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Abstract
This paper examines the educational and religious lives of Dominican Sisters in nineteenth-century Ireland and New Zealand. It considers developments in Irish society and culture that shaped the educational mission of Dominican Sisters, as well as some of the challenges facing 10 Sisters who, in 1871, journeyed from Dublin to establish a foundation in Dunedin, New Zealand. Drawing on previously unpublished archival sources, including Sisters’ letters “home” to Ireland, this paper explores ways in which the expectations of the Founder Sisters were initially shaped by “Old World” social and cultural structures and their dependence on their motherhouse in Sion Hill, Dublin. It examines changes in the lives of Sisters as their links with Ireland diminished and they began to reshape their educational mission around a new cultural and religious identity. This paper challenges educational historians to acknowledge the role Catholic sister-teachers played in the formation of national education systems.
Acknowledgements
I wish to express my gratitude to Carmel Walsh, OP, for her patient answering of my many questions; to Lorraine Challis, OP, who gave unstintingly of her time during my visit to the Dominican archives; and to the Dominican archive team for their commitment to making the New Zealand Dominican archives such an excellent repository of women’s history.
Notes
1Elizabeth Smyth, “Writing the History of Women Religious in Canada (1996–2001),” International Journal of Canadian Studies 23 (Spring 2001): 205–10.
3Caitriona Clear, Nuns in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, 1987), xvii.
2Mary J. Oates, “Organised Voluntarism: The Catholic Sisters in Massachusetts, 1870–1940,” in Women in American Religion, ed. Janet Wilson James (University of Pennsylvannia Press, 1980), 141.
4Marta Danylewycz, Taking the Veil: An Alternative to Marriage, Motherhood and Spinsterhood in Quebec, 1840–1920, The Canada Social History Series (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1987), 14.
5Oates, “Organised Voluntarism,” 141–69; Elizabeth Kolmer, ASC, “Catholic Women Religious and Women’s History: A Survey of the Literature,” in Women in American Religion, ed. J. James Wilson (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980), 127–69; Danylewycz, Taking the Veil; Clear, Nuns in Nineteenth-century Ireland.
6Danylewycz, Taking the Veil, 16.
7Shulamit Reinharz, Feminist Methods in Social Research (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 260.
8Jenny Collins, “Creating Spaces in a Male Domain: Sister Principals in Catholic Schools, 1850–1974,” Journal of Educational Administration and History (forthcoming, 2013).
9See for example Margaret MacCurtain, “Late in the Field: Catholic Sisters in Twentieth-century Ireland and the New Religious History,” Journal of Women’s History 6, no. 4 (1995): 49–63; Elizabeth Smyth, “Professionalization among the Professed: The Case of Roman Catholic Religious,” in Challenging Professions: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Women’s Professional Work, ed. Elizabeth Smyth et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 234–54; John Fialka, Sisters: Catholic Nuns and the Making of America (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003); Bart Hellinckx, Frank Simon, and Marc Depaepe, The Forgotten Contribution of the Teaching Sisters: A Historiographical Essay on the Educational Work of Catholic Women Religious in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2009); Carmen Mangion, Contested Identities: Catholic Women Religious in Nineteenth-Century England and Wales (Manchester University Press: Boomerang Books, 2008); Stephanie Burley, “Engagement with Empires: Irish Catholic Female Religious Teachers in Colonial South Australia, 1868–1901,” Irish Educational Studies 31, no. 2 (June 2012): 175–90; Collins, “Creating Spaces in a Male Domain.”
10Clear, Nuns in Nineteenth-Century Ireland.
11The first record of the foundation of a Dominican convent was in Galway in 1644.
12Maura Duggan, OP, In Search of Truth: Journeys of Nineteenth-Century Irish Dominican Women (Dublin: Linden Publishing Services, 2010).
13Anthony Fahey, Female Asceticism in the Catholic Church: A Case Study of Nuns in Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1982).
14Caitriona Clear, “The Limits of Female Autonomy: Nuns in Nineteenth-century Ireland,” in Women Surviving: Studies in Irish Women’s History in the 19th and 20th Centuries, ed. Maria Luddy and Cliona Murphy (Dublin: Poolbeg, 1990), 21.
