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Abstract
This article examines the biographies and personal records of nineteenth-century Catholic nuns who worked in education, with a view to determining how they reconciled their individuality with the demands of religious life. Their resistance to rules, and the ways in which they wrestled with the vow of obedience, is examined. The roles of the Novice Mistress and the Superior in teaching and managing the members of their religious communities are explored, with particular reference to three orders of women religious.
Notes
1 In the nineteenth century, Catholic women in religious ‘orders’ took solemn vows and received the title ‘nun’, while women in religious ‘congregations’ took simple vows and were known as ‘Sisters’. Throughout the article, the terms nun, woman religious, and Sister are used interchangeably, as is common in scholarship. See Mary Peckham Magray, The Transforming Power of the Nuns: Women, Religion and Cultural Change in Ireland, 1750–1900 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 138.
2 Scholarship on the role of nuns in education includes: Sarah Curtis, Educating the Faithful: Religion, Schooling and Society in Nineteenth-Century France (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000); Phil Kilroy, Madeleine Sophie Barat: a Life (Cork: Cork University Press, 2000) and The Society of the Sacred Heart in Nineteenth Century France (Cork: Cork University Press, 2012); Rebecca Rogers, From the Salon to the Schoolroom: Educating Bourgeois Girls in Nineteenth-Century France (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005); Elizabeth M. Smyth, ed., Changing Habits: Women’s Religious Orders in Canada (Toronto: Novalis, 2007); Marie Kealy, Dominican Education in Ireland, 1820–1930 (Dublin and Portland OR: Irish Academic Press, 2007); Deirdre Raftery and Catherine Nowlan-Roebuck, ‘Convent Schools and National Education in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: Negotiating a Place within a Non-denominational System’, History of Education 36, no. 3 (2007): 353–362. Research on nuns and healthcare includes Barbara Mann Wall, Unlikely Entrepreneurs: Catholic Sisters and the Hospital Marketplace, 1865–1925 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005), and Maureen Fitzgerald, Habits of Compassion: Irish Catholic Nuns and the Origin of New York’s Welfare system, 1830–1920 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois press, 2006). Research on the agency of nuns includes Emily Clarke, Masterless Mistresses: The New York Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727–1834 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Carmen M. Mangion, Contested Identities: Catholic Women Religious in Nineteenth-Century England and Wales (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), and Kathleen Sprows Cummings, New Women of the Old Faith: Gender and American Catholicism in the Progressive Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
3 Smyth, ed., Changing Habits; Rose Bruno-Jofré, The Missionary Oblate Sisters: Vision and Mission (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005); Rogers, From the Salon to the Schoolroom; Curtis, Educating the Faithful; Kealy, Dominican Education; Clarke, Masterless Mistresses; Sprows Cummings, New Women of the Old Faith.
4 The ‘initiative and independence’ of nuns has, however, been demonstrated in some scholarship. See, for example, Rebecca Rogers, ‘Retrograde or Modern? Unveiling the Teaching Nun in Nineteenth-century France’, Social History 23, no. 2 (1998): 150.
5 ‘International’ here refers to that which encompasses more than one nation or national boundary.
6 Catriona Clear, Nuns in Nineteenth Century Ireland (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1987); Rosemary Raughter, ed., Religious Women and their History (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2005); Mary Peckham Magray, The Transforming Power of the Nuns: Women, Religion and Cultural Change in Ireland, 1750–1900 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Kealy, Dominican Education. Interest in the legacy of nuns to education is timely, not least because while nuns dominated the provision of female education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was a sharp decline in vocations to religious life in the decades following the Second Vatican Council. In Ireland and internationally, there has been a transfer of much Catholic school management to secular management systems.
7 Recent research on Irish nuns in education includes Stephanie Burley, ‘Engagement with Empires: Irish Catholic Female Religious Teachers in Colonial South Australia, 1868–1901’, Irish Educational Studies 31, no. 2 (2012): 175–90; Maria Luddy, ‘“Possessed of Fine Properties”: Power, Authority and the Funding of Convents in Ireland, 1780–1900’, in The Economics of Providence, Maarten Van Dijck et al. (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2012); Deirdre Raftery, ‘The “Mission” of Nuns in Female Education’, Paedagogica Historica 48, no. 2 (2012): 299-313; and ‘“Je suis d’aucune Nation”: The Recruitment and Identity of Irish Women Religious in the International Mission Field, c. 1830–1930’, Paedagogica Historica 9, no. 4 (2013): 513–30.
