Clothing of Piety, Clothing of Poverty: Object Lessons in a Convent School

Abstract

This paper focuses on the ways in which memories of the religious habits worn by Catholic teaching sisters prior to the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) came to circulate in Atlantic Canada in the 1990s. At that time, people living in an impoverished rural settlement in northern New Brunswick recalled ominous dark and shrouded figures when discussing the religious past. However, the significance attached to the clothing of piety diverged considerably when the teaching sisters who once worked in that settlement recalled their past. They focused on the very materiality of their clothing as an object that had sensuous properties, constricting and enveloping, limiting and enabling their work. But they also recalled the clothing of others, the clothing of poverty in which their students came to school. One's deictic perspective, as either perceiver or wearer, altered the significance attached to the religious clothing of piety, or the threadbare clothing of poverty. This paper examines the ways in which the memories of objects from the past came to articulate broader grievances.

Keywords:

• Objects
• perspective
• memory
• poverty and Catholicism

Notes

1. I have discussed representations of the Catholic Church in life history narratives elsewhere. See Young 1996:24–44.

2. ‘Five Canadian Brothers had been convicted of offences at Mount Cashel ranging from buggery to bodily assault causing bodily harm… Court documents say in 1975 the Christian Brothers tried to avoid the criminal consequences of Mount Cashel abuse by making a bargain with St. John's police to keep the matter secret’. ‘Kings‐clear housed young offenders and boys who couldn't fit into foster homes during the 1960s and 1970s. Many residents became victims of former guard Karl Toft, who pleaded guilty in 1992 to 34 sexual assaults on 18 children. Again, there was the whiff of a police cover‐up and much was made of Toft's political connections and friendship with Richard Hatfield, who was premiere of the province when the abuse was taking place.

3. Perhaps the earliest sustained ethnographic study of life in Atlantic Canada is the Stirling County Study, headed up by Alexander Leighton and his colleagues at Cornell in the late 1940s. Tellingly, the second volume in that study is entitled People of Cove and Woodlot: Communities from the Viewpoint of Social Psychiatry (Hughes, Charles C. et al. 1960). Prior to World War ii, most people in the Maritimes were rural and most deployed a similar combination of livelihood strategies (see Samson 1994). But Acadians tended to be worse off for both geographical and political reasons, having been forced to settle on the most inhospitable lands for agriculture after the Expulsion of 1758 (see John Reid 1987). They remained politically weak until the 1960s (see Wilbur 1989).

4. Throughout the 1920s and the 1930s, school inspectors visiting the one‐room schoolhouse in the settlement found it empty, the teachers retained in September having quit when their pay was not forthcoming.

5. See John Milbank's essay ‘Against the Resignations of the Age’ for a discussion of Christian socialism, a utopian movement that has a particularly long tradition in France (1993:1–39). Les Filles de Jésus originated in Brittany, France, but the political events in France from 1902 onwards prompted hundreds of sisters to leave their country when they were no longer allowed to teach in the schools.

6. Nor would it be the last. See Chaplin 1993 and Holmes 2000 for a discussion of the influence of Catholic Social Philosophy, especially the idea of subsidiarity, on political debates during the formation of the EU. Many of the essays in Boswell 2000 discuss the religious roots of current political discourse and the return to vo‐lunteerism for the delivery of social services. I was surprised to learn that it was Pius xi, in 1931, who coined the idea of'the third way', and not Anthony Giddens and Tony Blair!

7. Only Prince Edward Island had lower wages (Wilbur 1989).

8. See Manning's analysis of the changing registers of belonging in Wales (2004).

9. MacDonald (2003) likened the exploitation of PEI women religious during the Depression years to the invisible labour of women in the home, which feminists argue props up capitalism and the liberal secular state.

10. When Patricia Wittberg (1994) interviewed sisters who left convents in the 1960s after the Second Vatican Council, many said that losing the habit and the veil was a significant factor.

11. After all, the Province of New Brunswick promoted similar ideals of self‐sustaining farming communities by making land available to indigent labourers when the economy collapsed in the 1860s. Throughout the long years of economic depression such settlements extended further into the forested interior. At the same time, the forest economy was expanding, and greatly benefiting from the large and very cheap labour reserves of illiterate woodsmen found on these homesteads.

12. See, for instance, Terdiman 1993; Hacking 1995; Antze & Lambek 1996; Showalter 1997.

13. At that time the newspapers were full of shocking stories of child abuse on the part of various religious and governmental authorities previously entrusted with the care of children. A few people in the settlement where I worked claimed recovered memories of abuse, satanic and otherwise (Young 1996, 2006).