Irish Nuns and Education in the Anglophone World: A Transnational History (Global Histories of Education) 3031462009, 9783031462009

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GLOBAL HISTORIES OF EDUCATION

Irish Nuns and Education in the Anglophone World A Transnational History

Deirdre Raftery

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

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 [email protected]. Preliminary inquiries are welcome and encouraged.

Deirdre Raftery

Irish Nuns and Education in the Anglophone World A Transnational History

Deirdre Raftery School of Education University College Dublin Dublin, Ireland

ISSN 2731-6408     ISSN 2731-6416 (electronic) Global Histories of Education ISBN 978-3-031-46200-9    ISBN 978-3-031-46201-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46201-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: benoitb / Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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

Acknowledgements

Research for this book has benefitted from the support of many archivists and communities of women religious. It has also been supported, at various times, by libraries, universities, scholarly organisations, professional networks and by my friends and family. I would like to thank all of the archivists who provided access to materials and advice on collections at the following archives: Brigidine Archives, New South Wales; Delaney Archive, Carlow; Dominican Congregation Archives, Cabra; Dublin Diocesan Archives; Faithful Companions of Jesus Archive, Melbourne; Infant Jesus Sisters Archives, Paris; IBVM Canadian Province Archives; Infant Jesus Archives, Dublin; Loreto Congregation Institute and Province Archives, Ireland; Loreto Province Archives, Australia; Loreto South Asia Province Archives; Marist Congregational Archive, Rome; Mercy Archives, New South Wales; Mercy Congregational Archives, Ireland; Archives of the Pontifical Irish College, Rome; Presentation Sisters Congregational Archives, Cork; Presentation Sisters Archive, Newfoundland; Presentation Sisters Archive, San Francisco; Provincial Archives, Society of the Sacred Heart, United States-Canada Province, St. Louis, Missouri; Religious Sisters of Charity Archives, Sydney; Sisters of St Louis Archive, Juilly; Sisters of St Joseph of Cluny Archive, Dublin; Society of the Sacred Heart Archives, Dublin; Society of the Sacred Heart Library, Joigny; Society of the Sacred Heart Archives, Rome; and the Ursuline Congregational Archives, Cork. At different points during the research process, I benefitted from both the wisdom and the interest of sisters in the congregations which I was researching. I would like to acknowledge this with gratitude, and extend xiii

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thanks for the kind hospitality extended by many communities around the world. An award from the Irish Research Council supported a period of work at archives in Australia and allowed me to determine the scope of this project. An Ireland-Canada University Foundation Award facilitated research at archives in Toronto. A Hibernian Research Award from the University of Notre Dame supported the examination of US collections. A Chawton House Visiting Fellowship provided access to relevant publications. A Visiting Fellowship at the University of Oxford allowed for a period of research and writing at the Bodleian library. A Fulbright award to spend a term at Boston College in 2015 facilitated research on American sources. I acknowledge all of this support with immense gratitude. I would also like to acknowledge my colleagues, friends and students who research in the area of the history of women religious, especially those who share ideas and scholarship via the History of Women Religious Britain and Ireland (H-WRBI) and the Conference for the History of Women Religious (USA). My greatest debt of gratitude is to Catherine KilBride to whom this book is dedicated with my thanks. For her translation of all the French archival material in this book, Italian translation at archives in Rome, and support throughout the research and editing, I am most grateful. Moreover, her unwavering belief in the value of this project is deeply appreciated. Finally I want to thank my husband, Peter, and my son, Leonard, who have lived with this research for many years and have always shown interest in it. Their love and support is treasured.

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

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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

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.

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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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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

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

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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

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

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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 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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.

CHAPTER 2

Preparing for Religious Life: The Training of Aspirants, Postulants and Novices in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

‘When young in the Franciscan house in Calais She complained to the dentist, I have a pain in our teeth.’ ‘J’ai mal à nos dents’. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

Informal Preparation Young women began their lives as nuns having been prepared both informally and formally. As will be seen, formal preparation, in the postulancy and novitiate, had a clear structure and objectives. But informal preparation—at home and at school—also played an important role in readying girls and young women for religious life. Many girls were strongly influenced by family members, especially older siblings who were either already professed religious, or were deeply involved in the Church. For example, the educational and spiritual formation of Sophie Barat, who founded the Society of the Sacred Heart in France in 1800, was firmly under the control of her brother, Louis. Born in 1770, Sophie was the third child born to Jacques Barat and Madeleine Fouffé, in Joigny, France. Her family were winegrowers and lived in comfort, though Sophie, in later life, recalled that the ‘dark, heavy religion’ of Jansenism, with its emphasis on the innate evil of humanity, cast a shadow over the Barat home. Sophie’s older © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Raftery, Irish Nuns and Education in the Anglophone World, Global Histories of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46201-6_2

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brother, Louis, briefly studied for the priesthood with the Lazaristes, but left the seminary to return home and undertake the tutoring of the young Sophie. He was a demanding teacher, who enforced long periods of study and attendance at daily Mass. In 1795, having been secretly ordained a priest, Louis left Joigny and brought the sixteen-year old Sophie to Paris, in order to complete her education and formation. Through Louis, she became influenced by Fr Joseph Varin who wanted to form a community of women ‘devoted to the spirituality of the Sacred Heart and involved in the education of young women’.1 Though Sophie indicated an interest in becoming a Carmelite, Varin insisted that she would waste her fine education by going into a monastery. He encouraged her towards a more active role, dedicated to the education of Catholic girls. In 1800, at the age of twenty-one, Sophie Barat and three other women committed themselves to religious life in a community.2 Teresa Ball, who founded the Loreto order (IBVM) in Ireland in 1821, was influenced by her older sister, Cecilia, who had been professed an Ursuline in 1808. She was also strongly influenced by the Rev. Dr Daniel Murray. Murray was a friend of her father’s, John Ball, and a frequent visitor at her home. When John Ball died in 1812, Murray began to play a direct role in her life, as her confessor and friend, while also training her ‘especially in obedience, and [putting] her to the test in the practice of this fundamental virtue’.3 His paternalism was noted by her contemporaries, who wrote that after the death of John Ball, Murray became ‘a second parent’ to her.4 Later in life, Ball herself said that Murray was ‘like the tenderest of fathers’.5 Under his direction, she agreed to go to the Bar Convent in York, to make her novitiate. Murray wrote to the Superior of the Bar Convent, Mother Coyney, to tell her that he was sending her ‘a little treasure’, and had high hopes that she would return to Ireland in due course, to bring the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary to Dublin.6 Teresa was a reluctant foundress, and wanted to stay at the Bar Convent. Murray regularly visited her there, and wrote to her, to reassure her that she was suited to being a Superior in Ireland. ‘Let me entreat you, my dear child, not to continue wearing out your poor mind by anxieties’, Murray wrote to Ball, when she was beginning to balk at the prospect of becoming a foundress at a tender age.7 Teresa Ball eventually returned to Ireland in 1821, by which time Murray had prepared a convent—Loreto Abbey—for her and put as much as possible in place to ensure its success. In a gesture of paternal pride, he insisted that she—as ‘first Abbess of Loreto’—should sit for a full-length portrait that would thereafter hang in the hall of the convent.8 For this project, he commissioned Joseph Haverty RHA, a

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well-­established artist and a member of the Royal Hibernian Academy by the time he painted the Loreto Superior.9 Murray remained an advisor to Ball for the rest of his life and was also a close friend of Anna Maria Ball O’Brien, Teresa’s sister.10 While he did not interfere in the running of Loreto Abbey once Ball was installed, he remained a benign but useful supporter until his death in 1852. In his Will, he requested that his heart should be buried at Loreto Abbey. The paternal friendship between Daniel Murray and his protégée was no less powerful than the blood relationship of Sophie and Louis Barat. Both women were given spiritual formation by these men; however, both women had to loosen the ties that bound them to their mentors once they were professed. The only kinship ties that were possible inside the enclosure were those between women. However, very few accounts survive that tell us about familial relationships within convents. As seen in Chap. 1, siblings often lived in the same convent, just as some aunts, nieces and cousins who had entered the same order and served in the same foundations. But how family ties impacted on community life is almost invisible in convent records. Nonetheless, siblings who were nuns supported each other in myriad ways. For example, the few surviving letters between Mother Teresa Ball and her sister, Mother Regis Ball, show that they offered each other advice, and updated each other with snippets of family news.11 Similarly, letters between Nano Nagle and Teresa Mulally, and between Nagle and other women religious, show that they provided guidance and support to each other.12 Their exchanges served as a kind of informal preparation for the challenges of religious life, and later became a source of strength. Nowhere is this more evident than in the correspondence between Mother Teresa Ball and Mother Teresa Dease, the woman who established the Loreto order in Canada. Because many of their letters survive, it is possible to see how some women religious remained in constant conversation with each other across geographical boundaries.13 Informal preparation for religious life also happened within families that were particularly attentive to their faith, and to the revival of the Catholic Church in post-penal Ireland. George Bodkin and Marian O’Kelly, descendants of old landowning Catholic families who supported the Jacobite cause, raised a large family of eight children in their home in Kenmare, County Kerry. Religion permeated their lives. George’s father, John Bodkin, had kept a chapel at his home in County Galway, where he had trained his children ‘along strongly traditional lines’.14 Marian O’Kelly’s father, Count Cornelius O’Kelly of Callagh, also kept a chapel in his home. Unsurprisingly, George and Marian Bodkin gave their children

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a Catholic education both at home and in the schools that they selected for them. The three older daughters, Helen, Minna and Agnes, were sent to boarding school in Bruges, to the Dames de l’Instruction Chrétienne, where they had an aunt who was a nun. The three sons attended Stonyhurst, and one—William—entered the Society of Jesus in 1886. William’s acceptance of his vocation apparently influenced Helen to join the Society of the Sacred Heart, Roehampton, that same year. In 1887, Mrs Bodkin sent her two youngest daughters—Madeleine and Gertrude—to board at the Roehampton convent. The education of the girls, both at home and in school, provided them with an unbroken experience of religion that disposed them to entering the convent. In all, four of the Bodkins entered the Society of the Sacred Heart. The elite convent education of women such as the Ball sisters, and the four Bodkins, included spiritual direction. Certainly, this influenced the decisions they took about their lives. But many other Irishwomen received a less cosmopolitan upbringing that, nonetheless, predisposed them to religious life. They were influenced by the religious mood in Catholic Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century that has been called a time of ‘devotional revolution’.15 They were also conscious of the changing physical landscape of the country, as churches and convents sprang up. And they were influenced by the performative elements of their religion—novenas, sodalities, benediction—all of which brought young girls out of their homes and into spaces that fostered the faith.16 The quasi-social aspect of these kinds of meetings may have had some attraction for young women. Equally, the all-female contexts in which women’s gatherings took place may have given girls a sense of what religious community life might look like. This kind of informal devotional preparation was encouraged by churchmen and by women religious, because the benefits were obvious. Less obvious, though certainly as important, were the benefits of the informal education and training that girls got inside their own homes. The rigid gender segregation of the sexes in post-Famine Ireland meant that girls learned their skills from other women, including ways to earn money. Particularly for farm families, female-earned income became ‘the factor that tipped the balance between bare survival and a degree of comfort’.17 Women taught each other poultry-keeping, knitting, weaving, spinning, brewing and distilling. They were intimately involved in all aspects of the management of death, laying out corpses and waking the dead. Many did domestic work to earn money, while others ran shops where they had to balance the accounts. Women taught their daughters the kinds of skills

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that made them very useful in convents, especially—though not exclusively—if they became lay or ‘house’ sisters. This kind of informal education also prepared Irish girls for emigration, and their employment as domestic servants in America, for instance, would give them the wherewithal to bring siblings out. Many such women later entered convents, having made their contribution to chain-migration. For example, of the 503 Irish-born women who entered the Society of the Sacred Heart in the United States between 1831 and 1900, 350 were received into the rank of lay sister. Their biographical records note that most had first worked in service in Philadelphia, New York and Chicago, and many had supported younger siblings to immigrate.18 For these women, the convent was often a safe harbour when they found themselves homeless and unmarried, after a decade or two of hard domestic work. Though often overlooked in histories of nuns, informal preparation for religious life was of crucial importance, disposing them to religion and preparing them for the kind of work that lay ahead of them.