8 Bart Hellinckx, Frank Simon and Marc Depape, The Forgotten Contribution of the Teaching Sisters (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2009).
9 Helen Rose Ebaugh, ‘Patriarchal Bargains and Latent Avenues of Social Mobility: Nuns in the Roman Catholic Church’, Gender and Society 7, no. 3 (1993): 402.
10 See for example R. Forgan and J. Bennet, eds., There’s Something About a Convent Girl (London: Virago, 1991), and relevant sections from J. Quinn, My Eductaion (Dublin: Town House & Country House, 1997).
11 While the purpose of this article is not to analyse the discourse of power within convents, Foucault’s work could be used in an analysis of convent discipline. See, for example, M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of a Prison (London: Penguin, 1991).
12 See Raftery, ‘“Je suis d’aucune Nation”’.
13 See Suellen Hoy, ‘The Journey Out: The Recruitment and Emigration of Irish Religious Women to the United States, 1812–1914’, Journal of Women’s History 6, no. 4/7, no. 1 (1995): 70. See also Magray, The Transforming Power of the Nuns, 9. For other discussions of convent life in nineteenth-century Ireland see Anthony Fahey, Female Asceticism in the Catholic Church: a Case Study of Nuns in Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Illinois, 1982); Catriona Clear, Nuns in Nineteenth Century Ireland (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1987); Suellen Hoy, Good Hearts: Catholic Sisters in Chicago’s Past (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006).
14 For a discussion of the increase in vocations and an analysis of the spread of convents in Ireland see chapter two of Peckham Magray, The Transforming Power of the Nuns.
15 Raftery, ‘“Je suis d’aucune Nation”’.
16 Tom O’Donoghue, Come Follow Me and Forsake Temptation: Catholic Schooling and the Recruitment and Retention of Teachers for Religious Teaching Orders, 1922–1965 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2004), 69. See also E. Brian Titley, Church, State and the Control of Schooling in Ireland 1900–1944 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1983), 149.
17 Luddy, Women and Philanthropy, 45.
18 Margaret MacCurtain, Mary O’Dowd and Maria Luddy, ‘An Agenda for Women’s History in Ireland, 1500–1900’, Irish Historical Studies 28, no. 109 (1992): 24.
19 See Pauline Jackson, ‘Women in 19th Century Irish Emigration’, International Migration Review 18 (1984):1004–1020.
20 See Raftery, ‘“Je suis d’aucune Nation”’.
21 Etienne Lelong, Bishop of Nevers, The Nun, Her Character and Work, 3rd ed. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Trubner, 1920), 4.
22 Lelong, The Nun, Her Character and Work, 101.
23 The splendid cause referred to the spread of the Christian message; Irish missionary nuns and priests knew and sang a rousing anthem (originally a poem) by Fr. Paddy O’Connor which began ‘Who has a blade for a splendid cause, a cause that is good and true? /To live and to die for the grandest thing, that man could say or singer sing or ever soldier knew…’. Infant Jesus Archives, Dublin.
24 Joyful Mother of Children: Mother Frances Mary Teresa Ball, by a Loreto Sister, IBVM. (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1961), 123.
25 Such public scandals were not uncommon, and misunderstandings about Catholicism, sometimes fuelled by Protestant evangelicals, caused a spate of popular publications to appear in the first half of the nineteenth century that were damaging to convents and caused Superiors to be cautious about attracting negative attention. The best-known publication, The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monck (1836), was a gothic tale of a Protestant girl, educated in a Catholic convent, who became a nun and found herself and other nuns ‘imprisoned’ within the convent walls.
26 Society of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Lettres Annuelles, 1906–1908, Vol. 3, 41–4, SSHPAD.
27 The biographical data on Irish nuns is drawn from a database currently being compiled by this author, for a history of Irish women religious and the international mission field, c.1840–1940. The research process includes developing searchable data sets for religious orders involved in education, and allows the activity of thousands of women to be traced over countries and continents. Source of information on nineteenth-century RSCJs include the Biographical Index, SSHPAD, and records of Irish RSCJs at the Archives of the US. and Canadian Provinces of the Society of the Sacred Heart, St Louis, MO.
28 Helena Concannon, ‘Historic Irish Convents’, Studies 38, no. 151 (1949): 66. Mother Juliana Nolan was received into the Dominican Convent in Bilbao, during the period in which Irish convents were in exile; she returned to Ireland in 1686 as part of the group that refounded the Dominican Convent, Galway.
