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GLOBAL HISTORIES OF EDUCATION
Irish Nuns and Education in
the Anglophone World
A Transnational History
Deirdre Raftery
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Global Histories of Education
Series Editors
Christian Ydesen
Department of Culture and Learning
Aalborg University
Aalborg, Denmark
Eugenia Roldan Vera
Cinvestav-Coapa
Mexico City, Estado de México, Mexico
Klaus Dittrich
Literature and Cultural Studies
Education University of Hong Kong
Tai Po, Hong Kong
Linda Chisholm
Education Rights and Transformation
University of Johannesburg
Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa
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We are very pleased to announce the ISCHE Global Histories of Education
book series. The International Standing Conference for the History of
Education has organized conferences in the field since 1978. Thanks to
our collaboration with Palgrave Macmillan we now offer an edited book
series for the publication of innovative scholarship in the history of
education.
This series seeks to engage with historical scholarship that analyzes education within a global, world, or transnational perspective. Specifically, it
seeks to examine the role of educational institutions, actors, technologies
as well as pedagogical ideas that for centuries have crossed regional and
national boundaries. Topics for publication may include the study of educational networks and practices that connect national and colonial
domains, or those that range in time from the age of Empire to decolonization. These networks could concern the international movement of
educational policies, curricula, pedagogies, or universities within and
across different socio-political settings. The ‘actors’ under examination
might include individuals and groups of people, but also educational apparatuses such as textbooks, built-environments, and bureaucratic paperwork situated within a global perspective. Books in the series may be single
authored or edited volumes. The strong transnational dimension of the
Global Histories of Education series means that many of the volumes
should be based on archival research undertaken in more than one country and using documents written in multiple languages. All books in the
series will be published in English, although we welcome English-language
proposals for manuscripts which were initially written in other languages
and which will be translated into English at the cost of the author. All
submitted manuscripts will be blind peer-reviewed with editorial decisions
to be made by the ISCHE series editors who themselves are appointed by
the ISCHE Executive Committee to serve three to five year terms.
Full submissions should include: (1) a proposal aligned to the Palgrave
Book Proposal form (downloadable here); (2) the CV of the author(s) or
editor(s); and, (3) a cover letter that explains how the proposed book fits
into the overall aims and framing of the ISCHE Global Histories of
Education book series. Proposals and queries should be addressed to
bookseries@ische.org. Preliminary inquiries are welcome and encouraged.
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Deirdre Raftery
Irish Nuns and
Education in the
Anglophone World
A Transnational History
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Preface
The idea for this book came about almost by accident. As a historian of
education, my research focus was on nineteenth-century higher education
for women in Ireland and England, and on the expansion of mass education in Ireland in the nineteenth century. Women religious (nuns and sisters) played a small, though significant, role in the former and a more
significant role in the latter, yet I had not looked at them as a research
subject until fifteen years ago when I was introduced to the Irish and
French archives of the Infant Jesus Sisters. I was particularly interested in
their records of how and why this French congregation had come to
Ireland in 1909 to open a convent and novitiate in County Cork. In their
records, their need to ‘grow vocations’ to supply English-speaking nuns
for their schools in South East Asia was articulated openly and clearly as
the reason for the Irish foundation. Indeed, Ireland had been seen as a rich
recruitment ground for many French orders from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Like many researchers who become curious about a phenomenon, I wanted to know more. I was especially interested in the
process by which French religious became established in Ireland and how
they managed to attract young women to religious life. In due course, I
became interested in how they competed for recruits with the native
orders, such as the Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary,
the Sisters of Charity and the Sisters of Mercy, and how all of these orders
continued to grow even though they were sending large numbers of novices and nuns out of the country.
Many scholars agree that there was a ‘devotional revolution’ in
nineteenth-­century Ireland and identify the impact of churchmen such as
v
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vi
PREFACE
Cardinal Paul Cullen on the growth of the Catholic church at that time.
However, the history of this period in Ireland is incomplete without the
history of the women who were central to the growth of the church at that
time: women religious.
One of the fastest growth areas in women’s history, over the past two
decades, has been the history of women religious. Nuns/women religious
are now recognised as an important and legitimate subject for scholarly
research. A deeper knowledge of their lives and work can greatly add to
our understanding of women’s history, social history, the history of education, medical history and the history of the Catholic church. But this was
not always the case. In 2014, Bernadette McCauley surveyed the field in
American Catholic Studies 125 and concluded: ‘Good news—it is no longer necessary to introduce a discussion of the history of women religious
in the United States by noting … [its] historical neglect’. However, it is
worth considering the many reasons for which they had been traditionally
overlooked in scholarship, before discussing this volume and its contribution to research.
Some of the scholars cited in this book have proposed reasons why
women religious were traditionally left out of the wider historical narrative. Kathleen Fitzgerald has argued that women religious were ignored in
nineteenth-century women’s history, because the measures of their power
did not correspond with those of Protestant women in the same period.
Kathleen Sprows Cummings and Anne Braude have noted that historians
have shown a ‘squeamishness’ concerning writing about religious faith.
However, it is not possible for lay historians to write about nuns without
firstly recognising that they were women of faith. Understanding the
nature of a ‘religious vocation’ can be challenging for those of us who are
not women religious, and may have deterred historians from exploring
this aspect of women’s history, church history and the history of education
and healthcare. To research and analyse the contribution of nuns to these
areas, we have to become familiar with the language of religious life. This
includes specialist terminology, which is often in Latin or French. In different congregations, the same terminology can be used differently. A further complication is that specialist language used in religious life changed
across several hundred years.
If a lay scholar decides to work in this field, becoming familiar with the
language of religious life is only one step. Scholars also need access to
congregational archives, and this continues to be an obstacle to research.
As I have noted many times in talks and articles, convent archives are
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PREFACE
vii
private collections. Some religious orders are not in a position to prepare
their records for researchers or to facilitate access. Records are extant for
thousands of individual ‘houses’ belonging to hundreds of orders.
However, the cost of establishing an archive and appointing an archivist is
beyond the means of most communities, which are now declining in
members anyway. My experience of researching this book, over several
years and on four continents, offers some insight into the challenges that
women religious face when scholars ask for access to their records.
Sometimes a community will have appointed one of the sisters to look
after their archives. This person is usually an older woman who has several
other roles, including caring for older sisters. Welcoming a researcher
means that the sister has to take a few hours away from her ministry and
do her best to find what the scholar needs. The advanced age of women in
most congregations in the Global North means that it is not always possible for a congregation to assign anyone to the role of record keeper.
A solution that some religious orders have found is to bring all of their
records into one central location and create a major research collection,
employing professional archivists. In some instances, the records used in
this volume were located in centralised repositories. One such major
repository, used for researching this book, is that of the Society of the
Sacred Heart, in St Louis, Missouri. I also used the Mercy Congregational
Archives, in Dublin, and the Presentation Sisters Congregational Archive,
located at Nano Nagle Place in Cork. Other large centralised collections
that were consulted for this project were those of the Institute of the
Blessed Virgin Mary in Australia, Canada, Ireland and India, and the
records of the Sisters of Charity in Australia, which are at their purpose-­
built archives and heritage centre in Sydney. Access to collections that have
been brought together under one roof is a researcher’s joy. But it is still
necessary for scholars to gain access to much smaller collections, and for
this we have to rely on the goodwill and hospitality of nuns.
With the opening of some major archival collections to scholars, it has
become possible for lay historians to start to work in areas that had traditionally been the preserve of religious. The long tradition of hagiographical writing by ‘insiders’ has come to an end, in part because of the decline
in religious life and in part because priests and nuns have come to accept
that their histories have to be written by ‘outsiders’. While hagiographical
writings tended to present uncritical accounts of ‘important’ religious,
increasingly scholars are re-visiting the lives of those women and men to
ask new questions. They are also interested in the broader narratives
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viii
PREFACE
around religious life for women and explore areas such as the contribution
of women religious to healthcare, education, the civil rights movement of
the 1960s and feminism.
My interest in this broad research area and the fact that congregations
were increasingly opening their archives to lay scholars spurred me to
define an area that I believed merited attention: a study of Irish women
religious who worked in education around the globe in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. I discussed my ideas with several scholars,
including three historians who were also women religious. The biggest
challenge, they all agreed, was that this would be a very broad canvas.
‘Irish nuns went everywhere’, I was warned. The sheer size of their contribution would not be possible to compute, but it certainly would be worth
trying to understand how that expansion came about. It would also be
worthwhile to try to get some insights into how women religious experienced this period of expansion overseas.
To give readers a sense of the rate of growth at home, it is worth noting
here that communities of women religious grew very rapidly in number in
mid-nineteenth-century Ireland. In 1800, there were twelve houses and
four religious orders in Ireland; by 1900 there were 368 convents and 35
orders. Two scholars in particular have explored the growth of the conventual movement in nineteenth-century Ireland: Caitriona Clear and
Mary Peckham Magray. Their work is a rich source of scholarship on Irish
convent life and on the impact of women religious on society and on their
own church, and—as the bibliography to this book indicates—some other
scholars have added to their research. However, there was almost no
research on the hundreds—possibly thousands—of Irishwomen who had
left the country as nuns, novices or aspirants to religious life. Equally,
almost no scholarship mentioned women who had firstly emigrated from
Ireland and then later entered convents. These two broad cohorts of
women became my area for research and a first step was to trace them
through the entrance and profession records of a large sample of religious
orders. While social scientists may have clearly defined reasons for selecting a ‘sample’, historians often have to go where the sources are available.
In this instance, it turned out that it was possible to get access to sources
for many orders of women religious, both in Ireland and elsewhere. The
sources suggested that more Irish-born women religious went to North
America and Australia than to any other country. They were almost always
invited by a bishop or priest, and sometimes they were related to those
men or to other nuns with whom they were missioned. They were usually
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PREFACE
ix
made welcome because they provided a solution to the ‘problem’ of how
to provide schooling to the growing immigrant Catholic population. But
occasionally when Irishwomen entered congregations that had large numbers from other countries, such as Italy or France, they were only tolerated. Perhaps the power and influence of Irish bishops in some dioceses
may have been advantageous to Irish nuns, in ways that irritated their
French and Italian sisters.
Gathering evidence for the lives and work of Irish women religious
involved locating them within the records at archives in several parts of
France (Society of the Sacred Heart; Infant Jesus Sisters; Sisters of St
Louis); Rome (Marists; Society of the Sacred Heart); Canada (Presentations;
Loreto/IBVM); Australia (Sisters of Mercy; Sisters of Charity; Society of
the Sacred Heart; Sisters of St Joseph; Marists; Faithful Companions of
Jesus; Brigidines); India (Loreto/IBVM; Presentations); Singapore
(Infant Jesus Sisters); and USA (Society of the Sacred Heart; Ursulines;
IBVM; Congregation of St Joseph). Additionally, archival collections were
examined at the Pontifical Irish College, Rome; the Provincial Archives,
Newfoundland; the Diocesan Archives, Newfoundland; and the Women
and Leadership Archives, Loyola University, Chicago. Dozens of collections in Ireland were examined, including relevant papers at the Dublin
Diocesan Archives, the National Library of Ireland (Special Collections)
and the archives of University College Cork. The Irish archives of the
Presentations, Sisters of Mercy, Sisters of Charity, Infant Jesus Sisters,
Dominicans, Sisters of St Joseph of Cluny, Brigidines, Sisters of St Louis,
Marist Sisters, Ursuline Sisters and the Loreto/IBVM were all examined
at various times. All of these sent Irishwomen overseas to either make
foundations or serve in existing ministries. What was already known about
the Irish religious in these orders tended to be scanty. Most of their own
publications that charted their histories had been written by priests or
sisters in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For example, there were
biographies of a handful of those who had gone to America and Australia,
to make foundations, also mainly written by religious, but there was nothing to indicate the scale of the contribution of Irish women religious
whose apostolate was outside the country.