Formal Preparation The demand for teaching sisters in Catholic schools required a steady supply of women with vocations, willing to submit to rigorous formal preparation. Some young women presented themselves to convent Superiors or to priests, to discuss their sense of having a ‘call’ to religious life. Others were invited to ‘discern’ whether or not they were being called. As noted earlier, convent schools and sodalities provided an ideal place to begin this discernment process. Nuns were advised that the Church urged them to ‘seek out, foster and train with special solicitude’ young people who gave ‘indications of a vocation’.19 They could ‘put the idea before’ their pupils, but they were not supposed to press the issue: a girl should discern her own vocation. The discernment process was also a part of the practice of questing for vocations, and it had to be managed carefully. While nuns who made recruitment trips to Ireland might succeed in bringing young women back to the US or Australia, it was the Superior who would eventually judge their vocation.20 This process involved examining the ‘motives’ expressed by the young woman who asked to be received as a postulant, and then assessing ‘impediments to admission’ and the ‘aptitude of the postulant’. When explaining their motives, some women said their sense of a vocation came from an interior voice or ‘call’. Others referred to the influence

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of friends and relatives, or the impact of reading sermons and praying. However, Superiors were expected to ‘set aside … the spark which sets light to the fire, [and] study the flame itself’.21 They were to ‘judge of the vocation on its own merits without attaching too much importance to what called it into being’.22 A young woman was suitable if she had been attracted to religious life for a sustained period, and in a way that indicated a ‘calm and steady’ approach. But a girl should not be accepted if her vocation seemed to be a ‘mere caprice’.23 Capriciousness manifested itself in many ways: in 1822, the daughter of a Protestant gentleman arrived at Loreto Abbey ‘in a habit of her own fancy’, installing herself ‘with a determination’ until her father was called to take her away.24 The Superior, Mother Teresa Ball, also had to turn away a woman who tried to deposit her seven-year old daughter, ‘to receive the holy habit, without any pecuniary resources’.25 Thereafter, the Superior had to be sure that there were no ‘impediments’: an aspirant should not enter an order ‘under stress of violence or grave fear or fraud’, and she could not be married, with ‘the other party still living’.26 She had to be at least sixteen years of age, not be ‘liable to punishment for a grave crime’, and not already be bound by religious vows to another institute. Ideally, she should not be from a family ‘of doubtful repute’, but ultimately she would be judged on her own merits. While the Church did not encourage the reception of girls whose parents were unmarried, it did not forbid it. Finally, the Superior had to judge whether or not the young woman had an aptitude for the work that lay ahead of her. Some convents needed women who were suited to being Choir sisters. Ideally these women would be reasonably well educated, and well-disposed to becoming teachers. Other orders needed healthy, hard-working young women who were suited to working as lay sisters. If they had skills, such as shoe-making or poultry-keeping, this was an advantage. Indeed, some had many skills, including carpentry and brewing. Women who asked to be accepted into a congregation were ‘aspirants to religious life’.27 The term ‘aspirant’ referred to a woman who hoped to become a vowed religious, but had yet to complete all of her postulancy and novitiate, and make her profession of vows. Some aspirants were clearly well suited to religion, and there was no question about accepting them. Wexford-born Anna Shannon was thoroughly prepared to become a member of the Society of the Sacred Heart (RSCJ) in America, before she asked to be accepted into the Society. From the age of eleven, she had

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been educated at their boarding school in Florissant, living in a small and very close community, under the instruction of the Superior, Mother Philippine Duchesne, who had brought the French congregation to the US in 1818.28 Anna Shannon remained with Mother Philippine Duchesne to make her novitiate. Writing to the Mother General Sophie Barat in 1834, Duchesne assured her that Anna Shannon was ready to profess her solemn vows as she was ‘in her twenty-fifth year … [having] completed her five years aspirancy’.29 For this relatively new French congregation, it was crucial to attract young, capable women: Anna Shannon was exactly the kind of aspirant that Mother Duchesne would accept. As Duchesne later said, Anna Shannon became her right hand; Duchesne spoke no English, while Shannon spoke both English and French and could therefore communicate for the Superior. She was also a very able administrator and teacher, and would eventually become Superior of several US convents, and made a foundation in New Orleans in 1867.30 Most of the aspirants who left Ireland following successful recruitment by religious orders, were bound for the US or Australia, and would begin their postulancy on arrival there. Under Canon Law, before Superiors accepted women to begin their postulancy, they were obliged to make ‘searching enquiries into their character and conduct’.31 However, nuns who were recruiting in Ireland on short visits, had to make decisions based on very little knowledge of the young women who offered themselves. They therefore relied on local priests, nuns and their own kinship networks, to provide as much information as possible before they accepted an aspirant. Mother Josephine Butler, a Presentation nun from Bandon in Cork, was recruited for the order’s Dakota foundation in 1885. She returned to Ireland four times to recruit, gathering several girls from the Sisters of Mercy Industrial School in Kinsale, between 1903 and 1913.32 These would have been poor girls, with few opportunities in Ireland. Ascertaining their ‘vocation’ to religious life would mainly have relied on enquiring about them from the nuns at the Industrial School. The vocation of an aspirant was tested during the months that she spent as a postulant. It was entirely possible that a postulant would not be accepted into the novitiate after postulancy. In this case, those who had travelled overseas had to make their own way back to Ireland. If they could not afford this, they had to find the kind of work available to Irish immigrants. The vulnerability of young women who were turned away

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from convents in North America became a particular concern to Irish bishops. Because of this, some religious orders founded ‘aspirancies’ in Ireland, to prepare young women thoroughly before they left the country for good.

Aspirancies An aspirancy was a kind of boarding school that accepted girls who were too young to be accepted as postulants. Quite aside from their role in preparing young women, they also responded to the increasingly urgent need to ‘grow vocations’, by accepting school-age girls and giving them a free education. The Presentation Sisters established an aspirancy in Kilcock, County Kildare, in 1879. Founded in order to supply nuns for the Presentation convent in San Francisco, it was the brainchild of Mother Teresa Comerford, Superior of the Presentation Convent in San Francisco. That foundation had been established in 1854, to serve the growing population of Irish Catholics who had settled there following the gold discoveries of 1848–1849. Comerford had left Presentation Convent, Kilkenny, to travel to California with five other nuns, where she set up several schools. Although she was a reluctant leader, she soon settled into the role and was described by the Bishop of Salford as ‘the most persevering and determined nun [he] ever met’.33 To bring about the successful expansion of the order in California, Mother Teresa Comerford needed vocations. The Presentation Convent in Kilkenny supplied some, and her own sister who was in the Presentation Convent, Midleton, also agreed to join her in the US. Still in need of support, she made two questing trips to Ireland. Her visit in 1867 resulted in ‘eight accomplished ladies’ returning to America with her.34 But Comerford still needed more teaching sisters, and was dismayed to find that she could not get ‘suitable subjects from among the educated classes’ in California.35 She wrote to Rome, to ask for support to establish ‘a Novitiate in Europe … to provide our Convents with Sisters trained in the same spirit’. Specifically, she wanted to found an Irish novitiate to ‘attract ladies of independent rank’, whose dowries could support the impoverished Californian mission.36 Though Propaganda Fide provided financial support for seminaries for Irishmen, it did not fund female aspirancies: Mother Comerford therefore had to raise funds herself. Her cousin, the Rev. Thomas Geoghegan, used the donations and legacies to build a convent in Kilcock, which had a school, an aspirancy and a novitiate. It opened in 1879. Within a year it had 150 pupils and six novices, and soon supplied fifteen sisters to San Francisco.37

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The Sisters of Mercy also founded an aspirancy, which they advertised in the Catholic Directory, saying that it was a ‘school … intended to afford a suitable education to Young Persons desirous of becoming Nuns, and … especially adapted for those who wish to go on the Foreign Mission’.38 This was St Brigid’s Missionary School, established at the Mercy Convent in Callan, County Kilkenny in 1884. It was founded to both foster and ‘test’ the vocations of girls as young as fourteen, so that they would be able to make an informed decision about whether or not to pursue religious life. The Superior in Callan was Mother Michael Maher, one of Cardinal Cullen’s many relatives who were influential nuns. She was also a cousin of the local bishop, Patrick Moran, who approved the establishment of St Brigid’s.39 When Moran was appointed Bishop of Sydney in 1884, he continued to be a source of support, encouraging Mother Michael to send newly professed nuns to Australia. The aspirancy was also supported by the Archbishop of Maitland, Dr James Murray, as he was in urgent need of teaching sisters, particularly once government support for Catholic schooling in Australia was discontinued in 1883. Girls as young as fourteen were accepted as aspirants, once they had completed their primary education. The yearly cost of maintaining a young woman at St Brigid’s Missionary School was £22 well into the twentieth century, and a ‘burse’ was created from donations to support girls who could not pay the annual fee. Some bursary places were given to girls who either had teaching certificates, or had assisted in national schools, because they would be valuable additions to schools in Australia and the United States. Lack of a dowry was no barrier to entering St Brigid’s; even before the aspirancy was fully established, it was clear that there was no shortage of funds to support girls who were willing to go to Australia. Dr Murray wrote to Mother Michael in 1883 to state emphatically: ‘I hereby authorize you to select six or eight candidates and educate them for the Diocese of Maitland. They can have their choice of either the Dominican order or the Sisters of Mercy. Both communities require sisters very much.’40 Within months of opening, St Brigid’s was able to offer the Archbishop five ‘promising aspirants’, with the assurance of three more to follow.41 The Sisters of Mercy tirelessly promoted the aspirancy among ‘talented girls in [national schools] that would be glad to avail of an offer’ to attend St Brigid’s. ‘We could give a free place almost any time to a well-­ educated … aspirant’, Mother Joseph Rice wrote in 1892. She also confirmed that the young women would be put to ‘no expense for pension, nor for passage’.42 By then, Mother Joseph had already sent ‘between