29 Register, Society of St Louis Archives, Monaghan.
30 Lettres Annuelles, Society of the Sacred Heart (SSHPAD).
31 Anthony Fahey, Female Asceticism in the Catholic Church: a Case Study of Nuns in Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Illinois, 1982), 5.
32 Henri de Lubac, SJ, The Splendour of the Church (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1956), in Obedience, the Greatest Freedom, ed. Daughters of St Paul (Boston: St Paul Editions, 1966), 124–5.
33 Christine Trimmingham Jack, ‘Sacred symbols, school ideology and the construction of subjectivity’, Paedagogica Historica 34, no. 3 (1998): 786. See also Rosemary Radford Reuther, ‘Misogynism and Virginal Feminism in the Fathers of the Church’, in Religion and Sexism: Images of Woman in the Jewish and Christian Traditions, ed. Rosemary Radford Reuther (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974).
34 Trimmingham Jack, 786.
35 St Thomas Aquinas, ‘Whether obedience belongs to religious perfection’, Summa Theologica (trans.), in Obedience, the Greatest Freedom, 108.
36 For the duties of Superiors see Fintan Geser, The Canon Law Governing Communities of Sisters (St Louis, MO and London: Herder Book Co., 1950), 116–26. See also James Alberione, Ut Perfectus Sit Homo Dei (Rome: St Paul Editions, 1960).
37 The first Superiors of the Institute houses in Canada were all Irish women, sent from Loreto Abbey, Rathfarnham. Teresa Dease IBVM appointed the Superiors as follows: Toronto (1847): Teresa Dease IBVM; Brantford (1853): Joachim Murray IBVM; London, Ontario (1855): Berchmans Lalor IBVM; Guelph (1856): Berchmans Lalor; Belleville (1857): Teresa Dease IBVM; Niagara Falls (1861): Joachim Murray IBVM; Hamilton (1865): Stanislaus Hennigan IBVM; Lindsay (1874): Dosithea Gibney IBVM; Stratford (1878): Evangelista O’Sullivan IBVM. When the Institute made its first foundation in the United States, in 1880, its first Superior was also Irish-born, and from Loreto Abbey, Rathfarnham: Gonzaga Gallivan IBVM. Source: Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary Archives, Canadian Province (hereafter IBVMACP). Sprows Cummings, New Women of the Old Faith, 3.
38 File 4.1–47, N.A. Superiors General, Reverend Mother Teresa Dease: Exhortations. 1851–1889, 1 (Loreto Central & Irish Province Archives [hereafter LCIPA]).
39 Mother Teresa Dease IBVM (Toronto) to Mother Scholastica IBVM (Dublin), November 7, November 1871. SS/PRO/3/0, LCIPA.
40 Directory for the Professed of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary (Catholic Orphan Press, 1919), 5–6.
41 Ibid., 57.
42 Society of the Sacred Heart, Lettres Annuelles, 1926–1928. The obituary for Bridget Quinn RSCJ commended her ‘loyal and filial submission’, SSHPAD.
43 Texts and reading books used in the Novitiates of different religious orders give a good indication of the learning that took place. See for example: Preparatory Exercises for the Religious Profession: A Series of Meditations on the Vows of Religion, by a Member of the Ursuline Community (Dublin: James Duffy, 1863); The Choir Manual (London: Burns & Oates, 1895); Daily Duties: An Instruction for Novices of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary (Toronto: Loretto Novitiate,1897); A Directory for Novices of the Ursuline Order (London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1927); The Sister of Mercy’s Daily Round (Dublin: M.H. Gill & Son, 1927).
44 A Directory for Novices, 337–9.
45 See Rogers, ‘Retrograde or Modern?’, 157.
46 MS Journal, Sacred Heart House 1853–1883 [Mount Anville], March 3, 1892, SSHPAD.
47 Mother Mary Magdalen Bray, South Presentation Convent, Cork, to Mother Genevieve Beale, Convent of St Louis, Juilly, April 10, 1849. Transcriptions of the letters of Genevieve Beale, 7.A 3. Archives of the Sisters of St Louis, Juilly, France (hereafter SSLAF).
48 Mother Marie de Loë, Superior General, Society of the Sacred Heart. MS notebook, ‘Visits to Mount Anville House’, Visit of June 15–20, 1924. MAV/287 (4), SSHPAD (trans. 2013).
49 Sister Marianne O’Sullivan, Convent of St Louis, Monaghan, to the Superior General, Convent of St Louis, Juilly, June 21, 1860, SSLAF, (trans. 2013).