I decided to try to capture a record of the process whereby they were
involved in founding/expanding in schooling overseas in the period
1830–1930 approximately. The dates were determined by the fact that the
1830s saw the slow but steady start of recruitment from Ireland for overseas foundations and they mainly taught Catholic immigrants and worked
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PREFACE
in Catholic parishes and hospitals. By the 1930s, those foundations had
become well-established and were no longer relying on Irish religious.
Additionally, a ‘missionary movement’ had begun in Ireland and Irish
women were beginning to enter missionary congregations that had been
founded in the 1920s and 1930s, such as the Missionary Sisters of the
Holy Rosary and the Missionary Sisters of St Columban, both founded in
1924, and the Medical Missionaries of Mary, which was founded in 1937.
It is always important to signal what a book is about and what it is not
about. This book is influenced by women’s history and by the need to
uncover records of women’s lives. It attempts an exploration of how Irish
girls and women, especially in the nineteenth century, were recruited, prepared and sent overseas as teaching sisters and how they commenced the
project of expansion in education once they arrived in the countries to
which they had been sent. That is the scope of this book and that is what
I aimed to uncover through many years of combing through archival collections on four continents. The book is not about their spiritual lives, nor
is it about the reception and activity of Catholic missionaries in the colonial world. Both are worthy subjects for scholarship, but they are not the
purpose of this piece of scholarship.
This is a volume which hopes, nonetheless, to contribute something to
other research areas. For example, it offers something to the history of
travel through the discussion of ways in which nuns negotiated long journeys by sea, train, mule and on foot. Many nuns who left Ireland in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries kept travel diaries and some took
photographs. These were valuable sources for this research. The book also
offers new insights into aspects of the history of female education. It
uncovers ways in which the schooling that the nuns had received in Ireland
was eventually ‘repurposed’ in their overseas schools. For instance, by
looking closely at evidence for the education of some of the Loreto, Mercy
and Presentation nuns, it was possible to get a good idea of the subject
knowledge that they brought to America, Australia and India. Convent-­
educated women drew on their own schooling as they began teaching
overseas. Equally, girls who had attended the state-funded national school
system harnessed their elementary education in support of their teaching,
once they became nuns. Though some had completed their schooling
around the age of fourteen or fifteen, they had gained experience as classroom ‘monitors’ which proved very useful once they started to teach in
parochial schools and free schools in America and Australia, for example.
This aspect of the history of female education has not been explored
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PREFACE
xi
before and offers a new perspective on the impact of national schooling on
girls in nineteenth-century Ireland.
I was also interested in how the lives of women religious were part of
the wider histories of emigration, female domestic labour and the Irish
diaspora. Many Irish women who entered convents in America in the
1850s and 1860s had contributed to the process of chain migration. They
had worked in domestic service, either sending remittances home or supporting siblings who had also emigrated, before finally entering convents
themselves when in their thirties and forties. This slice of emigrant history
points to how women could find themselves homeless, unemployable and
in need of shelter. Some were not professed for many years, suggesting
that convent Superiors had some doubts about the legitimacy of the religious vocations of these women, but the value of their labour was rarely in
doubt. Some of the hardest work in convents was done by middle-aged
Irish immigrant women who knocked at convent doors in New York,
Chicago and Philadelphia and offered themselves as lay sisters.
Like all books, this volume is limited in its scope. It can only offer a
window on the lives of some Irish women and it focusses on the
Anglophone world. While the overriding aim was to start the process of
finding them and placing them within a wider education context, there are
many other aspects of their history that have not been approached in this
volume. Some are being addressed by other scholars or will interest future
scholars. Additionally, as international scholarship in the history of women
religious continues to grow, the findings of other researchers can be
brought to bear on deepening an understanding of the lives of some of the
women in this book. Newly emerging scholarship on race and ethnicity in
religious congregations and on race in the institutional Catholic church
can also provoke important questions concerning the lives of women religious. Recently published books by historians, including Shannen Dee
Williams writing on Black Catholic nuns in America and Sophie Cooper
writing on nuns and immigrant communities in Australia and America,
show how international scholarship in this field is widening its lens to see
what has traditionally been ignored. Indeed, as Williams has written, the
greatest responsibility of the historian, when confronted with a silenced
past, is to ‘tell the story’.
Finally, I would suggest that while seeing these women as nuns is
important, it is also important to recognise that they were aunts, daughters, immigrants, teachers, carers, siblings, cooks, doctors, widows, administrators, cleaners, nurses, seamstresses and prison workers. Researching
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xii
PREFACE
Irish-born nuns, and starting to ‘tell the story’, is neither about setting
them on a pedestal nor about knocking them off the pedestal on which
some were placed by hagiographers.
It is about trying to find them within archives and collections, so that
we can better understand another aspect of how women lived in the past.
Dublin, Ireland
Deirdre Raftery
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Contents
1 Entering
Convents: Irish Women, Kinship Networks and
Recruitment to Religious Life in the Nineteenth and Early
Twentieth Centuries 1
2 Preparing
for Religious Life: The Training of Aspirants,
Postulants and Novices in the Nineteenth and Early
Twentieth Centuries 33
3 Outward
Bound: Irish Women Religious and Their
Journeys to Overseas Foundations in the Nineteenth and
Early Twentieth Centuries 61
4 Founding
and Teaching: Education Provision by Irish
Nuns in the Nineteenth-Century Anglophone World 91
5 Expanding
the Reach of Irish Nuns in Education:
Convents, Schools and Academies in the Nineteenth and
Early Twentieth Centuries119
6 Conclusion:
The Need for Transnational Histories of
Women Religious163
xv
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xvi
Contents
Appendix A: Schools and Convents of Mercy Founded by
Frances Warde, 1837–1883171
Appendix B: Early Irish-Born Religious with M Philippine
Duchesne in America175
Appendix C: Irish-Born Members of Loreto/IBVM in India,
1841–1930177
Appendix D: Irish-Born Members of the Institute of the
Blessed Virgin Mary in North America, 1847–1930181
Appendix E: Second-Generation Irish Members of Loreto/
IBVM in North America, 1847–1930185
Appendix F: Irish-Born Members of the PBVM Sisters, San
Francisco, 1854–1930191
Appendix G: Irish Nuns in Australia, 1838–1918195
Appendix H: Irish Brigidines in NSW Australia (1872–1930)197
Glossary201
Bibliography205
Index217
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About the Author
Deirdre Raftery is Full Professor of the history of education at University
College Dublin, Ireland. Her research interests focus on the history of
women and girls in the long nineteenth century and the history of convent
schools and convent education. In addition to fourteen book publications,
she has authored many articles and chapters. She has been awarded visiting
fellowships at the University of Oxford, the University of Toronto, the
University of Notre Dame, the University of Cambridge, and Trinity
College Dublin, and she held a Fulbright at Boston College. A Life
Member of the University of Cambridge, she is also an elected Fellow of
the Royal Historical Society.
xvii
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Abbreviations
ACSJSP
A-EJNB
AFCJM
AMSPA
APICR
BAI
CHF
CSB
CSJ
DAC
DDA
FCJ
GSS
IBVM
IBVMCPA
IBVMGPAD
IJS
IJSAD
LCIPA
LPAAU
LSAPA
LSU
MCAD
MMM
NLI
OP
Archives of the Congregation of St Joseph, St Paul
Archives-Enfant Jésus Nicolas Barré, Paris
Archives of the Faithful Companions of Jesus, Melbourne
Archives of the Marist Sisters, Province of Australia
Archives of the Pontifical Irish College, Rome
Brigidine Archives Ireland
Congregation of the Holy Faith
Congregation of St Brigid—Brigidines
Congregation of St Joseph—Josephites
Dominican Archives Cabra, Ireland
Dublin Diocesan Archives
Faithful Companions of Jesus
Good Shepherd Sisters
Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary (Loreto)
Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary Canada Province Archives
Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary General and Province
Archives Dublin
Infant Jesus Sisters
Infant Jesus Sisters Archives Dublin
Loreto Congregation Institute and Provincial Archives, Ireland
Loreto Province Archive Australia, Ballarat
Loreto South Asia Province Archives
La Sainte Union Sisters
Mercy Congregational Archives Dublin
Medical Missionaries of Mary
National Library of Ireland
Dominican Nuns (Order of Preachers)
xix
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xx
ABBREVIATIONS
OSB
OSU
PANFL
PASF
PASSHUSCP
PBVM
PROANFL
PSCA
PSMG
RSC
RSCJ
RSM
SJCAI
SMANS
SSC
SSHAD
SSJAS
SSL
UCAC
WLA
Order of St Benedict—Benedictines
Order of Saint Ursuline—Ursulines
Presentation Archives Newfoundland
Presentation Sisters Archives San Francisco
Provincial Archives, Society of the Sacred Heart, United
States-Canada Province, St. Louis, Missouri
Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Provincial Archives, Newfoundland, Canada
Presentation Sisters Congregational Archives, Cork
Poor Servants of the Mother of God
Religious Sisters of Charity
Religieuses du Sacré Coeur de Jésus—Society of the
Sacred Heart
Religious Sisters of Mercy
St Joseph of Cluny Archives Dublin, Ireland
Sisters of Mercy Archives North Sydney, Australia
Missionary Sisters of St Columban
Society of the Sacred Heart Archives Dublin
Sisters of St Joseph Archives New South Wales
Society of Saint Louis
Ursuline Congregational Archives Cork
Women and Leadership Archives, Loyola University, Chicago
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List of Figures
Fig. 1.1
Fig. 1.2
Fig. 2.1
Fig. 3.1
Fig. 3.2
Fig. 3.3
Fig. 4.1
Fig. 5.1
Fig. 5.2
Siblings from St Brigid’s Missionary School, Callan, who
entered the Sisters of St Joseph of the Apparition, Freemantle
(late nineteenth century). (By kind permission of the Mercy
Congregational Archives, Dublin)
10
Sisters of St Joseph of Carondolet with a group of Irish
postulants en route to St Louis, MO. [1893]. (By kind
permission of the Mercy Congregational Archives, Dublin)
19
Aspirants at St Brigid’s Missionary School, Callan, 1898. (By
kind permission of the Mercy Congregational Archives, Dublin) 42
Presentation Convent, St John’s, Newfoundland (built in
1853). (By kind permission of the Presentation Sisters Archive,
Newfoundland)66
Mother M. Teresa Dease IBVM. (By kind permission of the
IBVM Canadian Province Archives)
72
Mother M. Michael Corcoran IBVM with her camera while on
Visitation in Australia, 1903. (By kind permission of the Loreto
Congregation Institute and Provincial Archives, Ireland)
84
Society of the Sacred Heart Convent, Mount Anville, Dublin,
c.1866 (By kind permission of the Society of the Sacred Heart
Archives, Dublin)
103
Mother M. Gonzaga Barry, IBVM. (By kind permission of the
Loreto Province Archive Australia)
126
Novices from Ireland who arrived to the convent of the Sisters
of St Joseph of Carondolet, Minneapolis (1903). (By kind
permission Archives of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet,
St. Paul Province (St. Paul, MN))
133
xxi
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xxii
List of Figures
Fig. 5.3
Fig. 5.4
The Young Ladies’ College, Goderick Street, Victoria Square,
Perth, 1895. (By kind permission of the Mercy Congregational
Archives, Dublin)
148
Mother M. Michael Corcoran IBVM. Photograph taken in
1903, during her visitation of Loreto convents in Australia. (By
kind permission of the Loreto Institute and Province Archives,
Ireland)154
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List of Tables
Table 2.1
Table 5.1
Table 5.2
Destination of novices from St Brigid’s Missionary School,
Callan, 1884–1923
Number of women religious in United States by decade
Catholic female academies in the United States, 1820–1900
43
134
144
xxiii
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CHAPTER 1
Entering Convents: Irish Women, Kinship
Networks and Recruitment to Religious Life
in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth
Centuries
And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea.