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thirty and forty postulants to Australia’, mainly in little groups that travelled under the supervision of one or two priests.43 Dr Murray, however, continued to send insistent letters requesting ‘numerous battalions … for our foundations’.44 At St Brigid’s Missionary School, aspirants ‘learned the habits and rituals of convent life’.45 They rose at 5.30 in the morning, and went to the oratory for a half hour of meditation. This was followed by breakfast and domestic chores. At 8.40am lessons began: the girls studied continental languages, music, drawing and painting.46 For girls who showed academic ability, there was an ‘extended course … of Book-keeping, Algebra, Euclid, Natural Philosophy … [and] Italian’.47 There were also lessons in ‘etiquette’, because the nuns recognised that many of the aspirants, though ‘of a respectable class … require[d] as a rule a good deal of refining’.48 Neatly dressed and well-groomed, aspirants had to reflect the training and preparation that they had received at St Brigid’s (see Fig. 2.1, Aspirants at

Fig. 2.1  Aspirants at St Brigid’s Missionary School, Callan, 1898. (By kind permission of the Mercy Congregational Archives, Dublin)

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St Brigid’s Missionary School, Callan, 1898. By kind permission of the Mercy Congregational Archives, Dublin.) Some religious orders in the US and Australia sponsored aspirants, but required that they complete at least one year of novitiate before leaving Ireland to join the overseas foundation. ‘They go out as seculars, but are so formed to religious life that they can easily adapt to the duties of their respective convents’, the nuns at St Brigid’s argued.49 The most common overseas destinations were Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania and the United States (see Table 2.1). Those who went understood that they would never see Ireland or their families again. The first to depart from St Brigid’s was nineteen-year-old Maggie Morris, who left for New South Wales in September, 1885, after twenty months of training. Financed by Bishop Murray, and bound for his diocese, her long life as a Sister of Mercy would include holding the offices of Novice Mistress and Mother Superior. Many aspirants went to the United States, including sixteen-year-old Bridie McGrath, the first of several who went to St Louis to join the Sisters of St Joseph of Carondolet, departing in 1893 after a mere six months’ preparation. Professed as Sr Mary Gabriel, she died at the age of twenty-four. Others went to San Antonio, Texas, to enter the Servants of the Holy Ghost, and to the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word in Galveston. Still more went to Presentation convents in the Dakotas and in San Francisco. The Ursulines in Kentucky, the Dominicans in Nashville and several Mercy convents in the US, all took aspirants from St Brigid’s Missionary School.50 Because of a continued demand for teaching sisters in Australia, the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart (RSJ) opened an aspirancy in Table 2.1 Destination of novices from St Brigid’s Missionary School, Callan, 1884–1923

Destination Went home Australia USA Ireland South Africa England Canada New Zealand India

1884–1923 198 169 164 140 64 60 18 15 14

Source: Mercy Congregational Archives, Ireland

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Newmarket, County Cork, in 1925. Known as St Joseph’s Convent, it was unusual in that it was established by a congregation that had no other presence in Ireland. The Sisters of St Joseph were an Australian foundation, established by Mother Mary MacKillop in 1866. Known as the ‘brown Josephites’ because of their distinctive brown habit, they spread to mining towns and cities across Australia, setting up schools for the poor.51 In need of English-speaking sisters, MacKillop travelled to England and Ireland in 1874, arriving in Ireland in June to quest for vocations. Writing back to her community in July, she explained that she would be delayed from returning to Australia, as she had to make unexpected additional journeys between Ireland and England. However, she had been impressed by the standard of education in Irish schools, and was not going to leave without a few good aspirants who could teach at her schools. She wrote to her community: Good postulants, really useful school ones, are in view, only they may not succeed in getting money enough to take them out. I then am to try to make up the difference, and to please their friends and … I must try to take them out under my own care. All this, as you can easily see, necessitates delay. Then, what I have seen of schools in Ireland makes me wish to leave no means untried of securing our own interests whilst it is in my power to do so. The Cardinal himself was one of those who advised me to return again to Dublin if I wished to make sure of the postulants. It is not the individual candidates I fear for, but for the prejudices of their friends. In Ireland, more than in any place in which I have been, I find the people look very much to appearances, and that little encouragement will be given to postulants unless I am on the spot to take them away. After all, we need not wonder at anxiety on the part of their friends considering the extreme distance of Australia.52

The delay was not in vain: the Presentations in Dungarvan ‘found … four postulants’ for Mary MacKillop, and the Ursulines, Sisters of Mercy and Sisters of Charity also helped her to find willing aspirants. She also managed to get the Abbot of Mount Melleray to ‘endeavour to secure some good ones’.53 By the end of August, she was ready to ‘assemble all [the] generous volunteers, take them over to England … and ship them off’.54 When she departed on the SS St Osyth to commence the long journey back to Australia in November, she brought ‘fifteen good earnest postulants’ with her.55 By eventually opening their own Irish aspirancy in 1925—St Joseph’s in Newmarket—the Sisters of St Joseph no longer needed to make lengthy recruiting trips to Ireland.

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The Presentation Sisters also established a novitiate specifically to prepare religious for their convents in India. Their first foundation in India had been made in 1842, and had been supported in particular by their convents in Rahan and Limerick, that sent out nuns. With the outbreak of the First World War, travel restrictions disrupted their outward mobility, and the supply of English-speaking nuns to India suffered. In 1918, the Presentations decided to open an Irish novitiate specifically to prepare young women for India. However, because of the unsettled political climate in Ireland, they decided that it would be better to locate this novitiate in England.56 The other two aspirancies continued to thrive into the second half of the twentieth century. By the time St Joseph’s closed in 1971, it had sent a total of 321 young Irishwomen to Australia. St Brigid’s Missionary School closed thirteen years earlier, having sent about 1204 postulants out of the country.57 The latter foundation drew far greater numbers than the former, because the Sisters of Mercy were a very well-known native congregation, with a large network of schools from which to draw girls. Additionally, the fact that they prepared novices for many different orders meant that girls had some choice about where they would spend their religious life. The eventual closure of St Brigid’s reflected the fact that, by the 1970s, there was no longer a need for Irish novices in the US convents that they had traditionally supplied. On the contrary: congregations in the US had flourished due to the soaring numbers of US vocations, which included a substantial proportion of second-generation Irishwomen.58 By 1960, there were more than 600 sisterhoods in the United States, some with very large numbers: the Sisters of St Joseph of Carondolet had 17,000 members; the Sisters of Mercy had 14,000; there were 6500 School Sisters of Notre Dame, and the US also had ‘smaller’ orders with several thousand sisters, such as the Sisters of Charity, and the Sisters of the Good Shepherd.59

Postulancy and Novitiate By the late nineteenth century, religious institutes in Ireland that were established under one Superior usually had their own novitiate house, which was often in a building separate from the convent, but within the same grounds. This had not always been the case: in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the first post-penal Irish convents were being founded, novices had to be ‘formed’, or prepared, elsewhere.

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The Ursuline foundation that Nano Nagle made in Cork in 1771 was begun with a small group of Irishwomen who made their novitiates with the Ursulines at the rue St Jacques, Paris.60 The first Sisters of Mercy were professed at a Presentation convent.61 Mary Aikenhead, who founded the Irish Sisters of Charity in 1815, went to England to make her novitiate with the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, at the Bar Convent in York. Similarly, Mother Teresa Ball, who established the Loreto order in Ireland in 1821, had also been prepared at the Bar Convent, where she was professed in 1816. There are few records by novices of their experience of nineteenth-century novitiate life, though the formation of Teresa Ball can be traced through some of her letters, and from surviving records. Generally, though, scholars rely on convent annals and account books, and novitiate manuals, to get insight into how women were prepared for religious life in the nineteenth century. Formal preparation took place in the postulancy and novitiate. Typically, when a girl was accepted into a religious order or institute, she spent between three and six months as a postulant. Postulants could not be accepted into the novitiate until they reached the age of fifteen, and some congregations set the entrance age at sixteen. The period of postulancy allowed Superiors to take several months to satisfy themselves that the young woman was suited to religious life, and understood the seriousness of the next step—asking to be received into the order. During this time, the Superior could also ‘interrogate’ the postulant about ‘her conduct and previous life’, her motives for entering, and whether or not she was in ‘a good state of health, of both mind and body’.62 A postulant then had to be formally accepted into the novitiate to commence her ‘formation’ as a religious. At a Chapter meeting, the ‘consent of the nuns’ was given if the postulant received the number of votes specified by the congregation Rules. Members of the Chapter could not vote against accepting a postulant without ‘just cause’, and a postulant rejected by the Chapter could be admitted later, by the same Chapter, if there were new reasons for altering the earlier decision.63 The postulant made a ten-day retreat before formally asking to be received into the novitiate at a ceremony called ‘reception’. Postulants usually wore a white dress and veil, which sometimes had been fashioned from wedding dresses and lace that had been donated to the convent.64 They were examined by the Bishop as to whether they were entering of their own free will. They were then ‘clothed’ in the habit and veil of a novice. In most religious institutes they were also given a new ‘name in religion’ which would be the name of a saint of the Church.65

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The clothing ceremony had both symbolic and spiritual meanings, marking the transformation of the postulant as she entered the convent. Often the clothing ceremony was attended by the families of the novices. One Ursuline clothing ceremony was described as a ‘glittering display’ of candlelight, the procession of nuns ordered by rank, and the ‘long Mass filled with song, supplication and prayer’.66 At Loreto Abbey in Dublin, gifts of plum cakes and wine were shared out after the clothing ceremony.67 Each religious institute had its own habit, and each part of the habit had a name and a significance. Additionally, religious had their own customs regarding the kind of dress to be worn by postulants and novices. Presentation postulants wore a black dress and a kind of bonnet. Similarly, Loreto postulants wore ‘a dark dress [and] a black cap in the house’, and on the rare occasions that they walked outside, they wore a black cloak and bonnet.68 Once the postulant entered the novitiate, she wore a habit and veil, and this was often a modified version of the full habit that she would wear after profession. Generally, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century religious wore a head-dress which included a cap or coif which covered the head tightly; a bandeau was sometimes then placed on the cap, and an under-veil of thin fabric was placed over this; the final layer was the heavier veil. The habit typically comprised a black, brown, grey or white t-shaped tunic or dress, over which a scapular was worn. This was like a long tabard. A white guimpe covered the neck and chest of some tunics, and was often stiffened with starch. Other parts of the habits of women religious included a belt or cord, a cincture or girdle, and a cape or mantle. Some religious wore a crucifix and rosary beads so that it was seen, while others wore them hidden under the mantle or scapular.69 In addition to being the accepted mode of dress for a religious, the habit worn by members of a religious order had the effect of uniting all the members of that order across national boundaries. Samples of habits were kept in convents in order to teach novices the parts of the habit; in many convents a miniature habit was sewn and displayed on a doll, to modestly demonstrate the correct way to assemble the various layers of the habit. At the first Presentation Convent in San Francisco, established in 1854, diagrams and drawings of the habit were kept so that their nuns would be dressed exactly like the Presentations in Ireland and India. Usually the period of the novitiate (also called noviceship) was not less than two years, as a novice had to be prepared spiritually, and she also had to be trained in the routines of religious life, including her work as a teacher or nurse. The term of the novitiate could be extended, if a Superior