15Suellen Hoy, “The Recruitment and Emigration of Irish Religious Women to the United States, 1812-1914,” Journal of Women’s History 6, no. 4 (1995): 64–98.
16Clear, Nuns in Nineteenth-Century Ireland.
17Mercy Congregation, Maxims, 9.The average dowry brought by women professed as choir nuns in the Galway Mercy convent in the years 1840–1857 was £375, although Catherine McAuley, the founder, was said to never refuse a candidate “because she had not got a bag of money.”
18Clear, Nuns in Nineteenth-Century Ireland. The father of Kathleen Doherty, for example, who entered the Dominican convent in Galway direct from its boarding school in 1908, paid £500 directly to the convent as well as other unspecified amounts.
19The Channel Row convent moved in 1808 to Clontarf and then to Cabra in 1819, before establishing a new foundation at Sion Hill, Dublin, in 1836.
20Duggan, OP, In Search of Truth. Much has been written about the problems associated with the jurisdiction issues. They presented some difficulties for the Dominican Sisters in New Zealand when they were seeking their independent constitutions in 1933.
21 Cabra Annals, 87. At least, that is how the annalist presented the matter.
22Duggan, OP, In Search of Truth.
23M.M. Butler, Cabra Archives.
24M.M. Magdalen Butler had been prioress at the time the application for change of jurisdiction was made.
25OPG (Order of Preachers, Galway). Letter of Mother Ignatius O’Doherty to Mother Bertrand Maher, December 15 1902. The other members who formed this new community were: Sisters Peter Colgan, Teresa Gan, Joseph Vercome, and Agnes Rooney (who, at 60 years of age and having spent 30 years at Sion Hill, volunteered for the New Zealand mission; she died in Dunedin (aged 91) on October 10 1902).
26Maire M. Kealy, OP, Dominican Education in Ireland 1820–1930 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007). After the passing of the Intermediate Education Act in 1878, the Sion Hill community was the first Dominican convent to take up the cause of a broader curriculum for girls by requesting permission from the Archbishop of Dublin to participate in the state examinations.
27OPSH, Sion Hill Annals 1845, 12.
28Kealy, OP, Dominican Education in Ireland.
29 Thom’s Official directory of the U.K. and Ireland, 1850–1902 (Dublin: Alex Thom, published annually).The Directory indicates that family background of pupils at Sion Hill belonged to the professional, farming or merchant class.
30Kealy, OP, Dominican Education in Ireland 1820-1930, 30.
31Kealy, OP, Dominican Education in Ireland, 78.
32Ibid.
33Ibid. The Eccles St. school “for orphan girls of upper classes” which opened in 1882 offered the state examinations, on the basis that as it catered for daughters of respectable families who had fallen on hard times, the state qualification would enable them get suitable work and support themselves after leaving school.
34Ibid.
35Interview with Sister M. Winefride, OP, 1998.
36Mangion, Contested Identities; Fialka, Sisters: Catholic Nuns and the Making of America; Smyth, “Professionalization among the Professed”; Jenny Collins, “Schooling for Faith, Citizenship and Social Mobility: Catholic Secondary Education in New Zealand, 1924–1944,” Journal of Educational Administration and History 37, no. 2 (2005): 157–72; MacCurtain, “Late in the Field”; Burley, “Engagement with Empires.”
37Hoy, “The Recruitment and Emigration of Irish Religious Women.”
38Cabra established foundations in Lisbon (1860), New Orleans (1860) and South Africa (1863), as well as two foundations in Australia – in Adelaide (1868) and Maitland (1867). By then, relations with Sion Hill appear to have improved.
39Duggan, OP, In Search of Truth. Dr. James Quin applied for Sisters to go to Brisbane, the Most Rev. Dr. Allemany, OP, applied for nuns for his diocese in San Francisco and Dr. Patrick Moran, newly appointed bishop of Port Elizabeth, applied for Sisters for his mission to Port Elizabeth in South Africa. It is likely that the decision to go to South Africa was encouraged by the Cabra congregation’s successful foundation in Cape Town in 1863. The Sisters probably knew Moran from his time as parish priest at Booterstown.