‘Heaven-haven, a nun takes the veil’. Gerard Manley Hopkins.
The idealised vision of a nun taking the veil in order to spend her life ‘out
of the swing of the sea’, penned by Gerard Manley Hopkins in 1864, may
have been a romantic one, but it was far from reality. There were many
reasons that women entered convents: a ‘call’ or sense of vocation to serve
God, the urge to travel overseas as a missionary, a preference for living in
all-female communities, a desire for further education and teacher training—these were just some of the motivations that impelled women to join
religious orders. Others could see that religious life offered them attractive
philanthropic and leadership possibilities. In addition to these ‘pull’ factors, there were also ‘push’ factors. Scholars have demonstrated that convent life allowed women, irrespective of education or wealth, to escape the
drudgery of married life and the dangers of childbirth. Additionally, for
some young women it provided a welcome escape from incest or violence
1
D. Raftery, Irish Nuns and Education in the Anglophone World,
Global Histories of Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46201-6_1
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D. RAFTERY
in their homes. For others, convents not only supplied regular meals and
shelter but also—especially during and after the Irish Famine—‘banished
the twin phantoms of poorhouse and pauper’s grave which haunted those
who strove to stay on the respectable, upper limits of the poverty line’.1 It
has also been noted that the proliferation of large convents in Munster and
Leinster co-existed with a progressively high rate of mental illness among
women in these two regions, and tentatively suggested that both may have
been at least partly connected to the ‘erosion of women’s economic and
social relevance, in an era when their traditional occupations were disappearing and the falling marriage rate rendered a daughter a liability in the
family economy’.2
Only those who entered enclosed orders of nuns, such as the
Benedictines or Carmelites for example, withdrew fully from the ‘swing’
of life. Women who entered orders with an active apostolate worked in
hospitals, asylums, schools and prisons. Some walked the streets of cities,
collecting alms. There was little about religious life that was easy. It
involved living in a community, with little privacy; it included living by the
rules and constitutions of the order and following rigid schedules. For
choir nuns, it included praying or singing the Divine Office, across the
day, and taking on roles such as superior, bursar, infirmarian, novice mistress or schoolteacher. For lay sisters, religious life usually involved long
hours of physical labour, running large kitchens, tending livestock on convent farms, brewing beer, making soap, gathering hay, mending shoes and
making clothes.3 And there were penances and pieties that took their toll
on the mental and physical health of both lay and choir religious. For
example, nuns denied themselves food as a form of penance, and some
used forms of mortification that dated back to the medieval monasteries,
such as wearing a haircloth or iron girdle under the habit.4 Religious life
was taxing on both body and mind. Nonetheless, orders of women religious continued to grow in number in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. In Ireland, that growth was rapid and sustained, up to the middle of the twentieth century. To understand religious life for Irishwomen,
it is firstly necessary to explore two inter-related questions: who were the
women that entered convents, and how did they do so?
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ENTERING CONVENTS: IRISH WOMEN, KINSHIP NETWORKS…
3
Women Responding to a National Need:
Early Foundresses
While there were eleven convents in Ireland in 1800, there were 368 by
1900. During that period, the number of orders of women religious grew
from eleven to thirty-five.5 ‘The country is advancing in piety, and the
convents are fast filling’, wrote Margaret O’Gorman to her friend, Mother
Genevieve Beale, in 1856.6 Two years later, Beale would bring a French
order, the Sisters of St Louis, to Ireland to make a foundation. She was
following a route already taken by several orders involved in education.
The Ursulines (OSU) had been established in Cork in 1771, while the
Society of the Sacred Heart (RSCJ) and the Faithful Companions of Jesus
(FCJ) arrived from France in 1842 and 1844 respectively.7 The Institute
of the Blessed Virgin Mary (IBVM) was established in Ireland in 1821,
with the arrival of Irish-born Teresa Ball from their York novitiate, to
make a foundation in Dublin. Known as the Loreto order, it quickly
attracted many vocations.8 But the most significant growth in the first half
of the nineteenth century was within the new indigenous orders: the
Presentations (PBVM, 1775), Brigidines (CSB, 1807), Sisters of Charity
(RSC, 1815) and Sisters of Mercy (RSM, 1831). The second half of the
century saw further foundations being made, including those of the Sisters
of St Joseph of Cluny (SJC, 1860), the Sisters of the Holy Faith (HFS,
1866) and the Marists (SM, 1873).9 Indeed, French orders continued to
come into the country in the early twentieth century, including the Infant
Jesus Sisters (IJS 1909) and the Religious of Jesus and Mary (RJM, 1912).
The number of nuns in Ireland multiplied eightfold between 1841 and
1901. Clear calculated that by 1861, ‘there were 68 per cent more nuns
than there had been ten years earlier, and from then until 1901 the rate of
increase in numbers every ten years never fell below 20 per cent’.10
The profile of the women who entered Irish convents changed across
the century. As will be seen, the early foundations were made by women
who came from upper-middle class families; they were generally well-­
educated and in possession of a useful social network. They were also
women who were keenly aware of the legacy of penal legislation that had
severely restricted Catholic education in Ireland. Their work in establishing convents and Catholic schools was bound up with a desire to provide
alternatives to Protestant schooling and the effects of proselytism.
Penal legislation prohibited Catholics from teaching, running Catholic
schools or sending children abroad for Catholic education.11 While wealthy
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4
D. RAFTERY
Catholic families found ways to quietly send their children out of the
country to boarding schools, the majority of Catholics could not do this,
and relied on whatever was available at home. A growing Protestant evangelical spirit in the late seventeenth century saw the introduction of a
number of charity schools and, by 1733, the Incorporated Society for
Promoting English Protestant Schools in Ireland (Charter Schools) had
been established.12 The number of pupils in these schools remained low
and the majority of poor Roman Catholic families sent their children to
the illegal ‘hedge schools’.13 These were small schools run by masters who
charged a nominal fee for lessons in reading, writing, arithmetic, Latin,
land measurement, geography and history. The illegal status of the schools
meant that hedge school masters had to be secretive regarding their
whereabouts, and regularly moved around the country. Lessons were conducted in barns, outbuildings, and occasionally in fields under hedges.
Pupils paid what they could afford, and some made payments ‘in kind’, by
bringing a sod of turf for the fire, or a little food for the master.
The children of wealthy Catholics, on the other hand, were often sent
out of Ireland for their education. Records for the second half of the eighteenth century indicate strong Irish support for certain Catholic schools:
boys went to the Jesuit College at Stonyhurst in Lancashire, or to Oscott
College in Birmingham. The Benedictine schools at Ampleforth and
Downside were also attractive to the Irish Catholic gentry.14 Girls were
sent to St Mary’s Convent, Micklegate Bar, in York (known as the Bar
Convent), or to be educated at the Benedictine foundation at Ypres, which
was run by the ‘Irish Dames’.15 It was also fashionable for girls to be sent
to France, and Irish names are to be found in the records of the Ursuline
and Sacred Heart convents in Paris. The elite education given to these
young women would eventually benefit Ireland: some would return to
their homeland to help establish the first Irish convent schools to be
founded in the post-penal period.
The Irish-born ‘early foundresses’ of the modern period were Nano
Nagle, Mary Aikenhead, Teresa Ball and Catherine McAuley.16 Nagle,
who brought the Ursuline order to Ireland, and later founded the
Presentation order, may have been educated by the Benedictines at Ypres.
Teresa Ball, who established the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary in
Ireland in 1821, had attended the Bar Convent as a boarder, and later as
a novice preparing for religious life. Mary Aikenhead, foundress of the
Religious Sisters of Charity, was probably educated privately in Cork, but
she also attended the novitiate at the Bar Convent, York. Catherine
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ENTERING CONVENTS: IRISH WOMEN, KINSHIP NETWORKS…
5
McAuley similarly was educated at home, while her formation was undertaken at the convent of the Presentation Sisters on George’s Hill, Dublin.
The religious ‘formation’ of each of these women was hugely significant.
Formation not only referred to preparation for religious life in the novitiate, it also involved the development of the whole person. Novices not
only studied devotional literature, but some also studied music and languages; they learned self-discipline, punctuality, humility and restraint. By
the time they took their vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, each of
these four Irish foundresses had been moulded in way that would have an
influence over generations of women and girls in Irish convents and
schools.
Honora (Nano) Nagle was born in Ballygriffin, County Cork in 1718.
Though this was a time when many Catholics—including some of her own
family—had to leave the country, her family managed to hold onto large
tracts of profitable land in County Cork. Described as ‘one of the most
important Catholic landed families to survive the seventeenth-century
confiscations’, the Nagles were astute managers of their estates.17 The
Ballygriffin estate, onto which Nano was born, was one of the most productive Irish orchards, at a time when there was a robust cider market in
Munster.18 The Nagles married into a network of Catholic families which
consolidated their status. Nano’s grandfather, David, was an MP in the
parliament of James II. He married into another wealthy Cork family, the
Lombards of Lombardstown Park, and bought land around the parish of
Blackrock, Cork. His two sons, Garrett and Joseph, were known to be
Jacobite sympathisers. Garrett had business links in Flanders where many
Jacobite exiles lived, and he allegedly served as agent to James II. It was
there that he married an Irish woman, Ann Mathew, connecting his family
with several distinguished families: Ann’s great-grandfather had married
Elizabeth Poyntz, the daughter of Sir John Poyntz, a Catholic recusant in
England. She was the widow of Thomas, Viscount Thurles, whose father
had been Walter, Earl of Ormond and Ossory. As will be seen, this network would furnish Nano Nagle with postulants for her Ursuline foundation in Cork.
Garrett and Ann Nagle were in Ireland by the time their children were
born, and—like many other parents—they had to make decisions about
how to educate their young family. The Nagles were known to offer hospitality to travelling scholars and hedge school masters: Eoghan Rua Ó
Súilleabhán was a tutor in the Nagle household in the mid-eighteenth
century before becoming a schoolmaster. He may have tutored Nano
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6
D. RAFTERY
when she was young. Additionally, Ann Nagle would have undertaken the
religious education of her daughters. Books of spiritual instruction, including the Imitation of Christ, by Thomas à Kempis, and the lives of the
saints, were popular with women readers. When Nano was old enough to
travel out of the country, she was sent to boarding school—probably with
the Benedictines at Ypres.19 The monastery at Ypres had a long tradition
of Irish Abbesses and nuns, and provided instruction through English,
unlike the other elite continental convents which were French-speaking.