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believed that a novice was not quite ready to ‘profess her vows’. A novice could also, in exceptional circumstances, be required to make a second novitiate. However, the term of the novitiate could not be extended indefinitely, nor could a Superior use the postponement of vows as a kind of punishment for a novice.70 Once a postulant became a novice, she was incorporated into the community and had to ‘bear the duties and austerities of religious life with the other members of the Community’.71 The period of the novitiate was both a ‘time of probation’, when the novice was tested regularly by being given duties and hard tasks, and a time of training and spiritual education. The novice had to learn to imitate Jesus, so she had firstly to learn humility. This included occupying the lowest place in the Convent, and ‘she should learn to be forgotten’.72 She had to learn not to be vain, therefore should not look in mirrors or study her reflection. She should not try to attract attention in any way, while praying or singing, or by displaying excessive gravity.73 Most importantly, she had to learn to observe the three ‘virtues’ of chastity, poverty and obedience. Eventually, she would take three vows, promising to always observe these virtues, and some religious took a fourth vow. For example, in some of the congregations in this book, women religious took a vow to ‘instruct youth’, or to educate girls. Most of the religious orders examined in this volume required at least two years novitiate. When an exception was made to the requirement of a two-year novitiate, it was usually for a practical reason, such as the urgent need for nuns. For example, when Mother Teresa Ball established the Loreto order in Ireland, she requested that the first handful of entrants could dispense with the second year, and commence their teaching and house duties at Loreto Abbey. Permission was secured from Rome, until the order would be well established. In due course, once the convent school was running successfully, the requirement for a two-year novitiate was reintroduced. By then, the order was attracting more entrants, the future of the school seemed secure, and the novices could be afforded two full years in the novitiate. The training and education of the novice was the responsibility of the Novice Mistress—arguably the most important nun in a convent, after the Superior. The survival of a foundation could rest upon its ability to attract and form novices, and the success of a teaching order relied on having a steady supply of teaching sisters. A Novice Mistress was supposed to be a model of a ‘good religious’, setting example for novices while also teaching them. Orders had manuals printed, that laid out the duties of the

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novice, and provided guidance for every daily activity. One of the first things that she had to learn was ‘perfect obedience’. This was learned by being trained to respond instantly to the ringing of the bell, and by doing ‘Manual Works’. These were chores, such as scrubbing refectory tables and washing clothes, that were assigned in order to test the young novice. ‘In the noviceship the bell rings often, for the duties are comparatively short’, a Loreto manual advised in 1897.74 The novice was not supposed to become caught up in her task, or become interested in it. She was to approach every task willingly, and should not show preference for one kind of duty over another, rather she should ‘practise holy indifference’ when work was allotted to her. At the sound of the bell, novices were ‘to leave everything at once, to go to that to which they are called, even though they were to stop writing while forming a letter’.75 Mother Teresa Ball recalled being ordered ‘to hurry’ when the bell rang for prayer, even though she had already answered to the bell ‘with alacrity’.76 She also recalled being assigned the task of sweeping a stone staircase, and then suddenly being instructed to go and light a candle instead. Even when instructions and admonishments seemed unfair or pointless to a novice, she was supposed to obey without questioning. This ‘is admirable training, for it breaks the will’, novices were taught.77 In addition to learning by being tested like this, novices also had to learn all of the ‘customs’ of the order. ‘At dinner and supper no one removes her plate until the Superior sends hers away. Napkins are folded into three plaits, the knife and fork … are kept in a small case’, the Loreto Customs instructed.78 Religious orders printed directories that recorded how a novice should behave. Some were used by Novice Mistresses when instructing novices, and others were given to novices as suitable reading material. They were remarkably similar for the various Orders discussed in this volume, and ensured performative uniformity in convents around the globe.79 The Directory printed for the Loreto nuns in Calcutta, for example, served to unify them with those in Dublin, Gibraltar, Spain, Canada and Australia; the many Ursuline publications equally contributed to ensuring an agreed modus operandi in all of their foundations. ‘Religious communities are now extending over the whole Christian world’, an Ursuline Directory for Novices reminded readers. ‘Our Irish children … propagate holy religion in distant climes. However, evil of serious magnitude might ensue from neglect of due formation in the Novitiate.’80 Generally, these manuals instructed the novice about ‘the fervent practice of virtue’, through punctuality, modesty and mortification.81 Small

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personal sacrifices were encouraged, but they should not endanger the health of the novice. For example, she should resist taking a large portion of food, but should not starve herself as a form of penance. Other manuals served to instruct the novice in her responsibilities, including religious observances and daily routines.82 Their days were ‘highly structured, with specific times for rising, prayer, meals, work, recreation and retiring’.83 Their recreation time was spent sitting in circles, sewing or knitting, and they ate their meals in silence, listening to another Sister reading aloud, from a work such as the Lives of the Saints. After night prayer, the Great Silence was imposed, and talking was not allowed again until after breakfast the next morning. By learning to live in a highly structured way, with no concessions to individuality, they were prepared equally well for life in any convent belonging to their order, in any part of the world. Novices also studied the Rule and Constitutions of their order, and learned about the importance of the ‘exact observance of the Rule’. Because ‘submission to the Rule must be exact and universal, it must extend to all times and places’, it served to unify all members of a religious order, irrespective of where they were.84 The period of noviceship normally incurred a financial cost for the family of the novice. A young woman entering the novitiate of the Ursuline Convent, Cork, had to be able to pay for ‘sugar, wine and sundries … napkins, towels, petticoat [and] apron’, and to bring two pairs of sheets, gloves, belt, beads, postage and paper, four pairs of shoes, and both linen and lawn to make up a chemise, guimpe and veil.85 At that time, the Cork Ursulines also required a pension or annual fee of £25, until the novice was professed. The payment of a fee for board and lodging was common in all convents, though some could accept women who had less money, if other novices had brought larger sums. Equally, convents could accept ‘a postulant who in every other respect is a worthy subject but is without means’.86 A ‘worthy subject’ was a woman who could bring skills, such as baking, brewing or shoe-making: there was no requirement for most lay sisters to bring money in addition to their skills. Women who entered as choir sisters were worthy subjects if they were reasonably well educated. To be a choir sister, the only standard of education required under Canon Law, was that ‘the novice should know how to read so as to be able to … recite the canonical hours’.87 The convent dowry system, such as it was, resembled the kind of economic agreement that was made for women when they married. A dowry was a ‘transfer of property, money or gifts to the bridegroom by the bride’s

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parents or guardians’ and was also known as a marriage portion.88 It typically reflected the variation in wealth between the families of the bride and groom, and it served as a way of consolidating the wealth and property of the Catholic elite. When the heiress to a fortune indicated that she wanted to enter a convent, her parents had to decide whether or not to let her take her fortune with her. Angelina Gould and Maria O’Brien were allowed to bring very substantial fortunes to the Presentation order, but other women were denied the inheritance that had been originally planned for them.89 For example, in a very pragmatic step, Cecilia Ball’s mother arranged for Cecilia to sign her inheritance over to her siblings, before she entered the Ursuline order.90 This increased the size of the dowries that her two unmarried sisters could eventually bring to their own marriages. For small farmers, setting a dowry on their daughters was also a standard practice. Before the Famine, agrarian practices involved the sub-­ division of landholdings, so that parents could provide a small plot of land for each of their sons. In post-Famine Ireland, ‘an inheritance came to be the entire holding’, destined for the eldest son.91 Emigration, late marriage and religious life were options for the remaining offspring. When the male heir inherited the farm, his parents ‘calculated how much dowry had to be brought in by a prospective daughter-in-law to compensate them for feeding, clothing and sheltering her’. A dowry ‘could be a very expensive affair’: by the 1880s it approximated to ten or twelve years rent for land.92 If a daughter entered a convent, the amount that had been put aside for her dowry—or a part of it—could be given to the convent to cover her living expenses. Because few convents insisted on a dowry, parents with several daughters were often relieved when some of them entered convents, thereby removing the necessity to part with much money at all. Flexibility about accepting women who were educated, but lacked a dowry or pension, was crucial to the success of foundations by the mid-­ nineteenth century, when rapid expansion meant that many teaching sisters and nurses were needed. For example, Mother Teresa Comerford, who established the Presentations in the United States, knew that she had to accept postulants who had no dowry. She was happy to accept ‘worthy subjects’ who had no money, but who had some education.93 Girls with no money, who had benefitted from the free national school system, established in Ireland in 1831, or who had been educated in the free convent schools run by the Sisters of Mercy and the Presentations, were well suited to filling up the hundreds of convents in the US and Australia that ran schools and hospitals.

