent in Boston over who owned the property at Graymoor, and eventually the donors demanded it back, with that initial handshake agreement underlying much of the confusion.

The sisters prepared to move into a building on the part of the property they did own, because Mother White did not wish to appeal and violate her vow of poverty.

Just as the sisters were preparing to move, Hamilton Fish II intervened to broker a purchase, and after much legal wrangling, Mother White received the quit-claim deed in exchange for her payment of $2,000 on June 11, 1918.

This lives on in this body, and also in the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, observed each January by Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox churches.