Nano may also have spent some time living in a convent in France, considering whether or not to take religious vows. On inheriting a substantial
fortune from her uncle, Joseph Nagle, she decided to settle in Cork and
start schools for the poor. Initially, she established ‘two schools for boys
and five for girls’.20 Impelled by her commitment to the promotion of the
Catholic faith, Nagle decided that the time was right to bring a small
group of Ursuline nuns from France, to start a convent and school. She
calculated that not only would the school attract pupils, but it would also
become a seed-bed for vocations to the religious life. In the event, she was
right. The Ursuline convent that she founded in Cork in 1771 provided
elite schooling for Irish girls, removing their need to travel overseas.21 The
success of the venture meant that the Ursulines made several additional
Irish foundations. However, Nagle decided that there was also a need for
a congregation of women religious that would educate the poor, and that
would not be confined by canonical requirements to remain inside the
convent cloister. She wanted a congregation of ‘walking nuns’ who could
move easily amongst the poor of the city, and run small schools to teach
catechism, reading and writing. Nagle had doubtless been influenced in
her desire to found a community of uncloistered religious, when she spent
time in France as a young woman. Seventeenth-century France had seen
the emergence of a new kind of female community, the filles dévotes or filles
séculières.22 By the time Nagle was in France in the mid-eighteenth century, she witnessed such pious women providing religious instruction to
the faithful, and running charity schools for the poor.
In 1775, she succeeded in founding the first religious congregation of
women established in Ireland since the Reformation. Initially known as
the Sisters of Charitable Instruction of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the congregation later became known as the Sisters of the Presentation of the
Blessed Virgin Mary.23 Initially, she did not have the support of the hierarchy, but she threatened to take her wealth and her plans for a foundation
‘to some other part of Ireland where she should meet with no opposition
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ENTERING CONVENTS: IRISH WOMEN, KINSHIP NETWORKS…
7
and some encouragement’.24 This had the effect of quickly resolving the
matter: in December 1775 Nano Nagle, together with three other Cork
women, commenced her novitiate. They were professed in 1776 by Dr
Butler, Bishop of Cork. By then, Nagle was about fifty-eight years old. She
is, therefore, something of an outlier: the other ‘early foundresses’ were
young women, and indeed, thereafter, most Irishwomen who entered
convents were under the age of thirty.
Nagle paved the way for other women to both found and fund a congregation for women. Her success shows how important it was for women
to have independent means if they wanted to establish convents and retain
any kind of control of how the congregation would develop. Where
women did not have substantial wealth at their disposal, it was important
that they had networks of influential people around them. Mary Aikenhead
and Teresa Ball both benefitted from their kinship and social networks in
Ireland, when they established the Sisters of Charity, and the Institute of
the Blessed Virgin Mary, respectively. As it happened, their networks overlapped and this strengthened the impact of these two women, especially in
Dublin. Aikenhead knew Cecilia Ball, Teresa’s older sister, who attended
the Ursuline convent in Cork and entered the order there in 1805. Mary
Aikenhead attended the profession ceremony of Cecilia Ball, which was
also attended by Teresa Ball and her married sister, Anna Maria O’Brien.
Dr Daniel Murray, coadjutor archbishop of Dublin was also present, as a
close friend of the Ball family. From around this point, Murray began to
influence both Mary Aikenhead and Teresa Ball to consider religious life.
Aikenhead’s parents had died while she was still young; Ball was raised
in what seems to have been a close and happy family. Her father, John Ball,
was a successful silk merchant and her mother, Mabel Clare Bennett Ball,
came from an old Catholic family that owned land in Roscommon and
County Galway. Mabel Clare’s brother, Francis Bennett of Thomastown
House, was a wealthy landowner and his social network would prove to be
of value to his niece, Teresa, once she was ready to establish the IBVM in
Dublin. Also of help was Dr Daniel Murray; it was he who had encouraged
John and Mabel Clare Ball to send three of their young daughters to
boarding school at the Bar Convent in York. Murray also later arranged
for both Mary Aikenhead and Teresa Ball to make their novitiates at the
Bar Convent. Aikenhead was there from June 1812 until August, 1815.
At that point, she returned to Ireland to found the Irish Sisters of Charity,
and open their first convent at North William Street in Dublin. Teresa Ball
was professed in York in 1816, remaining at the Bar Convent for a further
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8
D. RAFTERY
five years. She returned to Ireland in 1821, and a year later she opened the
first IBVM foundation in Ireland. The Ball network, and the generosity of
Teresa’s older married sister, Anna Maria Ball O’Brien, played a crucial
role in supporting the Sisters of Charity and the Institute of the Blessed
Virgin Mary in Ireland.25
The fourth of the ‘early foundresses’, Catherine McAuley, was—like
Aikenhead—orphaned while still quite young. She lived as a companion to
a wealthy childless couple, the Callaghans, who left her their entire estate.
Once she inherited this in 1822, she had the kind of independent wealth
that Nano Nagle had enjoyed. She spent it in a similar way to Nagle, firstly
leasing premises to run schools and asylums for the poor, and then establishing a house for poor women who ‘prefer a conventual life’.26 In 1830,
McAuley and three other women entered the Presentation Convent in
George’s Hill, Dublin, to make their novitiate. A year later, they were
ready to take vows and commence the congregation of the Sisters of
Mercy, ‘established for the visitation of the sick poor, and charitable
instruction of poor females’.27
Common to all of these women was that they either inherited money or
had wealthy connections. Though they still had to defer to the demands
of bishops, especially when making additional foundations in Ireland and
elsewhere, they were women who had the kind of self-confidence that
came with wealth. They were also educated women, and at least two of
them—Nagle and Ball—had been sent out of the country to an elite
boarding school. In adult life, Nagle could rely on the friendship and support of Dr Francis Moylan, who was Bishop of Ardfert and Aghadoe, and
later Bishop of Kerry. Aikenhead, Ball and McAuley had the strong support of Dr Daniel Murray, who was appointed Archbishop of Dublin
in 1823.
These, then, were the women who paved the way for other women to
enter religious life. They were all motivated by a desire to help the poor in
their own country. Even Ball, whose boarding schools catered to wealthy
Catholic families, was very aware of the needs of the poor in Dublin. She
attached a free ‘poor school’ to Loreto foundations, using fees from the
boarding schools to support the ‘poor schools’. The four women were
also motivated to spread the Catholic faith, by offering Catholics an alternative to Protestant schools, asylums and poor relief. All four women used
their wealth to establish congregations in Ireland that grew in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, accepting thousands of young Irish women
into their novitiates. Records show that the manner in which the early
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9
foundresses used their kinship and social networks to attract support and
vocations would continue right through the nineteenth century.
Surviving records of religious life for Irishwomen that pre-date this era
of growth show old Catholic family names amongst the lists of professed
nuns. The ‘Irish Dames’ at the Benedictine Abbey at Ypres, founded in
1665, included Dame Ursula Butler, Dame Mary Joseph O’Bryan, Dame
Mary Joseph Butler, Dame Joseph Ryan and Dame Flavia Carey.28 And in
Dublin, woven through account books and registers of the Dominican
Convent Cabra, which had been founded in 1647, are the names of other
prominent Catholic families: Aylmer, Nagle, Bodkin, Sherlock, Farrell,
Cantillon, Wyse, Kelly, Mapas and Mathew.29 These names would reappear in the records of the first convents established by Nagle, Ball,
Aikenhead and McAuley.
Family Networks in Convents
Kinship networks were a powerful source of vocations to religious life.
The profession registers of orders indicate that intricate family networks,
comprising siblings, cousins and aunts, were commonplace in religious
orders by the mid-nineteenth century. The presence of such networks
came about in several ways. Firstly, at a time when travel was limited and
costly, it was expedient for girls to enter the local convent at which they
had been educated. Siblings often entered together, with either the family
or the order delaying the reception date of one sibling until the second
was ready. In this way, the young women were together in the novitiate,
which probably made them less lonely for home (see Fig. 1.1). Others
waited a few years before following older siblings; for example, Eliza Keller
joined the Society of the Sacred Heart in Roscrea in 1855; her three sisters
entered the order between 1859 and 1864. Anna Gartlan, from Cork,
entered in 1860, and her two sisters followed her between 1862 and 1880.
The practice of siblings entering the same orders continued into the twentieth century. For example, the four Callaghan sisters from Dublin entered
the Society of the Sacred Heart between 1902 and 1920.30 The Presentation
order also had many sets of siblings. At their convent in Fermoy, County
Cork, Clare Cahill entered in 1843, and was joined by her sister in 1847;
Sister M Alphonsus O’Connell, who had entered at the age of nineteen in
1882, was joined two years later by her twin; Sr Borgia Byrne was even
younger when she entered at the age of seventeen in 1896, and her twin
sister followed her a few years later; another set of twins joined Fermoy in
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D. RAFTERY
Fig. 1.1 Siblings from St Brigid’s Missionary School, Callan, who entered the
Sisters of St Joseph of the Apparition, Freemantle (late nineteenth century). (By
kind permission of the Mercy Congregational Archives, Dublin)
1884. The records of the Society of the Sacred Heart also show instances
of twins entering the order, such as Margaret and Anne Sally, who entered
the convent in Armagh together in 1858. Records of the Cork convent of
the Infant Jesus Sisters indicate that of a total of 298 Irish-born women,
there were twenty-two instances of two siblings entering (including one
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ENTERING CONVENTS: IRISH WOMEN, KINSHIP NETWORKS…
11
set of twins), seven instances of three siblings joining and two instances of
four siblings entering. Additionally, several of those 298 women were
related in other ways (cousins, nieces/aunts).31 For example, the extended
family of Ellen MacSwiney/McSweeney, who entered in 1880, provided a
total of fifteen members to the order, all of whom were missioned to South
East Asia and Japan.32
Occasionally, several of the daughters in a family became nuns. The
three Shannon sisters entered the Society of the Sacred Heart not long
after it was founded.33 Almost a decade later, the four Leahy sisters entered
the same order. The records of the RSCJ show many instances of siblings
entering either together or within a few years of each other.34 The four
Bodkin sisters also entered the Society of the Sacred Heart.35 The
Congregation of St Joseph (CSJ) attracted all six of the Cotter sisters from
Limerick, who entered in the 1920s and 1930s, and went to Australia and
New Zealand. Sometimes siblings entered different religious orders; five
of the large family of John and Kate Sherin of Kilkenny became religious:
Josephine entered the Society of the Sacred Heart in 1911, Mollie became
a Sister of Charity and another sister chose to enter the Sisters of Notre
Dame de Namur. Similarly, while the four Woodlock sisters chose religious
life in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, two entered the
Ursulines and two entered the Society of the Sacred Heart. Belfast-born
Mary and Margaret McLoughlin, who entered the Society of the Sacred
Heart together in 1887, came from a family of nine children of which six
became religious.36 Born in County Mayo in 1876, Bridget Kyle was one
of seven sisters, of whom five became nuns in different orders.37 Often, in
families where several daughters became nuns, some of the sons became
priests. For instance, Brigid, Martha, Margaret and Sarah Heydon entered
the Society of the Sacred Heart between 1872 and 1904; they had three
brothers who were Dominican friars, while another sister joined the Sisters
of Mercy.38 Similarly, the four Bodkin sisters who entered the Society of
the Sacred Heart had a brother who was a Jesuit priest.39
A benefit to having siblings in a convent was that they could go together
to open a new convent, thereby providing a kind of solidarity and strength
that was useful in the early years of a new foundation. As early as 1795,
Ellen and Margaret Power had entered South Presentation Convent in
Cork, in order to be prepared together to make a foundation in Waterford
in 1798. In 1823, Honoria and Jane Hartnett from County Kerry were
also prepared at South Presentation Convent, in order to go together to
make a new foundation in Limerick. In Dublin, the founding group of the
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D. RAFTERY
Presentation Convent Clondalkin included Mothers Regis Cosslett and
Joseph Cosslett from Carlow. And when making overseas foundations, it
was not unusual for siblings to travel out together, or for aunts to send
home for their nieces. In the early years of the first San Francisco foundation made by the Presentations, Mother Superior Teresa Comerford was
joined by her sister; the first Presentation Superior in Tasmania in 1866,
Mother Xavier Murphy, was joined by several nieces; and the pioneering
group who set sail for Madras in September 1841 included Sisters Regis
and Martha Kelly. Kinship networks provided crucial moral support, and
perhaps even an unquestioning loyalty, that was necessary at the start of a
new foundation. Without doubt, Mother John Hughes, who left George’s
Hill Convent to make a foundation in the Dakotas in 1879, benefitted
from the support of her sister, Mother Agnes Hughes, who agreed to leave
the Presentation Convent in Doneraile, Cork, to be part of the pioneering group.