40Born in County Wicklow in 1823 as the son of a tenant farmer, Moran had witnessed the horrors of the cholera epidemic that followed the great famine. Educated in Dublin and Wexford, he was trained for the priesthood at St. Patrick’s College in Maynooth and ordained in 1847. After serving in Dublin parishes, he was consecrated as bishop, taking charge of the Eastern Province of the Cape Colony in South Africa in 1856, where he remained for 13 years before being appointed as Bishop of Dunedin.
41Duggan, OP, In Search of Truth.
42 Sion Hill Annals.
46L. Forde, Vic-Gen to Rev. Mother Clare Eliot (elected Prioress of Sion Hill in 1864 and on a number of occasions until early the 1900s). McCarthy, Star in the South, 17. According to Duggan, this procedure is likely to have been aimed at protecting the home convent from excessive depletion of its members, rather than the result of a negative attitude toward any particular sister who might offer herself for the mission. Duggan, OP, In Search of Truth.
43E.R. Simmons, A Brief History of the Catholic Church in New Zealand (Auckland: Catholic Publications Centre, 1978).
44When asked why he preferred the semi-enclosed Dominicans rather than the Sisters of Mercy (who might be seen as more suitable to work in a newly colonised country like New Zealand), Moran had replied – with typical succinctness – “it would be better for the people to come to the Sisters rather than the Sisters come to the people.” Related by Mother. M. Michael McCarthy, OP, to Mary Augustine McCarthy, OP, Star in the South (Dunedin: St. Dominic’s Priory, 1970), 16. The Sisters of Mercy were sometimes known (somewhat disparagingly) as the “walking nuns.”
45Paul Cullen, Rector of the Irish College in Rome from 1832 to 1850, was appointed as the first Irish Cardinal in 1849.
48Ibid.
47L. Forde, Vic-Gen to Rev. Mother Clare Eliot. Ibid. This agreement was to prove problematic for sisters wishing to return to their home communities due to illness or unsuitability.
49Hoy, “The Recruitment and Emigration of Irish Religious Women”; McCarthy, Star in the South.
50Mary Augustine McCarthy, OP, Mother of the Missions, Mother Mary Gabriel Gill, OSD (Dunedin: St. Dominic’s Priory, 1989).
51McCarthy, Star in the South, 20.
54S.M. Alphonsus Owens (who came to New Zealand from Sion Hill in 1874) to Sion Hill, 1905.
52There had been 13 children in all, including one son.
53McCarthy, Mother of the Missions.
55McCarthy, Mother of the Missions.
59 Annals of St. Dominic’s, January 1 1870, Dominican Sisters of Aotearoa New Zealand Archives (hereafter, DSANZ).
56Dun Laoghaire.
57As it was, the voyage cost £900 sterling.
58McCarthy, Star in the South.
60 Otago Daily Times, February 20 1871. Due to enclosure requirements, the Choir Sisters probably travelled in the closed carriages with the two Lay Sisters in the open barouche.
61Hugh M. Laracy, “Bishop Moran, Irish Politics and Catholicism in New Zealand,” Journal of Religious History 6, no. 1 (1970): 62–76.
62The welcome took place in St. Joseph’s Church. McCarthy, Star in the South, 35.
64McCarthy, Star in the South, 38–9.
63Michael King. Gods farthest outpost: A history of Catholics in New Zealand (Auckland: Penguin, 1997).
66S.M. Francis to Prioress, Sion Hill, March 17 1871, DSANZ.
65Ibid.
68S.M. Francis to Prioress Sion Hill, March 17 1871, DSANZ.
67Donald Harman Akenson, Half the World from Home: Perspectives on the Irish in New Zealand (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1990). The shortage of domestic servants and their expense can be partly explained by the availability of large numbers of single men wanting to marry, which meant that any period of domestic service tended to be of short duration.
69M.M. Gabriel Gill to Sion Hill, “Mothers and Sisters,” November 12 1871.
70Ibid.