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Profession The novitiate gave the novice time to experience her own ‘vowability’.94 Once the time came for a novice to be professed, she vowed herself to ‘a lasting form of life’.95 In this book, most of the congregations had ‘simple vows’; while simple vows are ‘in thought and intention’ perpetual, they are not always absolute and irrevocable. Solemn vows are understood to be irrevocable, and are usually followed by papal enclosure. Whether taking solemn or simple vows, a novice had to be mature enough to make her decision, freely and of her own consent. At a meeting of the Chapter, a decision could be made to refuse profession, but only if there was ‘sufficient cause’.96 For example, a novice could be refused if she was suffering from a mental illness. By the middle of the twentieth century, a literature had grown around identifying suitable candidates for religious life.97 Superiors were cautioned that ‘mental disturbances’ were ‘very frequent, particularly during the first years … of the religious life of young girls’.98 Manuals and text books noted in particular the challenge of the vow of chastity.99 They also issued vague warnings to Superiors of the scandals that could follow the ‘unexpected awakening’ of sexual impulses in young religious.100 Superiors also needed to know if the novice was physically strong, especially if she was going into the mission field. In the first half of the nineteenth century, young religious unwittingly brought tuberculosis into convents. Overseas houses dreaded the arrival of a consumptive nun, and tried to send them home. The novice also took a vow of obedience, whereby she was expected— according to the teachings of St Francis de Sales—to leave her own will outside the monastery door. It implied offering her own free will to God, and it included promising to obey her lawful Superiors in everything they commanded, according to the Rules of the congregation that she had entered. The third vow was the vow of poverty. Novices who were being professed with simple vows could retain ownership of goods, but they could not ‘administer’ their goods: this was usually done by the Superior or Bursar. They were free to make a Will, and were not obliged to leave their wealth and property to the convent. Religious with solemn vows could not Will or dispose of their wealth, and could not have ‘dominion over temporal goods whatsoever’.101 Whether or not a postulant brought a dowry to her convent, she had to take a vow of poverty when she was professed. In the period under review in this book, dowries ranged in size

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from several thousand pounds to a few hundred pounds. As will be seen, in the early nineteenth century the founding groups in many institutes were women from wealthy Catholic families. They brought the marriage portions that had been set aside for them, and sometimes this was a substantial amount of money. While Mother Teresa Ball brought a good dowry of over two thousand pounds to the Loreto order that she established in Ireland in 1821, her friend, Maria O’Brien, had brought some fifty thousand pounds to the Presentation order in 1818. Other Irish heiresses, such as Angelina Gould, brought equally large fortunes with them when they became nuns. Her inheritance of £60,000 meant that she could fund fully, or partially, the founding of new convents, before finally being professed as a Presentation nun.102 A bishop or ecclesiastical Superior could fix the amount of a dowry required in a convent in his Diocese and could also reduce the amount required for a novice, if he wished.103 However, the evidence suggests that convents had some flexibility in this regard. Women were accepted with very modest amounts, especially in the later nineteenth century when the need for the labour of nuns was far greater than the need for their money. Canon Law protected the wealth of a novice; a nun who was dispensed from simple vows could take her dowry back, though a portion could be retained by the convent to cover the costs of her living and her education. If she had taken solemn vows and solemn profession, her entire dowry was invested in the convent and she could not claim it back. If a nun moved to a different convent, the Bishop had to give approval if her dowry was to follow her. Some Irish Superiors were reluctant to part with dowries, however, when they sent nuns to make new foundations outside Ireland. Records show that the question of where the dowry should remain was often contested, not only by nuns but also by their family members. Additionally, some orders required that each convent should be financially independent. Each Presentation foundation had its own Superior, and was required to be self-sufficient. Because they did not charge any fees in their schools, they relied on the income that women brought when they entered the order, and on gifts. On the other hand, the Loreto order, which had one Superior General, had the flexibility to move money between foundations and countries. Because they ran fee-charging boarding schools, they had a source of income in each convent. The vow of poverty not only separated a nun from her own temporal possessions, but it taught her to live as part of a community that shared everything. Goods for the use of the convent could not be for the use of

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an individual alone, as taking something for one’s own use was deemed to be exercising ‘an act of dominion’ over it: the vow of poverty did not allow such an act. Everything in the convent was common property, and the word ‘mine’ was not to be heard. By the time a young religious had completed her novitiate and been professed, she was prepared for religious life. She had learned to live within a community and to obey her Superior, while always aspiring towards perfection. She would, thereafter, share everything with her religious community, and own nothing for herself. The erasure of individuality was captured by the Irish poet, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, writing of a relative who was a nun in a French convent. Asking to see the community dentist, the Sister explained, ‘J’ai mal à nos dents’.104

Notes 1. Phil Kilroy, Madeleine Sophie Barat, a Life (Cork: Cork University Press, 2000), 29. 2. For a full discussion of this, see Kilroy, Madeleine Sophie Barat, 28–31. 3. Coleridge, Henry James, The life of Mother Frances Mary Teresa Ball: foundress in Ireland of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary (London: Burns and Oates, 1881), 34. 4. Manuscript Life of Teresa Ball, TB/LIV 22, Loreto Congregation Institute and Provincial Archives, Dublin (hereafter LCIPA). 5. M. Teresa Ball, 14 July 1842, Copybook of the letters of M. Teresa Ball, TB/COR/8, LCIPA. 6. Copy of a letter from Dr Murray to Mother Coyney, 13 Apr. 1814. TB/ COR/9/1. Original in the Bar Convent Archives, York (hereafter IBVM GPAD). 7. Dr Daniel Murray to M.  Teresa Ball, 20 Oct. 1820, TB/ COR/9/3, LCIPA. 8. Dr Daniel Murray to M.  Teresa Ball, 14 May 1834, TB/COR/9/6, LCIPA. Murray indicated that he wanted both a full-length portrait, and a series of smaller ones, as a series of ‘abbesses of Loreto’. 9. Joseph Patrick Haverty RHA (1794–1864) was born in Galway, though he later resided in Dublin. One of his best-known paintings is ‘The Blind Piper’, which hangs in the National Gallery of Ireland. Haverty painted many portraits and historical pieces, and was elected a Member of the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1829. 10. Murray spent part of every year at the country home of Anna Maria Ball O’Brien and her husband, John O’Brien, and often went there for short periods of recuperation if he became ill or tired. He died in the presence

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of Anna Maria. See Thomas J. Morrissey, The Life and Times of Daniel Murray, Archbishop of Dublin, 1823–1852 (Dublin: Messenger Publications, 2018), 272. 11. M. Teresa Ball to M. Regis Ball. 16 Dec. 1834, UCB/00849, Ursuline Congregational Archives Cork (hereafter UCAC); M.  Teresa Ball to M. Regis Ball, 30 Dec. 1834, UCB/00871, UCAC. 12. In 1791, Teresa Mulally made a foundation at George’s Hill, Dublin, which became a Presentation convent. While Mulally did not become a nun, she retained a close relationship with Nagle and with the George’s Hill community. 13. Letters of M. Teresa Ball to M. Teresa Dease, IBVMCPA; M. Teresa Ball Papers, LCIPA. Many of their letters are cited in Raftery, Teresa Ball and Loreto Education. 14. Life of Mother Gertrude Bodkin (n.n., n.d., published by the Society of the Sacred Heart, Roehampton), 2. 15. The concept of a ‘devotional revolution’ is analysed in Emmet Larkin, ‘The devotional revolution in Ireland 1850–75’, The American Historical Review 77, no. 3 (1972), 625–52. The work of Caitriona Clear and of Mary Peckham Magray has explored in some depth the changing devotional practices of Irish women, expanding and even contesting the view of Emmet Larkin that this ‘revolution’ was driven by Churchmen. See Catriona Clear, Nuns in Nineteenth Century Ireland (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1987); Mary Peckham Magray, The Transforming Power of the Nuns: women, religion, and cultural change in Ireland, 1750–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 16. See Colm Lennon (ed.), Confraternities and sodalities in Ireland: Charity, Devotion and Sociability (Dublin: Columba Press, 2013). 17. Hasia Diner, Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 27. 18. Biographical records, Society of the Sacred Heart, discussed in 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. 19. R.  P. Loret, ‘The Discernment of Vocations’, in Anon. [A.P.  Ple OP], Religious Sisters, Being the English Version of Directoire des Supérieures and Les Adaptations de la Vie Religieuse (Maryland: Newman Press, 1952), 211–12. 20. Ibid. 21. Loret, ‘The Discernment of Vocations’, 214. 22. Ibid.

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23. Loret, ‘The Discernment of Vocations’, 212. 24. Annals of Loreto Abbey Rathfarnham, 1821–60, p.  9, RATH/ LAC/1/1, LCIPA. 25. Ibid. 26. Loret, ‘The Discernment of Vocations’, 214–15. 27. See for example Annals of South Presentation Convent Cork, 14 Feb 1842, Presentation Sisters Congregational Archives, Cork (hereafter PSCA). Annals of Drishane Convent, Co. Cork, 2 Feb 1926, Infant Jesus Sisters Archives, Dublin (hereafter IJSA). 28. See Louise Callan, Philippine Duchesne, Frontier Missionary of the Sacred Heart, 1769–1852 (Maryland: Newman Press, 1957) and The Society of the Sacred Heart in North America (London, New  York and Toronto: Longmans, Green and Co., 1937); see also Margaret Williams, The Society of the Sacred Heart: a History of a Spirit, 1800–1975 (London: Dartman, Longman and Todd, 1978). 29. Vie de la Révérende Mère Anna Josephine Shannon: Religieuse du Sacré-­ Coeur 1810–1896 (Roehampton: privately published by the RSCJ, 1920), 42. Trans. Catherine KilBride, 2012. The term ‘aspirancy’ also referred to a kind of boarding school in which young aspirants were educated before being accepted as a postulant. 30. See Vie de la Révérende Mère Anna Josephine Shannon. For a discussion of Mother Shannon and Mother Duchesne see Deirdre Raftery, ‘“Je suis d’aucune Nation”’, 522–28. 31. Loret, ‘The Discernment of Vocations’, 214–18. 32. Suellen Hoy, Good Hearts: Catholic Sisters in Chicago’s Past (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 29. 33. Bishop of Salford [Herbert Vaughn] to M.  Teresa Comerford, 27 Jan 1879, Administration Records, 1855–1889, Presentation Archives San Francisco (hereafter PASF). 34. ‘Irish Missioners in California’, Kilkenny Journal, 2 March 1867 and ‘Irish Nuns in California’ idem., 30 March 1867. Cited in Hoy, Good Hearts, 74. 35. M. Teresa Comerford to Cardinal Simeone, 25 January 1878, Mother Mary Teresa Comerford’s Kilcock Correspondence, Administration Records, 1855–1889, PASF. 36. Ibid. For an account of Comerford and the Presentation foundation in San Francisco see Deirdre Raftery, Catriona Delaney and Catherine Nowlan Roebuck, Nano Nagle: The Life and the Legacy (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2019, 186–9). 37. The requirement for Irish nuns for San Francisco ended with the appointment of Patrick William Riordan as Archbishop; he required that women born in America should supply the needs of convents there. For a study