Another benefit to siblings entering the same congregation is that it
could benefit the community through dowries, and the increased likelihood of gifts and legacies. Passing family wealth to one order was a way of
consolidating the use of this money, so that it could be used in a strategic
way. For example, Margaret and Eliza Corballis each brought dowries of
£1000, when they became Loreto nuns, and this sum was used to pay for
the purchase of the first Loreto convent in Ireland. They were the daughters of Richard and Deborah Corballis of Rosemount House, Clonskeagh.
Richard Corballis was a wealthy timber merchant, and member of an old
Catholic family.40 The Corballises intermarried with other prominent
Catholic families including that of Viscount Gormanstown, the Earl of
Fingal and the Earl of Cork.41 Richard married Deborah Taylor of Pollard
Castle, Castlepollard, and their large family included three daughters who
were sent to the Bar Convent in York, to be educated by the IBVM. Richard
Corballis was a close friend of the Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Murray, and
he helped Murray to find a suitable premise for Mother Teresa Ball when
she established the IBVM in Ireland. Corballis examined several properties, and settled on Rathfarnham House and estate as the location best
suited for the new convent. He then helped to prepare the house (renamed
Loreto Abbey) for its pioneering group of nuns, which included two of his
daughters.42
The case of the Corballis family and Loreto Abbey also offers an example of how wealth continued to accrue to a convent in which there were
several siblings. The convent continued to benefit from the extended
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ENTERING CONVENTS: IRISH WOMEN, KINSHIP NETWORKS…
13
Corballis family, members of which gave generous gifts. Among Deborah
Corballis’ many gifts were ‘hens, turkeys, geese … cakes, green tea, [and]
provisions’.43 Richard gave a sanctuary lamp, and a regular supply of altar
wine. He also gave the convent an organ for the chapel, along with paintings, candlesticks and a pound of ‘best incense’.44 The wider Corballis
network also sent gifts to the convent: John Corballis gave gold for a
chalice, and Anne Corballis gave cloth for habits.45 There were some reciprocal benefits to a man like Richard Corballis when he helped the nuns to
get established at their new convent: Corballis was allowed to buy up all
the trees on the estate for his timber business, for example. Indeed, families benefitted in other ways by having relatives who were nuns. At Loreto
Abbey, Catherine Duffy was a boarder in the school in 1834–1835. She
then entered the order and began teaching in the boarding school. When
her niece became a boarder in the 1840s, Duffy was allowed to provide
her with painting lessons, gratis.46 Generous credit arrangements were
sometimes allowed for the nieces or siblings of nuns. However, while
Mother Teresa Ball allowed bills for the ‘travelling expenses and articles of
dress’ for boarder Teresa McCarthy to mount up, mindful that McCarthy’s
two older sisters were nuns in Loreto Abbey, she nonetheless insisted that
expenses were eventually discharged.47
In addition to providing one of the main routes to religious life for
young women, kinship networks also sometimes resulted in powerful
‘dynasties’ emerging within some orders. This was particularly so after the
mid-nineteenth century, by which time many orders had expanded by
sending nuns from one place to another, to make new foundations. These
dynasties typically included nuns who were noted for leadership. One
noted dynasty within the Society of the Sacred Heart in Ireland was the
Walsh family: Annie entered in 1880, Margaret in 1883, and Mary (May)
in 1887. All three became superiors, and Mary founded the first RSCJ
convent in Scotland in 1895.48 Reverend Mother Digby, who had been
their Mistress of Novices in Roehampton and eventually became Mother
General, said that the ‘Walsh trio’ seemed to her to have been at the age
of reason from birth. Margaret, in particular, was very suited to leadership:
she was named Superior of the convent in Brighton in 1894. She later
went on to establish a teacher training college in Craiglockhart, Scotland.
Equally well-known within the Society of the Sacred Heart was the aforementioned Bodkin family, while in the Infant Jesus order the name
MacSwiney/McSweeney was well-known across several generations.
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D. RAFTERY
Some nuns also had relatives who were influential priests and bishops,
and this further consolidated their dynastic strength in religious life. The
extended family of Dr Paul Cullen is a case in point. While Rector of the
Irish College in Rome, Cullen often corresponded with relatives in different Irish convents, including his sister, Agnes Cullen, who was a
Presentation nun, and his cousin, Anne Maher, a nun at the Dominican
Convent Cabra, in Dublin. He had a strong interest in seeing convents
flourish and liked to be kept up to date on developments in different
houses.49 Cullen’s uncle was Fr James Maher DD, a friend of the Mercy
foundress Catherine McAuley, and ‘a member of one of Ireland’s most
distinguished Catholic families’.50 Maher supported his niece, Mother
Frances Warde, in her efforts to found St Leo’s Convent of Mercy, Carlow,
in 1837.51 Her sister, Sarah, also became a Sister of Mercy and served as
Superior in Cork. When Frances Warde went to Pittsburgh to make the
first US Mercy foundation in 1843, she was able to rely on her to send out
‘scores of young Irish women’.52 The fact that she was the cousin of
Cullen, who became Ireland’s first Cardinal in 1866, could only help
Warde when the Sisters of Mercy were expanding in North America. Other
members of this influential family included Mother M. Paula Cullen, who
became superior of the Convent of Mercy in Westport, and sent out aspirants and nuns to Australia, and Mother M. Teresa Maher, Superior of the
Convent of Mercy in Kinsale, who went to Cincinnati to make a foundation in 1858.53
The strength of a family’s influence within an order was reflected in the
fact that some nuns were allowed to bring their widowed mothers to live
within the enclosure as ‘parlour boarders’. Indeed, the practice of taking
parlour boarders provided a well-established and respectable source of
income for many communities. The only possible disadvantage to taking
‘externes’ or outsiders to live in a convent was the possibility that they
would gossip about the convent when outside the enclosure. This had to
be managed carefully, and Superiors could only accept women who would
be trustworthy and discreet. In the eighteenth century, the Dominican
Convent Cabra had several parlour boarders who lived at the convent,
along with their maids. These were usually widowed gentlewomen, including Lady Fingall and Lady Tyrconnell, who typically paid about £30
per annum for a room with parlour. While the accounts of the convent
indicate that most of these ladies paid their annual ‘pension’ promptly,
some allowed their debts to mount up. By 1734, Lady Fingall’s debt to
the convent had risen to £74.54 Generally, though, the advantage of taking
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parlour boarders was that wealthy widows would give money to convents,
on the understanding that they had a home for life. Barbara O’Connell
funded the establishment of North Presentation Convent when her husband died, and then lived as a parlour boarder within the enclosure until
her death. Similarly, Mrs O’Neill—together with her daughter, Catherine—
funded the establishment of the Presentation Convent Bandon, and subsequently lived there when her daughter became a nun.55 The Presentation
Convent Doneraile was also funded by a widow, Mary Anne Flynn, who
later entered the order. In Dublin, Dorinda Ashlin, mother of the celebrated church architect George Ashlin, became a parlour boarder at
Mount Anville Convent when her daughter entered the Society of the
Sacred Heart. Mrs Ashlin fulfilled the role of chaperone to the nuns, and
was also a source of income. In the hope of being eventually buried beside
her daughter, Dorinda Ashlin requested to be professed on her deathbed
at the age of ninety-two.56 She was not the only widow to take vows and
leave money to an order: the widowed Mrs Rose St Leger took vows at the
Presentation Convent Rahan, at the age of fifty-six. She was the mother of
a member of that community, Sr Mary Anne St Leger. The Sisters of St
Joseph of Cluny, who had kept a few ‘lady boarders’ at their Dublin convent, eventually went a step further and set up a separate house for lady
boarders, at Portlaw, in Co Waterford.57
The many records of kinship networks in religious orders, including
records of widowed mothers entering convents to live near their daughters, hint at the fact that some women entered convents simply to be with
a beloved family member. The writer Kate O’Brien recalled her aunts,
both of whom were Presentation nuns, in her autobiographical work entitled Presentation Parlour. Her Aunt Mary was ‘a true nun’, and it did not
surprise her family when she entered a convent in Cork. On the other
hand, her Aunt Fan ‘had no vocation to the religious life’.58 O’Brien
wrote: ‘Aunt Fan made no claims for her vocation and broke into no
heroic ecstasies. Simply she insisted that she could only live where Mary
was; she could be no longer separated from Mary, and so she was going to
be a nun where Mary was a nun. That was the sum total of her purpose,
and no one could find an argument against it.’59 In the years that followed,
Aunt Fan seemingly ‘grew holy and wise’, and her long life in religion
exceeded that of Mary by some twenty years. O’Brien’s intimate knowledge of her aunts allows her memoir to throw light on one of the many
reasons that siblings entered convents together, reasons that do not find
their way into profession records or convent annals.
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D. RAFTERY
By the middle of the nineteenth century, overall numbers of girls applying to enter convents had grown significantly. In Dublin, Loreto Abbey
turned many women away, whereas twenty years earlier they were only
beginning to attract vocations. There was a surplus of applicants to some
orders, and women who were refused were often open to invitations to
enter convents in Anglophone countries. Family networks also supported
the provision of young women for overseas convents. Cardinal Cullen’s
relatives, Mother Frances Warde and Mother Josephine Warde, worked
together to supply recruits for the thirteen Mercy foundations in the
United States. An extraordinary amount of work, energy and initiative
went into finding aspirants, novices and professed nuns who were willing
to leave Ireland to help new foundations overseas: one of these initiatives
was a practice known as ‘questing for vocations’.
The Influence of ‘Questing’
Questing was a term used to indicate the practice whereby nuns visited
schools and sodalities, to gather recruits for overseas convents. Sometimes,
a nun only needed to make one or two questing trips, and thereafter
someone at home would help to send out additional recruits. Mother
Frances Warde, who had been sent to America in 1843 to establish the
Sisters of Mercy there, soon found herself in desperate need of additional
nuns. Accompanied by Bishop Michael Connor of Pittsburgh, and another
sister, she set sail for Ireland in August 1845. Her quest for vocations
resulted in two ‘graduates of the Ursuline Convent in Cork and three
professed [Mercy] sisters’.60 Thereafter, her own sister, Mother Josephine
Warde, continued to recruit young women on behalf of Mother Frances.