50 Geser, The Canon Law, 120.
51 Mother Mabel Digby RSCJ, Superior Vicar. MS notebook ‘Glasnevin House – Record of Visits’, Part 2; Visit of September 26–October 5, 1875. MAV/287 (1), SSHPAD (trans. 2013).
52 Mother Janet Stuart RSCJ, Superior Vicar. MS Rapport sur la visite faite dans la maison de Mt Anville, 1910. CIV. 2. Society of the Sacred Heart General Archives, Rome (hereafter SSHGA) (trans. 2013).
53 Mother E.M. Lamb RSCJ, Assistant General. MS notebook ‘Visits to Mount Anville House’, Visit of 21st–28th June, 1927. MAV/287 (4), SSHPAD (trans. 2013).
54 Rebecca Rogers, ‘Retrograde or Modern?’, 149.
55 Mother Janet Stuart RSCJ, Superior Vicar. MS Rapport sur la visite faite dans la maison de Mt Anville, 1896, MS Rapport sur la visite faite dans la maison de Mt Anville, 1906, and MS Rapport sur la visite faite dans la maison de Mt Anville, 1910. CIV. 2. SSHGA (trans. 2013).
56 Mother Janet Stuart RSCJ, Superior Vicar. MS Rapport sur la visite faite dans la maison de Mt Anville, 1906, and MS Rapport sur la visite faite dans la maison de Mt Anville,1910. CIV. 2. SSHGA (trans. 2013).
57 Mother Janet Stuart RSCJ, Superior Vicar. MS Rapport sur la visite faite dans la maison de Mt Anville, 1896. CIV.2. SSHGA (trans. 2013).
58 Mother Lucie Merilhou RSCJ, Superior Vicar. MS Rapport sur la visite faite dans la maison de Glasnevin, 1862. CIV.2. SSHGA (trans. 2013).
59 Abbé Bautain, Juilly College, France, to Mother Genevieve Beale, St Louis Convent, Monaghan, July 30, 1860, 2A3.10/37. SSLAF (trans. 2013).
60 Mother Gertrude de Brou RSCJ, Superior Vicar. MS Rapport sur la visite faite dans la maison de Glasnevin, 1853. CIV.2. SSHGA (trans. 2013).
61 File 4.1–47, N.A. Superiors General, Reverend Mother Teresa Dease: Exhortations, 1851–1889, 1, IBVMACP.
62 Society of the Sacred Heart, Lettres Annuelles, 1900–1903 (obituary for Bridget Mary Strain RSCJ), SSHPAD (trans. 2013).
63 Society of the Sacred Heart, Lettres Annuelles, 1926–1928 (obituary for Bridget Quinn RSCJ), SSHPAD (trans. 2013).
64 Society of the Sacred Heart, Lettres Annuelles, 1864–1871 (obituary for Anne Brennan RSCJ), SSHPAD (trans. 2013).
65 Mother Lucie Merilhou, Superior Vicar. MS Rapport sur la visite faite dans la maison de Glasnevin, 1854. CIV.2. SSHGA (trans. 2013).
66 File 4.1–47, N.A. Superiors General, Reverend Mother Teresa Dease: Exhortations, 1851–1889, IBVMACP.
67 Mother Lucie Merilhou RSCJ, Superior Vicar. MS notebook Mt Anville – Record of Visits, May 1866. MAV/287 (1), SSHPAD (trans. 2013).
68 Mother Janet Stuart RSCJ, Superior Vicar. MS notebook Mt Anville – Record of Visits, October 1904. MAV/287 (4), SSHPAD (trans. 2013).
69 For a discussion of this see Raftery, ‘The “Mission” of Nuns’.
70 For example, countless entries in the School Journal of Mount Anville convent, Dublin describe treats enjoyed by the pupils. On 30 April 1901 the entertainments provided to celebrate Mother General’s anniversary included a cricket match, a ‘gypsy tea in the garden [and] … a cinematograph showing views of the Queen’s funeral and scenes from the war’. MS School Journal, 1900–1922. MAV/187 (1), SSHPAD.
71 Maud Monaghan, Life and Letters of Janet Erskine Stuart (London: Longmans Green, 1920), 65, cited in Margaret Williams, The Society of the Sacred Heart: History of a Spirit, 1800–1975 (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1978), 183.
72 Barbara Walsh, Roman Catholic Nuns in England and Wales, 1800–1937: A Social History (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2002), 133.