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of the Presentation Sisters in San Francisco, see Mary Rose Forest PBVM, With Hearts of Oak: the Story of the Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary in California, 1854–1907 (San Francisco: Sisters of the Presentation, Masonic Avenue, 2004). 38. Copy of ‘St Brigid’s Missionary School, Callan’, Catholic Directory, 1895, Mercy Congregational Archives Dublin (hereafter MCAD). 39. Bishop Moran was a loyal supporter of the Mercy Convent, Callan, and also made financial donations at intervals. See Accounts of the Sisters of Mercy, Callan, C45-1, Callan Papers, MCAD. 40. Dr James Murray to M. Michael Maher, 6 April 1883, TS in Hoy Papers, Women and Leadership Archives, Loyola University, Chicago (hereafter WLA). 41. Dr James Murray to Mother M. Michael, 14 April 1884, TS in Hoy Papers. 42. M.  Joseph Rice to M.  Berchmans Commins, 8 Oct. 1892, copy in Hoy Papers. 43. Dr Murray had requested Sr Joseph to send the aspirants to Australia ‘under the care or in the company of one or two priests’ from All Hallows College, a seminary for the preparation of missionary priests. Dr James Murray to Mother M. Michael, 16 April 1887, typescript in Hoy Papers. 44. Dr James Murray to M.  Michael Maher, 16 June 1888, typescript in Hoy Papers. 45. See Hoy, Good Hearts, 26. 46. See ‘Apostolic School for Women’, 201. 47. Copy of ‘St Brigid’s Missionary School, Callan’, Catholic Directory, 1895, MCAD. 48. Transcript of MS Note on St Brigid’s Mission School [n.d.], in Hoy Papers. 49. Ibid. 50. Data of entrants to St Brigid’s Missionary School, MCAD. In her research on St Brigid’s, Suelllen Hoy calculated that the mean age of entrant to this aspirancy was nineteen, while the median age was twenty. Aspirants came from all over Ireland, including counties Waterford, Wicklow, Clare, Tipperary, Cavan, Offaly and Roscommon. MS notes, St Brigid’s Missionary School, Register of Aspirants, Hoy Papers. 51. Studies of Mary MacKillop and the RSJs include Sheila McCreanor, Mary MacKillop and her Early Companions, 1866–1870 (Sydney: Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart, 2013); Marie Crowley, Women of the Vale: Perthville Josephites, 1872–1972 (Victoria: Perthville Publications, 2002). 52. Mary of the Cross MacKillop to her community, 9 July 1874, AP/91 [8], Sisters of St Joseph Archives, New South Wales (hereafter SSJAS). 53. Mary of the Cross MacKillop to her community, 30 August 1874, AP/91 [13], SSJAS. 54. Ibid.

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55. Mary of the Cross MacKillop to Cardinal Allesandro Franchi, 30 October 1874, AP/91 [17], SSJAS. 56. For a discussion of this, see Raftery et al, Nano Nagle, 161–2. 57. Hoy, Good Hearts, 25. About 430 aspirants at St Brigid’s did not continue in religious life. 58. See for example the work of Diner, Erin’s Daughters in America, 130–5. Diner notes that nuns made up the second largest group of women of Irish origin in the 1910 American Catholic Who’s Who. For a discussion of Irish immigrant women who became nuns, see Raftery, ‘“Je suis d’aucune Nation”’, 522–8. 59. The Sisters of St Joseph of Carondolet (CSJ) originated in Le Puy, France, in 1650. After the Revolution, they were reorganised by Mother St John Fontaine, and six sisters were sent to Carondolet, Missouri. By 1962, there were 30,000 CSJs worldwide, of which 17,000 were in the US. In that same year, the Irish Sisters of Mercy had 14,000 nuns in the US alone. Some indication of the size of female congregations and the scale of their work can be gleaned from Thomas P. McCarthy, Guide to Catholic Sisters in the United States (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1962; reprinted 2002). 60. The founding group who were prepared at the rue St Jacques comprised Eleanor Fitzsimons, Elizabeth Coppinger, Margaret Nagle, and Mary Kavanagh. See Raftery et al., Nano Nagle, 28. 61. Catherine McAuley, foundress of the Sisters of Mercy, together with Mary Ann Doyle and Mary Elizabeth Harley, took her vows at the Presentation Convent, George’s Hill, Dublin, on 12 December 1831. See Sullivan, Catherine McAuley and the Tradition of Mercy, 13. 62. Arthur Devine, Convent Life or the Duties of Sisters (1889; this issue reprinted by Palala Press, 2015), 45. 63. Ibid., 44. 64. See Raftery, Teresa Ball and Loreto Education, 109. 65. In most, though not all, of the orders in this book, the choir nuns were given the name Mary, followed by the name of a saint. Mary was usually indicated by the initial ‘M’. Some orders, such as the RSCJ, did not take the name Mary. 66. See Ann M.  Little, The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 116–7. 67. Notebook, ‘Benefactors to Loretto’ [sic], 1–3, GEN/FIN/8/1, LCIPA. 68. Mother M. Teresa Ball, ‘Customs’ notebook, 22, TB/CUS, LCIPA. 69. For a study of the dress of women religious see Veronica Bennett and Ryan Todd, Looking Good: a Visual Guide to the Nun’s Habit (UK: GraphicDesign&, 2018). 70. Devine, Convent Life, 50.

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71. Ibid., 47. 72. Ibid., 61. 73. Ibid., 61–2. 74. Daily Duties, An Instruction for Novices of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary (Toronto: Loreto Novitiate, 1897), 9. 75. Ibid. 76. MS fragment [Mother Magdalene Lalor, 1839], TB/LIV 12, LCIPA. The formation of Mother M. Teresa Ball is discussed in detail in Teresa Ball and Loreto Education: Convents and the Colonial World, 1794–1875 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2022), Chapter 4. 77. Daily Duties, 10. 78. Ibid., 25. 79. See for example Daily Duties (1897); Directory for the Professed of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary (Calcutta: Catholic Orphan Press, 1919); A Directory for Novices of the Ursuline Order (London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1927); Preparatory Exercises for the Religious Profession … translated from the French by a member of the Ursuline Community, Cork (Dublin: James Duffy, 1863). 80. Directory for Novices of the Ursuline Order, iii. 81. Ibid., iv. 82. See for example The Choir Manual for Community Use in the Convents of the Sisters of Mercy (London: Burns and Oates, 1895); The Nun: her Character and Work (London: Kegan Paul, 1914), and The Sisters of Mercy’s Daily Round (Dublin: M.H. Gill and Son, 1927). 83. Helen Short, Sisters of St Joseph of Cluny, Ferbane: Celebrating 100 Years of Apostolate (Published in Ireland by the Sisters of St Joseph of Cluny, 1996), 52. 84. Preparatory Exercises for the Religious Profession, 102. 85. See the detailed payments concerning a novice who entered in 1822, as listed in Noviceship Register of the Ursuline Convent Cork, UCD/00678, UCAC. 86. Devine, Convent Life, 57. 87. Ibid., 73. 88. Melanie Hayes, The Best Address in Town: Henrietta Street, Dublin and its First Residents, 1720–80 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2020), 233. For a fuller discussion of dowries in convents, see Raftery, Teresa Ball and Loreto Education, 64–7. 89. For a fuller discussion of this see Deirdre Bennett, The Founding and Funding of Presentation Convents and Schools in Ireland, 1775–1875 (Unpublished PhD Thesis, University College Dublin, 2022). 90. Indenture between Cecilia Ball and Mable Clare Ball, 11 Jul. 1805, Sherlock & O’Brien papers, MS 50, 814/9/2, National Library of

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Ireland (hereafter NLI), and Last will and testament of Cecilia Ball, UCD/00869, UCAC, cited in Raftery, Teresa Ball, Chapter Four, passim. 91. For a discussion of changing marriage patterns and inheritance patters in nineteenth-century Ireland, see Diner, Erin’s Daughters in America, 7–9. 92. Diner, Erin’s Daughters, 11. 93. See Raftery et al., Nano Nagle, 188. 94. Adrian Van Kaam, The Vowed Life: Dynamics of Personal and Spiritual Unfolding (New Jersey: Dimension Books, 1968), 129. 95. Ibid., 138. 96. Devine, Convent Life, 72. 97. Publications included René Biot and Pierre Galimard, Medical Guide to Vocations (Maryland: Newman Press, 1950; 1956); A. Bonduelle, ‘The Recognition of Vocation’, in Vocation (n.n., London: Blackfriars Publications, 1952); Suzy Rousset, ‘Medical Aspects’, in Chastity (n.n., London: Blackfriars Publications, 1955); 98. Biot and Galimard, Medical Guide to Vocations, 189. 99. The vow of chastity is ‘a vow made to God to abstain from … every voluntary sensual gratification, whether internal or external, not only unlawful, but also lawful’. Devine, Convent Life, 132. 100. Biot and Galimard, Medical Guide to Vocations, 207. 101. See Devine, Convent Life, 110. 102. See Bennett, The Founding and Funding, Chapter 4, passim. 103. Devine, Convent Life, 58. 104. Trans.: I have a pain in our teeth.

CHAPTER 3

Outward Bound: Irish Women Religious and Their Journeys to Overseas Foundations in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

‘On Saturday last, fifty-seven young lady postulants, intended for convent life in America, left Queenstown for Philadelphia’ Cork Examiner, 1 March 1898.

Context By the mid-nineteenth century, there was a steady flow of Irishwomen out of the country to convents in the Anglophone world. As early as 1833, the Presentation Sisters had sent sisters to Newfoundland, and they were followed there by the Sisters of Mercy, who had also expanded in parts of England. The 1840s saw Irish Loreto nuns go to India, Mauritius, Gibraltar and Canada. Many other orders—such as the Dominicans, the Society of the Sacred Heart, the Good Shepherd Sisters, the Faithful Companions of Jesus, the Brigidines, the Poor Clares and the Irish Sisters of Charity—also sent out hundreds of Irish nuns to work in schools, in healthcare and in the care of orphaned children.1 Additionally, there were orders—usually French—that sent out Irish-born nuns, even when they did not have a presence in Ireland. The Society of the Sacred Heart, the Sisters of St Louis and the Infant Jesus Sisters all had Irish members before they ever opened convents in Ireland. The Sisters of St Louis attracted © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Raftery, Irish Nuns and Education in the Anglophone World, Global Histories of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46201-6_3

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twenty-nine Irish-born women to their Juilly novitiate between 1841 and 1858, before opening an Irish convent in 1859. Though the Infant Jesus Sisters did not open an Irish convent until 1909, forty-three young women had made their way from Ireland to their Paris motherhouse between 1851 and 1902: most of them were attracted by the possibility of then being sent to teach in Singapore, Malaya (now Malaysia) or Japan.2 There were three inter-related reasons for this transnational flow. Firstly, the requirement by Propaganda Fide for priests and sisters for its mission territories meant that bishops were urged to harness women religious in support of its work. Teaching sisters were especially needed in parts of the world where Catholic migrants had settled; for instance, there were some 500,000 Catholic Germans, and 200,000 Catholic French, in the United States by 1850. The Irish Famine was followed by waves of emigration from Ireland to the US, Canada and Australia, creating a need for Irish nuns to both run schools and teach catechism in parishes, wherever the Irish diaspora was to be found. The Cork Examiner wrote of the ‘greater Ireland beyond the sea’, which needed Irish nuns ‘animated with the laudable desire of helping to propagate the faith of their fathers’.3 Secondly, religious life presented women with a respectable alternative to marriage, and economic dependency on men, and a route whereby they could avoid the drudgery—and the dangers—attached to multiple pregnancies and large families.4 A girl with no money and a modest national school education could aspire to a teaching career if she entered a religious order, and she might even attain a position of leadership and status. For young women with neither an education nor a marriage portion, joining an order provided an alternative to poverty and starvation. The convent offered them security, companionship and a home for life. It is, then, not at all surprising that convents filled up in post-Famine Ireland. Studies of religious life in the second half of the nineteenth century note the rapid expansion in the number of convents at that time, with the result that by 1901, there was one nun per 400 members of the Irish population. While the total number of Irish-born nuns outside Ireland by 1901 is impossible to compute precisely at this remove, it probably exceeded 20,000 women. As will be seen below, this number included Irish-born women who emigrated to work in service, and later entered convents. Thirdly, though it has largely been overlooked in scholarship, it is important to note that religious life provided a unique travel opportunity to Irishwomen: it offered a relatively safe migration route out of the country, usually at no financial cost. Leisurely international travel was unthinkable for women who had neither money nor a chaperone, but entering an