Most of the recruits were from Cork, where Mother Josephine was
Superior of a Mercy convent for almost forty years. Frances Warde’s biographer concluded that the ‘two Warde sisters [were] a kind of two-woman,
two-continent collaboration in the expansion of the Sisters of Mercy in the
West’.61 Sr Mary Eustace Eaton, a Sister of Charity at Harold’s Cross,
Dublin, was similarly industrious in supplying Irish aspirants to overseas
convents. She was moderator of the Children of Mary Sodality at Our
Lady’s Hospice between 1868 and 1901. During this time, she successfully placed 700 young women in convents outside Ireland. These were
working-class women, mostly in their early teens, who wanted to enter an
order but had no dowry. Eustace found places for them mainly in the
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ENTERING CONVENTS: IRISH WOMEN, KINSHIP NETWORKS…
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English-speaking countries to which Irish had emigrated during and after
the Famine; some 400 of them went to the United States.62
But very few orders could rely on women like Mother Josephine Warde
and Sr Eustace Easton to recruit on their behalf. Instead, they had to make
repeat trips to Ireland, to swell the ranks of their convents. Orders that
had originated in Ireland, such as the Sisters of Mercy and the Sisters of
Charity, made good use of their connections in Irish convent schools to
arrange visits, and meet older pupils who had an interest in religious life.
In the autumn of 1864, two Irish Sisters of Mercy set out from Cincinnati
to recruit in Ireland, when their community had been depleted following
deaths from consumption. They returned to the United States six months
later, with six Irish recruits.63 The Irish foundress of the Sisters of Mercy
in Western Australia also recruited in her homeland. In 1850, Mother
Ursula Frayne left Perth to make the long sea voyage to Ireland, in the
hope of finding some women willing to become part of the community
there. She managed to find ‘two new recruits’.64 Recruitment trips did not
always succeed, however. In 1902, the Sisters of St Joseph of Cluny
recorded that they ‘gave hospitality to two Sisters of Mercy who had come
from England to recruit vocation candidates … among our pupils’. They
added: ‘none wished to follow them; generally, those who feel themselves
called to religious life enter with us or in diocesan congregations’. They
concluded, doubtless with some satisfaction: ‘fifteen of our children were
admitted to our dear religious family’ across the previous three years.65
Ireland was also identified as a good recruiting ground by French
orders—even those that had no convents there. Mère Gaëtan Gervais, a
member of the Infant Jesus Sisters (Dames de St Maur), was Superior of
their foundation in Singapore from 1878 until her death in 1892. Although
the order did not have a foundation in Ireland at that time, they were not
deterred from looking for vocations there. Mère Gaëtan set sail from
Singapore three times—in 1880, 1888 and 1892—to quest for vocations
in England and Ireland.66 The latter country proved to be fertile ground:
in 1888 she brought twenty-seven Irish women back to Singapore. One of
the group was forty-year old Ellen MacSwiney/McSweeney. Her age
should have debarred her from being accepted, as the Constitutions of the
order stated that novices should be ‘not younger than 15, nor older than
30’. In the event, Mère Gaëtan chose well when she selected Ellen
MacSwiney for Singapore: she would become the first of a MacSwiney kinship network within the order. Ellen, known in religion as Madame St
Francis of Assisi, accompanied Mere Gaëtan when she went questing in
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18
D. RAFTERY
1892, and—following the death of Gaëtan on that trip—she took on
responsibility for seeking recruits in Ireland, returning there again in 1901.
There were some challenges when questing in Ireland. Firstly, it was
costly to transport recruits. While Mère Gaëtan was pleased to gather
twenty-seven Irish women for Singapore in 1888, she could not afford to
pay their passage out.67 She decided that she could therefore not accept
any aspirants without dowries—each woman would have to be able to pay
at least her own passage, adding that ‘those who bring more’ will support
those who have very little.68 The second challenge was that there were
many orders questing in Ireland at the same time. As Mere Gaëtan quickly
found out, ‘the territory seems to be exhausted because of so many
demands being made for foreign countries, particularly America’.69
The Sisters of Mercy, the Presentation Sisters and the Sisters of Charity,
were all involved in providing for the needs of Irish emigrants in Australia,
New Zealand, and North America. In the early years, their foundations in
the Anglophone world relied considerably on a steady supply of Irish aspirants, novices and professed nuns. Additionally, orders in the United
States, such as the Sisters of St Joseph of Carondolet, and the Sisters of
Charity of the Incarnate Word, recruited in Ireland even though they had
no convents there (see Fig.1.2., Sisters of St Joseph of Carondolet with a
group of Irish postulants en route to St Louis, MO. [n.d.]. By kind permission of the Mercy Congregational Archives, Ireland). Irish-born
Mother Mary John O’Shaughnessy recruited for the latter order in 1900,
bringing forty Irishwomen back to San Antonio, Texas. Indeed, the Sisters
of the Incarnate Word attracted many Irish women, partly because they
did not require a dowry and welcomed hard-working girls who were
‘respectable’. A measure of ‘respectability’ was being a member of a sodality. Rosanna Hurst learned about the Sisters of the Incarnate Word in
1883, when she was a young member of the Child of Mary sodality that
was organised by Sisters of Charity in Harold’s Cross, Dublin. She went
out to the US to enter their convent in San Antonio, Texas. As Mother
Mary Cleophas, she returned to Ireland to recruit for the order in 1904.
She was not the only nun questing for vocations: her friends among the
Sisters of Charity advised her to ‘start at once for the Provinces so as to be
the first in the field before the country is deluged by other nuns’.70 Mother
Mary Cleophas successfully recruited thirty-eight young women before
departing once again for Texas in the autumn of the same year.71
Such was the demand for Irish recruits that additional measures were
taken by religious orders to ensure a steady supply of vocations. Several
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Fig. 1.2 Sisters of St Joseph of Carondolet with a group of Irish postulants en
route to St Louis, MO. [1893]. (By kind permission of the Mercy Congregational
Archives, Dublin)
French orders decided that it would be better to ‘grow vocations’ than to
rely on questing. Some of these orders were relatively new, having been
founded in post-revolutionary France; others were much older orders that
were ready to expand having survived the Revolution. The Sisters of St
Joseph of Cluny, a French religious institute founded in 1807, arrived in
Ireland in 1860, to open a convent and boarding school just outside
Dublin city, with the aim of encouraging pupils towards religious life. The
foundress of the order, Mother Rosalie Javouhey, told the nuns in France
of her hopes for the Irish convent:
As for our little establishment in Blanchardstown, near Dublin … it is certain that what is hoped for will happen there. It has already sent seven postulants to the Novitiate of our General House and it has at the moment
sixteen more who are undergoing a first test there so that the sisters can get
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20
D. RAFTERY
to know them and study their disposition … this little [Irish] foundation
will … prove useful to the Institute.72
Pleased with the success of this initiative, the Sisters of St Joseph of Cluny
opened another convent in Ireland in 1896, expressing the hope that it
would be ‘a nursery of good vocations in a country so fundamentally
Catholic and religious’.73 The Infant Jesus Sisters established an Irish convent for the same purposes. Originally founded in 1666 in Rouen, the
order was in ninety-six French villages by the outbreak of the French
Revolution. Though it emerged somewhat diminished from the
Revolution, the order continued to work in education, expanding after
1852 to former Malaya and to Japan. While Mère Gaëtan had secured
many aspirants during her trips to Ireland in the 1880s, she had also
shrewdly observed that questing had ‘exhausted’ the ready supply of
young women. In 1909, the Infant Jesus Sisters decided to open an Irish
convent, with a boarding school and novitiate, on the Cork-Kerry border.
They were helped in this effort by Père Charles Nain, a priest of the
Missions Étrangères de Paris (MEP) who had spent many years in
Singapore where he knew the Infant Jesus nuns and was the architect for
their chapel there. Père Nain encouraged the French nuns to make an
Irish foundation, telling them that there was hardly a family in Ireland
without a member in a religious order.74
While Père Nain was keen to establish the Infant Jesus Sisters in Ireland,
he was also aware that the ecclesiastical authorities there had become concerned about the exodus of Irish women to overseas convents. In particular, the loss of hundreds of vocations to American convents, and the fate
of women alone in the US if they later decided that they did not in fact
have a vocation, caused bishops to discourage foreign religious from opening novitiates in Ireland.75 On the other hand, some French orders could
only survive in the Anglophone mission field if they recruited in Ireland.
Bishop Nicholas Gallagher of Galveston, Texas, ‘forbade bringing any
non-English-speaking candidates from France to his diocese’ but welcomed a succession of recruits from the West of Ireland.76 To help the
Infant Jesus Sisters to make an Irish foundation, Père Nain advised them
to tell the Irish hierarchy that their proposed convent in County Cork was
a partial substitute for the one in Paris that had been closed by the secularising French government. This, he said, would elicit some sympathy from
Irish bishops. He also cautioned the Mother General, Mère St Henri, to
avoid all mention of the fact that the order needed postulants for their
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ENTERING CONVENTS: IRISH WOMEN, KINSHIP NETWORKS…
21
foundations in South East Asia.77 The ruse worked. The nuns succeeded
in opening an Irish convent in March 1909, and by July a novitiate was
established. By 1950, it had sent over two hundred Irish sisters to South
East Asia, many of whom were past pupils of the convent boarding
school.78
The Influence of Schooling
An education in a convent boarding school was perhaps the best preparation for religious life. There were routines in convent boarding schools
that nurtured religious vocations, such as sodalities, daily Mass, regular
prayer, the observation of religious feast days, processions and retreats,
and the study of religious music. Piety was also cultivated through regular
practices that included the adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, novenas and triduums.
At the Dublin convent of the Sisters of St Joseph of Cluny, pupils celebrated St Patrick’s day with ‘a pious ceremony … [and] an evening’s
entertainment, during which they played music, sang and even put on a
little play’. Two days later, they ‘celebrated the feast of St Joseph with no
less solemnity’.79 The celebration of the Silver Jubilee of Reverend Mother
St Claire Bringeon, at the Infant Jesus Convent in County Cork was
marked by both the pupils and the nuns together:
[W]e had High Mass in our chapel. … The children sang a Mass by Bergman
in two parts. Rev Fr Kennedy officiated, assisted by two curates. … We realize even more the charm of the Catholic liturgy and its deep significance. It
was a morning from Heaven, which shone on the entire day. At three
o’clock, beautiful procession which finished with the coronation of the
Blessed Virgin on the terraces.80
The presence of clergy at boarding school events lent a solemnity, and also
fostered piety. Equally, clergy often made demands on convent boarding
schools, including requesting the presence of boarders at ceremonies and
parish events. When the foundation stone of a Dublin parish church was
to be laid in 1893, ‘the chaplain begged Reverend Mother Superior to
have [the] boarders attend, dressed in white, and carrying banners, in
order to raise the impact of the ceremony’, one convent recorded.81
At convent schools, the annual prize-giving ceremonies were often
attended by priests, and the presence of a bishop lent status to such an
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22
D. RAFTERY
occasion. The Sisters of St Joseph of Cluny proudly recorded ‘twelve
priests, sisters of the community [and] postulants’ attending the school
prize-giving in 1889.82 At Loreto Abbey, Mother Teresa Ball often had the
archbishop, Dr Daniel Murray, present for important occasions.83 The
Society of the Sacred Heart similarly had the support of the church hierarchy at annual events at their Dublin convent. Their ‘distribution of
prizes’ in 1854, was attended by the Archbishop of Dublin, along with
‘two other bishops, [the] Provincial of the Jesuits, several Fathers and a
large number of ecclesiastics from the city and surrounding areas’.84 The
golden jubilee of the Irish foundation was celebrated in the presence of
‘the Archbishop and thirty priests’. A much larger gathering, with ‘up to
500 priests and ladies’, was held to mark the centenary of the foundation
of the order. It was attended by ‘Archbishop Walsh, Bishop Donnelly of
Cannae … Bishop Sheehan of Waterford’ and many clergy including ‘five
Provincials of religious orders’.85 Archbishop Walsh and the various bishops dined in the refectory, while the priests were served in the parlour.86
Another way in which schooling fostered a religious vocation was
through sodalities of the Children of Mary.87 This sodality enjoyed a
revival in the schools of the Society of the Sacred Heart, in the early nineteenth century. Pupils who were Children of Mary were allowed to attend
the reception ceremonies when novices entered the order, thereby giving
them a greater intimacy with religious life. When members of this sodality
eventually became nuns, it served as an example to the pupils:
The Children of Mary were all present at this solemn ceremony so deeply
interesting to them and it would be impossible to describe the feelings with
which we witnessed the consecration to God of one who had shared with us
the sweet privileges of a Child of Mary.88
Mother Teresa Ball also wanted this sodality to be established in every
Loreto school. She believed it had a good effect on the pupils, encouraging piety. ‘Our wildest boarder has become an aspirant to be a Child of
Mary’, she wrote in 1854.89 She also hoped that the meetings of the
Children of Mary would encourage vocations, especially in the foundations that had been made outside Ireland, and she sent books to be given
out as prizes to encourage the young members.90 However, in the early
years of the first overseas Loreto convents, there was only a handful of
vocations, and Mother Ball—like other Superiors—relied on Irish girls to
swell the ranks of the Dublin novitiate and then go out to the convents in
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India, Canada, Mauritius and Cadiz. Bishops and priests strongly encouraged the sodality in girls’ schools. In Cork, Bishop Moriarty admitted
pupils at the Presentation Convent Cahirciveen into the Children of Mary
in 1861. In Dublin, the newly appointed Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Walsh,
‘presided at the meeting of the Children of Mary’ at Mount Anville Sacred
Heart school in 1885 and 1889.91
Like sodalities, regular devotional exercises helped to provide the atmosphere in which an inclination towards religious life could flourish.