71Marjorie Theobald, Knowing Women: Origins of Women’s Education in Nineteenth-century Australia (Cambridge University Press, 1996). A study of two Dominican schools in South Australia reveals a similar “accomplishments” curriculum. Stephanie Burley, “None More Anonymous? Catholic Teaching Nuns, their Secondary Schools and Students in South Australia 1880–1925” (Master’s thesis, University of Adelaide, 1992).
72Marjorie Theobald, Knowing Women.
74S.M. De Ricci to Dr Kirby, November 22 1876. Irish College Rome Archives (hereafter ICRA).
73Kealy, OP, Dominican Education in Ireland.
75A Father Hurley expressed these sentiments in an article entitled “Some Reasons why Catholics Lose their Faith in New Zealand,” Tablet, July 15 1887.
76Jenny Collins, “From ‘Apprentice to Professional’: The Training of New Zealand Catholic Teachers, 1945–1965,” History of Education Review 34, no. 2 (2005): 27–40.
77Jenny Collins, “Strategies for Survival and Success: Dominican Teachers 1931–1961,” History of Education Review 33, no. 1 (2004): 1–13.
78 Constitutions of the New Zealand Dominican Sisters under the protection of Our Lady of the Most Holy Rosary and of St. Catherine of Sienna, 1933, 24. Auckland Catholic Diocesan Archives (hereafter, ACDA).
79Sister Lucy, born Mary Tracy in 1827 in Dublin, had been a lady’s maid before becoming a sister; she had lived for several years in Paris and had a good command of French. Sister Peter, born Anne Jordan in 1849 in Dublin, Ireland, was professed two days after the announcement that she had been chosen to go to Dunedin.
80Margaret Susan Thompson, “Sisterhood and Power: Class, Culture, and Ethnicity in the American Convent,” Colby Library Quarterly 25 (1989): 149–75.
81James Belich, Paradise Reforged : A History of the New Zealanders from the 1880s to the Year 2000 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001). James Belich notes that by the 1900s, populist notions of egalitarianism had resulted in public pressure to open up educational opportunities to all sectors of society.
82See “Concerning those received” from Quinquennial Report of the Congregation of New Zealand Dominican Sisters to Sacred Congregation, 1948–1952, DSANZ. It took until the late 1940s for the distinction between Lay and Choir Sisters entering Dominican religious life in New Zealand to be abolished.
83Difficulties arose in relation to authority relationships and whose jurisdiction the novitiate was to operate under. Mother Gabriel Gill seems to have alienated Archbishop Walsh (Dublin) with her high-handed approach. The story has all the elements of drama and intrigue and deserves to be told elsewhere.
84Hoy, “The Recruitment and Emigration of Irish Religious Women.”
85See also Fialka, Sisters: Catholic Nuns and the Making of America; Jenny Collins, “Hidden Lives: The Teaching and Religious Lives of Eight Dominican Sisters, 1931–1961” (Master’s thesis, Massey University, 2001). This pattern is evident in the more formal relationship the Dominican Sisters had with Bishop Michael Verdon, who succeeded Patrick Moran as Bishop of Dunedin in 1896.
86Sister de Ricci to Dr Kirby, November 27 1889, DSANZ. The Exhibition ran from November 1889 to April 1890.
87 Annals St. Dominic’s 1889, gh6/3/8 DSANZ. In the same year Robert Stout, New Zealand’s 13th premier and a long-time political adversary of Moran’s, sent his daughter, Maia, as a boarder to St. Dominic’s College.
89Sister Louis Keighron to Prioress, Sion Hill, June 26 1910, DSANZ.
88In 1899, at the invitation of Bishop Kelly of the diocese of Geraldton in Western Australia, Gabriel Gill set up a new foundation with six Sisters (including Sister De Ricci, one of the original Irish founders). She died there in 1905.
90Part of the following discussion has appeared in Jenny Collins, “Dublin to Dunedin: From ‘Old World’ Frameworks to New Mission Frontiers,” in Towards the Intelligent Use of Liberty: Dominican Approaches to Education, ed. Gabriel Kelly, OP, and Kevin Saunders, OP (Adelaide: ATF Press, 2004), 279–91.