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order with overseas missions presented them with opportunities to see a little of the world. Women who left for overseas convents did so in groups, usually chaperoned by one or two priests. Their passage was paid, they had comfortable cabins and they were hosted by other religious when they docked at different points of their long sea journeys. Because the flow of Irish aspirants and nuns out of the country came at a time when transatlantic journeys had become easier, their travel diaries are almost uniformly positive. The opening up of the Suez Canal and the replacement of sailing ships with steamships meant that those who left Ireland in the 1870s and 1880s had a very different travel experience from those who had left Ireland forty years earlier. Additionally, the highly mobile nature of missionary life meant that some could expect to be moved between countries, and might see many parts of the world during their religious lives. Some women chose an order to enter, on the basis of where it had mission houses. Those who were prepared in St Brigid’s Missionary School, for example, could indicate which congregation they wanted to enter in Australia or the US. Other professed women religious went where they were sent, but even then they had some choice in the matter, as they could refuse the request to go overseas. The large numbers that left the country would suggest that the attraction of serving overseas was considerable. Nonetheless, before anyone went anywhere, they had to be invited.

Invitations Out On St Patrick’s Day, 1857, Mother Teresa Ball sat at her desk in Loreto Abbey. As the Loreto Superior General, she regularly wrote to the various sisters whom she had appointed as local Superiors in Canada, India, Mauritius and Gibraltar. Although a letter could take months to reach its destination, this did not deter Ball from updating Loreto convents about what was going on in Ireland. Her St Patrick’s Day letter noted with some satisfaction: ‘a host of Archbishops, Bishops, [and] Vicar-Generals … have called our nuns to be established in the four quarters of the globe’.5 This claim in her letter was not an exaggeration. The first invitation to Mother Teresa Ball had come from India in 1842. Dr Patrick Joseph Carew, an Irishman, had recently been appointed Bishop of Calcutta. He wanted Irish nuns, in order to provide elite Catholic schooling, and also to set up schools for the poor. Carew was clear that the kind of nuns he needed should be able to teach both ‘accomplishments’ and general subjects, including European languages. To find suitable religious, he sent one of

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his priests, the Rev. Dr Henry Backhaus to Ireland. Backhaus was a German secular priest, who had been educated at the Propaganda Fide Collegio Urbano under Dr Paul Cullen. While Backhaus may have travelled from India for this recruiting project, it was another man—Fr Robert Haly SJ— who secured the support of Mother Teresa Ball. Haly had been at Stonyhurst with Teresa Ball’s brother. He subsequently entered the Society of Jesus there. Ordained in 1828, he eventually was sent back to Ireland, where he served as Rector of Clongowes Wood College, and Belvedere College. In Ireland, he had become well known as a ‘missioner’, conducting parish missions around the country. Haly brought Backhaus to Loreto Abbey to meet Mother Ball and present Bishop Carew’s invitation. Initially Ball declined the invitation, but then asked for some time to pray in the chapel and consider what had been requested. She decided to send some nuns, recognising the chance to evangelise in India. She also knew that the provision of convent schools in India would greatly reduce the need for Catholic Anglo-Indians to attend Protestant schools.6 Ball presented the invitation to her community at Loreto Abbey, and several nuns offered themselves for the proposed mission. Thereafter, whenever Ball was asked for a colony of nuns, she sent only women who volunteered. Accepting the invitation of a bishop usually had the effect that further requests then followed. The Loreto Superior soon had requests from Dr William Collier in Mauritius, and Dr Henry Hughes, the Irish-born bishop of Gibraltar.7 She responded by sending eight religious to Mauritius in May 1845 and seven months later sent a further five to Gibraltar. Barely two years had elapsed before she was asked to send nuns to Toronto. Because of the influx of Irish immigrants to Upper Canada (now Ontario), many Irish priests had been sent there. The first bishop of Toronto, Dr Michael Power, was the son of two Irish immigrants. Determined to build an ultramontane church in Toronto, he imported French Jesuits. The Loreto nuns would be the perfect counterpart to the Jesuits, providing excellent schooling for both the wealthy and the poor. And, like Bishop Carew in Calcutta, he also wanted convent schools to attract the daughters of middle-class Protestants. In 1847, Power went to Ireland to quest for vocations, and managed to get Teresa Ball to give five religious for a new foundation in Toronto. Other bishops targeted native Irish orders, such as the Sisters of Mercy and the Presentation Sisters. Bishop O’Connor of Pittsburgh went to the Carlow convent of the Sisters of Mercy in 1843, to ask for nuns. He had been referred there by Dr Paul Cullen, who had ‘seven relatives in the

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Carlow convent’.8 Somewhat alarmingly, the entire convent community volunteered to go back to America with him, so the Superior had to intervene and select a small group of pioneers. When Superiors agreed to give nuns for overseas foundations, they knew they were depleting their own convents. They also knew that the intrepid pioneers who agreed to go overseas might find themselves unable for the tasks ahead of them. For these reasons, they attempted to attach conditions when agreeing to send out a group. For example, the Superior of the Presentation Convent in Galway agreed, somewhat cautiously, to make a foundation in Newfoundland in 1833. As the first Irish order to make a foundation overseas, the Presentations had no model to follow. However, they were somewhat cautious when the Irish-born Bishop of Newfoundland, Dr Michael Fleming, ‘crossed the Atlantic in 1833 [to] … bring from Galway in Ireland a little community of Nuns of the Presentation Order’.9 Like many places to which Irish nuns would be invited in the nineteenth century, the port of St John’s had a settled population of Irish immigrants. The majority came from southern Ireland, particularly Waterford, though there were also families from Cork, Wexford, Tipperary and Kilkenny. Most of the men worked in the salt-fish trade, while the women worked in fish and berry processing. There were some 14,000 Irish there by the time Fleming went in search of Irish priests and nuns to come to Newfoundland, where he believed young people were in grave danger of sin. Schooling in Newfoundland was provided by Protestant charities, such as the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), and the North American School Society, which was a British bible society. The schools were poorly attended, and there was little provision for Catholic children. Dr Fleming was concerned about the young boys who hung about the wharves and ports, drinking rum. Furthermore, boys and girls mixed freely, and spoke coarsely, he asserted. If he could get one or two congregations of nuns to establish convent schools, he believed he could instil ‘virtue and religion’ into these youths. He wrote of his passion to bring convent education to Newfoundland: I judged it of essential importance to fix the character of the female portion of our community in virtue and innocence … when once the future mothers are impressed with the truths of religion … once their young minds are enlarged and enlightened and strengthened by educational knowledge, the domestic fireside is immediately made the most powerful auxiliary to the school.10

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When Dr Fleming made his way to Ireland to request a colony of nuns, he was fixed on getting a group of Presentations for the convent that he hoped to eventually build in St John’s (see Fig. 3.1). The Presentations had been founded for the education of the poor, and especially poor girls, and he therefore calculated that they could provide the kind of useful education that would benefit girls who would end up working in unskilled labour, before eventually marrying. Importantly, the nuns would teach catechism to their pupils, thereby making them better future mothers of Catholic children. The Superior of the Presentation Convent Galway was Mother M. John Power, a native of Waterford. She may have had a particular sympathy for the many Waterford families who were settled in Newfoundland, for she agreed to see Dr Fleming when he arrived at the door of her convent, carrying nothing but a carpetbag. Mother Power listened to his request for nuns; she recognised that if the proposed convent in St John’s was to succeed, she would need to give at least four nuns—this would deplete her community, and was not without risk for

Fig. 3.1  Presentation Convent, St John’s, Newfoundland (built in 1853). (By kind permission of the Presentation Sisters Archive, Newfoundland)

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those who agreed to go with Fleming. In the end, she agreed to ask for volunteers, and—with the permission of the Bishop of Galway—they prepared to depart for Newfoundland. Mother Power insisted, however, that the women should be allowed to return to Galway if they wished, and equally she could recall them after six years. She wrote to Fleming to clarify her position: [T]his community will have it in their power to recall our Sisters any time after six years. Should the Convent at Newfoundland be sufficiently established, or should [the mission] … not succeed, to their satisfaction, or for any other particular cause which they deem necessary … your Lordship should have them safely conducted back to their own convent in Galway … we the Sisters of this community deem it necessary to make this stipulation. I resign to your care our dear Sisters.52

Superiors were painfully aware that they were sending nuns out into parts of the world about which they knew almost nothing. Once a colony of nuns set sail from Ireland, they could find themselves at the mercy of bishops and priests who had little or no interest in the women themselves, or in the Rule and Constitutions of the order to which they belonged. There were also circumstances for which no Superior could prepare: when Mother Teresa Ball accepted an invitation from Bishop Power to send five nuns to Toronto, she did so with the assurance that Power would look after her nuns. She could not have imagined that Power would be dead within two weeks of their arrival. Power’s successor, Bishop Armand de Charbonnel, was both domineering and demanding in his relations with the Loreto nuns. On the one hand he displayed little regard for them, yet on the other hand he wrote to Ireland to demand that more should be sent out. Rather than asking the Loreto Superior General, Teresa Ball, he laid out his needs in a letter to Dr Daniel Murray, Archbishop of Dublin, assuming that Murray would arrange the matter: [A]t least three new very healthy Sisters would not be too many; one should be a first rate housekeeper superintending the attendance of the sick, cooking, making provision, bargains, etc., and one of the two choir Sisters should be equally pious and sensible, perfectly well acquainted with the rules and usages of the institute, able to be a Superior. … My desire is to trust to them the whole education of the City of Toronto and as much as possible that of the most important places of the Diocese.11

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Teresa Ball, like other Superiors, learned to be somewhat circumspect when approached by bishops who wanted her nuns to make overseas foundations. Because months—or even a year—could elapse before letters from a new foundation would arrive back in Ireland, sometimes the fate of a founding group was sealed by the time that their motherhouse heard from them, and knew how things were progressing. Bishop Carew in Calcutta became overbearing in his control of the Loreto nuns who went there in 1841, insisting that they expand and take on responsibilities— including nursing—for which they were not trained. Eventually, Mother Teresa Ball had to make the decision that no more nuns from Loreto Abbey would go to India. Meanwhile in Canada, her Irish nuns found they were not free to return to Ireland at will. Women religious lived under the authority of their bishop and needed permission to travel anywhere at all. Mother Teresa Dease, Loreto Superior in Toronto, asked permission to return to Ireland in 1870. She was both weary and homesick, having spent twenty-three years in Canada. Any hope of remaining at the Dublin motherhouse vanished once a letter came from the bishop’s palace, telling her, in no uncertain terms: ‘His Grace puts the only restriction … that it is well understood that you will not remain permanently in Ireland, but … return to Canada to spend here the remainder of your days’.12 Nuns were unlikely to return to Ireland once they had left the country. It was precisely for this reason that Irish Superiors had to carefully select each of the members of a founding group. On the one hand, a founding group had the honour and status of being seen as pioneers. But on the other hand, they also had to say goodbye to their families and religious communities for good. They also had to be physically, mentally and spiritually strong so that they would survive both the long journey that lay ahead and succeed in their missions once they arrived.