Reflecting on daily routines at the Infant Jesus convent in County Cork,
one nun recalled:
[S]chool life was permeated by a living awareness of Christ’s example and
teachings. Every school day began with religious education … St Joseph’s
feast day and the Corpus Christi procession were important events in the
school calendar. Many of the students were members of the Children of
Mary Sodality. At mid-day, all the students went to the convent chapel to say
the rosary.92 (Sr Hannah Slevin, interview, 2010)
Additionally, the very ordered communal life experienced by boarders—
with set times for prayer, meals, lessons and recreation—prepared them for
convent life. Pupils were also educated about religious life by the nuns
themselves. For example, nuns would read aloud the letters that came
from missionary nuns. They set up sodalities and groups such as the
‘Crusaders’, who were treated to lectures from visiting missionaries, illustrated with lantern slides.93 Visits from missionary nuns were a cause for
excitement amongst the pupils. Not only would they hear stories about
missionary life, but they would meet women who had travelled. The
annals of the Infant Jesus Convent recorded how ‘Mother St Therese,
Visitatrice of Japan, is going to spend a week [here] on her way back to the
Far East, also Mother St Rosalie, Mistress of Novices in Tokyo’.
If the celebratory nature of visits from missionary nuns was designed to
inspire pupils, it also gave them a tantalising glimpse of a world outside
Ireland. For most unmarried Catholic Irishwomen in the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, the desire to travel could only be met by entering an order that had overseas convents.94 While Protestant ‘missionary
wives’ could travel with their husbands, generally overseas travel could
only be accomplished by women who had both the financial means and
the presence of a spouse or chaperone. When groups of Irish nuns,
together with young aspirants and postulants, set sail for North America,
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24
D. RAFTERY
Australia and South East Asia, they were achieving something denied to
their mothers: they were going to see the world.
*
*
*
These, then, were some of the Irishwomen who entered religious orders.
Far from withdrawing ‘out of the swing of the sea’, Irishwomen went into
religious life in order to work in the world, as teachers, school principals,
administrators, social workers, nurses and doctors. As will be seen in Chap.
4, some were well-educated, having attended an elite boarding school in
continental Europe, England or Ireland. Others were the daughters of
shopkeepers, small farmers and labourers, who had received their elementary (primary) schooling in a local national school or in a convent ‘free
school’. Most entered alone, but many entered to join family members.
Some brought dowries, while others brought nothing but the skills they
possessed. Their motives for entering a convent varied. While there is evidence to support the importance of a ‘call’ or vocation for entrants, others
were impelled by the desire to teach or nurse, or to travel overseas as a
missionary. It is very likely that many women who emigrated during and
after the Irish Famine were glad to be accepted into a convent, if they had
arrived in America or Australia without contacts or money. With the
expansion of the Catholic Church in those parts of the world, and the
arrival of Catholic immigrants from Ireland, Germany, Poland and Italy in
the nineteenth century, nuns were needed to run schools and hospitals.
Ireland was identified as an excellent recruitment ground, to supply
women religious to Catholic schools and hospitals in the Anglophone
world. Recruitment in Irish convent schools, and ‘questing’ around the
country, were successful. Especially in America and Australia, thousands of
young Irishwomen would live out their lives in convents. As will be seen
in Chap. 2, how well each woman survived depended to some degree on
the preparation that she had received as a novice.
Notes
1. Caitriona Clear, Nuns in Nineteenth Century Ireland (Dublin: Gill and
Macmillan, 1987), 140. The Irish Famine, sometimes called the Great
Famine, was a period of widespread starvation and disease in Ireland,
between 1845 and 1852 approx. Deaths and emigration resulted in the
depletion of the population, from 8.4 million in 1844, to about 6.6 by
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ENTERING CONVENTS: IRISH WOMEN, KINSHIP NETWORKS…
25
1851. The causes of the impact of this disaster are debated by scholars; see
for example R. Dudley Edwards and T. Desmond Williams (eds), The
Great Famine: Studies in Irish History, 1845–53 (2nd ed., Dublin: Lilliput
Press, 1994); Mary Daly, The Famine in Ireland (Dundalk: The Dublin
Historical Society, 1986); Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger:
Ireland 1845–1849 (London: Penguin, 1991); Christine Kinnealy, This
Great Calamity: The Irish Famine 1845–52 (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan,
1994); Cormac Ó Gráda, The Great Irish Famine (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995).
2. Ibid., 141.
3. The term ‘nun’ refers to a member of a religious order who has taken solemn vows. The term ‘sister’ refers to a woman who has taken simple vows.
While the term ‘nun’ is used to refer to women in contemplative orders, it
is also the case that the terms ‘nun’ and ‘sister’ are now often used interchangeably. The term ‘woman religious’ is also commonly used, to refer to
both nuns and sisters. In this book, these terms are used interchangeably.
During the period covered in this book, most religious orders had a twotier system of choir and lay sisters. This practice dated to the Middle Ages,
when ladies who entered convents often brought their own maidservants
to wait on them. See Deirdre Raftery, Catriona Delaney and Catherine
Nowlan Roebuck, Nano Nagle: The Life and the Legacy (Dublin: Irish
Academic Press, 2019), 9.
4. For a discussion of ascetic and penitential practices in convents see Deirdre
Raftery, Teresa Ball and Loreto Education: Convents and the Colonial World,
1794–1875 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2022), 112–14.
5. See Clear, Nuns in Nineteenth Century Ireland, 36–9. See also Deirdre
Raftery, ‘“Je suis d’aucune Nation”: the recruitment and identity of Irish
women religious in the international mission field, c. 1840–1940’,
Paedagogica Historica: International Journal of the History of Education
49, no. 4 (2013), 518.
6. Margaret O’Gorman to Mother Genevieve Beale SSL, January 1856.
O’Gorman was a friend of Beale’s, and at one point considered a religious
vocation but decided against it because of poor health. See Sr Mary
Pauline, God Wills It: Centenary Story of the Sisters of St Louis (Dublin:
Brown and Nolan, 1959), 90.
7. The Dominicans, an order which had originated in France in 1215, were
involved in education in Ireland from the seventeenth century, with a
school for girls at Channel Row, Dublin (1647).
8. Mother M. Teresa Ball IBVM established the Institute of the Blessed
Virgin Mary in Ireland in 1821; the motherhouse was Loreto Abbey,
Rathfarnham, County Dublin. The nuns became known in Ireland as
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D. RAFTERY
Loreto nuns, and foundations made from Ireland were thereafter known as
Loreto convents. See Raftery, Teresa Ball and Loreto Education, 101.
9. A few of these orders have been examined by scholars. See for example
Mary C. Sullivan, Catherine McAuley and the Tradition of Mercy (Dublin:
Four Courts Press, 1995); Catherine KilBride and Deirdre Raftery, The
Voyage Out: Infant Jesus Sisters in Ireland, 1909–2009 (Dublin: IJS
Centenary Committee, 2009); Phil Kilroy, The Society of the Sacred Heart
in Nineteenth Century France, 1800–1865 (Cork: Cork University Press,
2012); Ann Power, The Brigidine Sisters in Ireland, America, Australia
and New Zealand 1807–1922 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2018); Raftery
et al., Nano Nagle; Raftery, Teresa Ball and Loreto Education.
10. Clear, Nuns in Nineteenth Century Ireland, 37.
11. Act of Uniformity, 1665, 17 and 18 Car. II. c. 6; Act to Restrain Foreign
Education, 1695, 7 Wm. III. c. 4; 1703. 2 Anne, c. 6; 1709. 8 Anne, c. 3.
12. For a discussion of Charter schools and their eventual demise see Kenneth
Milne, The Irish Charter Schools, 1730–1830 (Dublin: Four Courts Press,
1997); see also Deirdre Raftery and Susan M. Parkes, Female Education in
Ireland, 1700–1900: Minerva or Madonna (Dublin: Irish Academic Press,
2007); and Michael C. Coleman, ‘“The children are used wretchedly”:
Pupil Responses to the Irish Charter Schools in the Early Nineteenth
Century’, History of Education 30, no. 4 (2001): 339–57.
13. Studies of hedge schools include P. J. Dowling, The Hedge Schools of Ireland
(Cork: Mercier Press, 1968); and Antonia McManus, The Irish Hedge
School and its Books, 1695–1831 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002).
14. For a study of the education of wealthy Irish Catholics see Ciaran O’Neill,
Catholics of Consequence: Transnational Education, Social Mobility, and the
Irish Catholic Elite, 1850–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
15. For an account of Irish Benedictines and Benedictine education for girls,
see Deirdre Raftery and Catherine KilBride, The Benedictine Nuns and
Kylemore Abbey (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2020).
16. Upon reception into a religious order, women were given a ‘name in religion’, that is, the name of a saint by which they were thereafter known. In
many orders, the name Mary (signified by the initial ‘M’) was also part of
the name. Each of these four foundresses had a name in religion: Nano
Nagle’s was St John of God; Aikenhead’s was M. Augustine, and McAuley’s
was M. Catherine. These three women religious are generally known by
their birth names. Ball, who was christened Frances, is generally known by
her name in religion: Mother M. Teresa. For clarity, this volume uses the
names by which they are commonly known: Nano Nagle, Mary Aikenhead,
Catherine McAuley and Teresa Ball.
17. Ian McBride, Eighteenth Century Ireland (Dublin: Gill Books, 2005), 256.
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18. See David Dickson, Old World Colony: Cork and Munster, 1630–1830
(Cork: Cork University Press, 2005), 174.
19. For an account of Nagle’s youth and education, see Raftery et al., Nano
Nagle, Chapter 2, passim.
20. Nano Nagle to Miss Fitzsimons, 17 July 1769, IE PBVM NN 1/1/1,
Presentation Sisters Congregational Archives, Cork (hereafter PSCA).
21. For a study of the first Ursuline convent in Ireland see Ursula Clarke, The
Ursulines in Cork Since 1771 (Cork: Ursuline Convent, 2007).
22. For a study of this development in the Church see Elizabeth Rapley, The
Dévotes: Women and Church in Seventeenth-Century France (Montreal and
Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990).
23. See Raftery et al., Nano Nagle, 30.
24. South Presentation Convent Annals, 19, IE PBVM [SPC] 1/1, PSCA.
25. For a close analysis of this network, and how it supported convents for
several decades, see Raftery, Teresa Ball, passim.
26. Catherine McAuley to Rev. Francis L’Estrange ODC, 10 September 1828,
cited in Sullivan, Catherine McAuley and the Tradition of Mercy, 11.
27. Extract from the vows taken by Catherine McAuley, 21 December 1831,
cited in Sullivan, Catherine McAuley, 11.
28. Raftery and KilBride, The Benedictine Nuns and Kylemore Abbey, 8.
29. Dominican Convent Cabra Account Book 2, 1729–1735; Annals of the
Dominican Convent Cabra, 1647–1912, Dominican Archives Cabra,
Ireland [hereafter DAC].
30. Margaret Callaghan entered the Society of the Sacred Heart in 1901, and
a year later, Cecilia entered. She was followed by Rosa Mary, in 1903. In
1920, at the age of 39, Kathleen—the oldest of the four siblings—also
joined the order. Biographical records, Society of the Sacred Heart
Archives, Dublin (hereafter SSHAD).
31. The source for the data on Irish Sisters is the Infant Jesus Sisters’ ‘Black
Book’, MS register of the Sisters connected with the England-Ireland
Province. Of these, 298 were born in Ireland. Infant Jesus Sisters Archives
Dublin (hereafter IJSAD).
32. Ellen MacSwiney (Sr St Francis of Assisi) entered in 1880, and her sister,
Kate (Sr St Augustine), joined in 1889. Across three generations, the
nieces and cousins who entered were Margaret and Ellen Foley; Kate
MacSwiney; Patricia and Ellen Walsh; their cousins Nora O’Sullivan and
Hannah and Mary Theresa McSweeney; three sisters—Eily, Mary and Kitty
McSweeney; Elizabeth Casey, and Anne Marie McSweeney Murray.
Source: personal document, MS family network of Sr Anne Marie Murray.
By kind permission of the Infant Jesus Sisters, England-Ireland Province.
33. Born in New Ross, County Wexford, Anna, Judith and Margaret Shannon
all entered the Society of the Sacred Heart in America, where their family
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28
D. RAFTERY
had emigrated. Anna entered the RSCJ convent in Florissant in 1825;
Judith followed her in 1828, and Margaret entered in 1836. Biographical
records, SSHAD.
34. Ibid.
35. Helen Bodkin entered the novitiate at Roehampton in 1887; Gertrude and
Madeleine Bodkin entered the same novitiate in 1894, and Mary Catherine
entered a year later. Biographical records, SSHAD.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid.
39. William Bodkin entered the Society of Jesus (SJ) in 1884.
40. Manuscript lives of the early members, LIVES/32, 7, Loreto Congregation
Institute and Province Archives (hereafter LCIPA). There were several
branches of the Corballis/Corbally family, with homes and estates in
Nuttstown, Jordanstown and Palmerston. See D. Parkinson, ‘The Corballis
families of Co. Dublin’, Dublin Historical Record 12, no. 3 (1951), 92.
41. Ibid.
42. Margaret (M. Catherine) entered the IBVM in 1822 and was professed in
1824; Eliza/Elizabeth (M. Gonzaga) entered in 1825 and was professed
in 1826. Another sister, Anna Maria Corballis, entered the Presentation
order; she became foundress of the Presentation Convent Mountmellick,
which was established with the support of Richard Corballis.
43. Notebook, ‘Benefactors to Loretto’, GEN/FIN/8/1, LCIPA.
44. Notebook, ‘Donations to the Sacristy of Loretto’, GEN/FIN/7, LCIPA.
45. Ibid.
46. M. Teresa Ball to Dr Daniel Murray, 6 May 1846, Murray Papers,
32/2/83, Dublin Diocesan Archives (hereafter DDA).
47. M. Teresa Ball, 28 May 1934, TB/COR/8, LCIPA. For a discussion of
the payment of debts within the boarding school and convent, see Raftery,
Teresa Ball and Loreto Education, 121–4.
48. Anne, Margaret and Mary were the daughters of Jeremiah and Mary Walsh
of Wexford. See Biographical records, SSHAD.
49. Cullen Papers, Pontifical Irish College, Rome (hereafter APICR).
50. Suellen Hoy, Good Hearts: Catholic Sisters in Chicago’s Past (Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 2006), 17.
51. Frances Warde entered the order in 1832; she was the first to be professed
at the Mercy motherhouse in Baggot Street, Dublin, in 1833. Warde was
Catherine McAuley’s secretary for many years. When a foundation was
being made in Carlow in 1837, McAuley parted with Warde recognising
that she was the person best suited to the role of Superior. For a study of
Warde see Anon. [the Sisters of Mercy, Manchester, New Hampshire],
Reverend Mother M. Xavier Warde: Foundress of the Order of Mercy in the
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United States (Boston: Marlier and Co., 1902). See also Kathleen Healy,
Frances Warde: American Founder of the Sisters of Mercy (New York: The
Seabury Press, 1973).
52. See Hoy, Good Hearts, 17. Sarah Warde (Mother Josephine) was Superior
at St Maries of the Isle Convent, Cork.
53. For an account of the foundation in Cincinnati, and the life of M. Teresa
Maher, see Mary Ellen Evans, The Spirit is Mercy: the Story of the Sisters of
Mercy in the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, 1858–1958 (Maryland: Newman
Press, 1959).
54. Entries for April 1729 and March 1735, Account Book 2, 1729–1735, DAC.
55. Presentation Convent Doneraile Annals, DON 1/1/2; Presentation
Convent Doneraile, Yearly Account Book 1818–1891, DON
1/38(1), PSCA
56. For short account of the Ashlin family, including Dorinda Ashlin’s time
with the RSCJ community, see Society of the Sacred Heart, Lettres
Annuelles, Mount Anville 1884–1885, 238–42.
57. Woodlock House, Portlaw, was left to the Sisters of St Joseph of Cluny by
‘a rich Protestant lady’ [Mrs Malcolmson], in 1909, for the purposes of
establishing a home for ladies. See Sisters of St Joseph of Cluny, Bulletins
of the British Isles [internal circular, hereafter Bulletins], Vol. 9, No. 97
(1910), 4, St Joseph of Cluny Archives Ireland (hereafter SJCAI). The
house eventually became a nursing home.
58. Kate O’Brien, Presentation Parlour (Dublin: Poolbeg, 1963), 43–4.
59. Ibid.
60. Anon., Reverend Mother M. Xavier Warde, 126.
61. Healy, Frances Warde, 127.
62. See Hoy, Good Hearts, 11.
63. Evans, The Spirit is Mercy, 99.
64. Catherine Kovesi Killerby, Ursula Frayne: a Biography (Australia: University
of Notre Dame Australia, 1996), 188.
65. Sisters of St Joseph of Cluny, ‘Bulletins’, Vol. 4, No. 69 (1903), 4, SJCAI.
66. ‘Voyage de ma Sr St Gaëtan, 1888, pour chercher des postulantes en
Angleterre’, Registre Paris 1888–1889, MS 93, Archives des Sœurs de
l’Enfant Jésus-Nicolas Barré (hereafter A-EJNB).
67. Ibid.
68. Ibid.
69. ‘Voyage de ma Sr St Gaëtan, 1888’, A-EJNB.
70. Hoy, Good Hearts, 28. Hoy’s study of the recruitment of Irishwomen for
foundations in the United States includes many examples of questing.
71. Ibid.
72. Lettre Circulaire de la R M Rosalie Javouhey [internal circular], No. 23,
(1861), 69, SJCAI.
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D. RAFTERY
73. Sisters of St Joseph of Cluny, ‘Bulletins’, Vol. V, No. 55, 1 (1896), SJCAI.
74. See KilBride and Raftery, The Voyage Out, 22.
75. Ibid., 23.
76. Hoy, Good Hearts, 29.
77. Père Charles Nain to Très Honorée Mère St Henri, 30 June 1908, IJSAD.
78. For an analysis of this, see Deirdre Raftery, ‘From Kerry to Katong: transnational influences in convent and novitiate life for the Sisters of the Infant
Jesus, c. 1908–1950’ in Deirdre Raftery and Elizabeth M. Smyth (eds),
Education, Identity and Women Religious: Convents, Classrooms and
Colleges (London: Routledge, 2016), 31–42.
79. Sisters of St Joseph of Cluny, Bulletins, Vol. 2, No. 16 (1889), 5, SJCAI.
80. Drishane Convent Annals, 31 May 1926, IJSAD.
81. Sisters of St Joseph of Cluny, Bulletins, Vol. 3, No. 32 (1893), 3, SJCAI.
82. Sisters of St Joseph of Cluny, Bulletins, Vol. 4, No. 69 (1903), 4, SJCAI.
83. For an account of how Archbishop Murray supported Loreto Abbey,
Rathfarnham, and regularly attended at events at the convent, see Raftery,
Teresa Ball and Loreto Education, 126–8.
84. Society of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Lettres Annuelles, 1854–1855,
3, SSHAD.
85. Society of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Lettres Annuelles, 1899–1901,
286–300, SSHAD.
86. Ibid.
87. The origins of the Congregation of the Children of Mary date from the
Middle Ages, when a sodality with the Latin title, Congregationes seu sodalitates B Mariae Virginis, was founded by Jan Leunis SJ in 1563. In the
eighteenth century the Congregation was annulled in France during the
Revolution. The nineteenth century saw it revived, and it was immediately
popular in the schools established by the Society of the Sacred Heart.
Around 1830, some Sacred Heart past-pupils established a group called
the Children of Mary, in Lyon. In Ireland, congregations of the Children
of Mary were started in convents from the mid-nineteenth century.
88. Society of the Sacred Heart Convent, Manhattanville, New York Children
of Mary 1844–1849, Series V, Provincial Archives, Society of the Sacred
Heart, United States-Canada Province, St. Louis, Missouri (hereafter
PASSHUSCP).
89. M. Teresa Ball to M. Teresa Dease, 18 Mar. 1854, 1/3/13/4, IBVM
Canadian Province Archives (hereafter IBVMCPA).
90. Raftery, Teresa Ball and Loreto Education, 173.
91. Presentation Convent Cahirciveen Annals, January 1861, IE PBVM CAH,
uncatalogued, cited in Raftery et al, Nano Nagle, 82. Society of the Sacred
Heart of Jesus, Lettres Annuelles, 1890–1891, 137.
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ENTERING CONVENTS: IRISH WOMEN, KINSHIP NETWORKS…
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92. Interview between this author and Sr Hannah Slevin IJS (pseud.), 2010,
cited in Raftery, ‘From Kerry to Katong’. In Raftery and Smyth, Education,
Identity and Women Religious, 36.
93. ‘Crusade’ meetings were held in schools to pray for missionaries and learn
about the mission field.
94. For a fuller discussion of this, see Deirdre Raftery, ‘Teaching Sisters and
transnational networks: recruitment and education expansion in the long
nineteenth century’, History of Education 44, no. 6 (2015): 717–28.
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