Selecting the Group ‘I feel that in going to this mission in Australia as if God gave me the grace to die, as it were, twice. For I am, as it seems to me, passing away out of this world into another. I think it will be Purgatory.’13 Thus wrote Mother Gonzaga Barry, when she was selected to become the Loreto founding Superior in Australia. Barry was not the only nun to become a reluctant foundress. The founding Superior of the Loreto order in Ireland, Teresa Ball, had been most reluctant to leave the familiar surrounds of the Bar Convent in York, when requested to do so by Dr Daniel Murray. She did

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not feel equal to the task before her, and believed she had a ‘greater prospect of happiness’ in the York convent. However, Murray was persuasive: ‘Let me entreat you, my dear child, not to continue wearing out your poor mind by anxieties’, he wrote to Ball.14 Murray had, at an early stage, identified Ball as the person suited to bring the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary to Ireland. He was a close family friend, who knew that she had been educated at the Bar Convent, and had therefore already taken the first steps towards understanding the charism of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It was Murray who arranged her return to the novitiate at the Bar Convent in 1814, when she was twenty years old, with a view to training her to be the foundress of a house of the same order in Dublin. And it was Murray who gently steered her back to Dublin in 1821, and helped her to establish Loreto Abbey. Ball grew into the role of leader; she was the first Novice Mistress at the Abbey, thereby forming the first generation of Irish Loreto nuns, and she was also closely involved in managing the finances of the convent and boarding school. She remained in the role of Superior General until her death in 1861, by which time she had ‘formed’ many other leaders and sent several of them out of the country to make foundations. Teresa Ball is an example of a nun who was destined for leadership because of the careful planning and preparation by Dr Murray. But many Irish nuns had leadership thrust upon them with no notice, when they were ‘named’ as Superiors of new foundations around the world. A founding group needed a few healthy young choir nuns, and one or two lay sisters; it also needed a strong leader who had been well ‘formed’ both by her own time as a novice and by her experience as a religious. By examining the family backgrounds and religious lives of several foundresses, it is possible to see some of their common characteristics. They tended to have been educated by the order, so were immersed in it from an early age; they were usually women who had held leadership roles in Irish convents so knew how to manage finances and run schools, and several had held the role of Novice Mistress, which meant that they were already experienced at training others. The choice of Gonzaga Barry to lead the pioneering group to Australia was made, doubtless, because she met these criteria. Barry had been sent to school at the Loreto Convent in Gorey, Co. Wexford, in 1846. There she came under the influence of the Superior, Mother Benedicta Somers—who had herself been educated and professed under the direction of Teresa Ball at Loreto Abbey. Somers possibly influenced the decision to send Barry to Dublin, to become a boarder at Loreto Abbey, where she met Mother Ball. She entered the novitiate

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there in 1853; by then, Mother Benedicta Somers had become Novice Mistress at the Abbey, and she formed Barry, until her profession in 1857. Almost immediately, Gonzaga Barry was given leadership responsibilities. She returned to Loreto Convent Gorey as Mistress of Novices, and eight years later she became Superior of the Gorey convent. When Bishop O’Connor appealed to the Loreto order for a community of nuns to make a foundation in Ballarat, Gonzaga Barry was asked by the Superior General to consider going to Australia as Superior. All of Barry’s experience and training made her the ideal leader. While Barry felt that the mission would be a kind of ‘Purgatory’, and dreaded the prospect of travelling such a distance, she accepted the mission. Mother Warde, who brought the Sisters of Mercy to the United States, was similarly well prepared for her responsibilities. As a girl, she had been influenced greatly by Mother Catherine McAuley, foundress of the Sisters of Mercy. McAuley became a kind of mother figure to Warde, whose own mother was dead. In 1832, a year after McAuley had founded the Sisters of Mercy, Frances Warde entered the order. She was professed as M. Francis Xavier, and for several years she was secretary to Catherine McAuley, and Mother Assistant at the motherhouse in Dublin. From an early stage, McAuley had identified Warde as a leader, and sent her to Carlow to make a foundation. When Bishop Michael O’Connor of Pittsburgh turned to the Carlow convent for some nuns, so that the Sisters of Mercy could be established in the United States, the community agreed that Warde should lead the group. She needed the approval of Bishop Francis Haly, who agreed that she could leave his diocese for two years only. In the event, while she returned to Ireland to make brief recruiting trips, she never lived there again. The speed with which Warde expanded the Sisters of Mercy in the US was remarkable (see Appendix A), indicating that she had all of the attributes necessary for the role in which she found herself when she stepped on board the Queen of the West, and crossed the Atlantic for the first time in 1843. There were also many Irish-born women religious who exercised influence and leadership indirectly. For example, while the woman who brought the Society of the Sacred Heart to the United States was the Frenchwoman, Mother Philippine Duchesne, she was a monoglot French speaker, and therefore relied heavily on an Irishwoman, Mother Anna Shannon, in order to lead her fledgling foundation in Missouri. Other nuns ended up in circumstances that bore no resemblance to the religious life they had expected. Mother Francis Bridgeman, a Sister of Mercy who had entered

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in their Limerick convent, rose to leadership quickly and founded a convent in Kinsale. Though she would successfully make a foundation in Cincinnati, one of the most challenging periods of her religious life was when she was chosen to lead a group of Sisters to nurse in Crimea. The Sisters of Mercy would send out many more Irish nuns to lead new foundations in the United States, including Mary Agnes O’Connor (New York), Baptist Russell (San Francisco); Patricia Waldron (Philadelphia), Teresa O’Farrell (Arkansas), and Mary Agnes Healy and Teresa Perry (Connecticut).15 Sometimes women religious were required to take over leadership in new foundations even though they had not originally been named as founding Superiors. Mother Teresa Comerford ended up in the role of founding leader when the nun singled out to lead the pioneering group of Presentations to US became ill. Mother Teresa Dease similarly ‘inherited’ the role of Loreto Superior in Toronto when the chosen Superior died in 1851, not long after the founding group had arrived in Canada. Dease was given her new ‘obedience’ by the Chief Superior, Mother Teresa Ball, who wrote from Ireland to say ‘Yesterday your letter of 25th ult arrived to enable us to be certain of the loss of our revered and beloved Superioress, whose maternal solicitude for the community you will cheerfully assume to prove your love for God’. Perhaps anticipating the reluctance of Mother Dease, Teresa Ball added; ‘you are obliged to be head, when chosen to govern your community.’16 Teresa Dease believed that her ‘inexperience and incapacity to acquit [herself]’ meant that she was not qualified to lead. However, she added, ‘I wish to know if I could consistently with my vow of Obedience insist on returning to Ireland. … I came through Obedience, I shall remain through the same if necessary.’17 Her vow of obedience obliged her to accept the final decision of her Superior, whose view was that Dease had all the necessary skills to lead a new foundation (Fig. 3.2). If it was important to select a good foundress for a new mission, it was also crucial to select a few healthy young nuns. Mother Teresa Ball dismissed thirteen novices who entered for the India mission in the 1840s, because they were unsuited.18 She knew that this caused some reputational damage, writing that ‘the censure of the public was heavily laid on us for [the] thirteen dismissions [sic]’.19 However, the mere fact that nuns volunteered for overseas foundations did not mean that they were suited; though the entire community of the Carlow Sisters of Mercy volunteered to go to the United States in 1843, most of the sixteen women were rejected. The final group comprised two cousins of Dr Paul Cullen: Francis

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Fig. 3.2  Mother M.  Teresa Dease IBVM. (By kind permission of the IBVM Canadian Province Archives)

Xavier Warde and Josephine Cullen. They were accompanied by five other religious: Margaret O’Brien, Veronica McDerby, Philomena Reid, Aloysius Strange and Elizabeth Strange. By giving such a substantial group for a foundation in the US, the Sisters of Mercy were guaranteeing its success. There were enough women to share out the various responsibilities, especially if a few of them became ill. However, other founding groups were quickly depleted due to illness. The Loreto colony of five women that went to Canada in 1847 comprised Bonaventure Phelan, who died from TB two years later; Ignatia Hutchinson (Superior) who died from the same disease in 1851, and her younger

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sister, Valentina Hutchinson, who was sent back to Ireland when she also showed signs of having TB. Another of the pioneering group, Gertrude Fleming, got gangrene in her foot, which led to her death in 1850. This series of illnesses and deaths resulted in Teresa Dease—the last of the group—being obliged to become Superior in Canada, as already mentioned, and provide leadership to women who entered the order in Toronto, as well as those who were sent out from Ireland. One religious who arrived from Dublin in 1849 was Sister Ita Cummings, a lay sister who was a much-needed skilled nurse. Lay sisters, who undertook the domestic work and cared for livestock, were crucial in new foundations. The first Presentations to go to Newfoundland in 1833 recalled the challenges of running their little convent during their first winter: their hands froze to the handle of the milk-pails when milking the cow, and by the time they brought the milk indoors they were ‘obliged to cut it with a knife’.20 Dealing with hardship on arrival was rarely the first challenge that Irish nuns faced when they made foundations overseas, however. They firstly had to negotiate daunting sea voyages, usually followed by over-­ land travel.

Planning the Voyage When planning to send a group of nuns to make a new overseas foundation, Irish Superiors had to firstly ascertain who would bear the costs of the travel. Ideally, the inviting bishop would cover the cost of the sea voyage, and any additional travel expenses. For example, Dr James Murray, Archbishop of Maitland, gave his assurance that any Irish novices who travelled to Australia from St Brigid’s Mission School would have to bear ‘no expense for pension, nor for passage’.21 Other Bishops were less generous: when Bishop Michael O’Connor asked Mother Scholastica Somers for Loreto nuns for Australia, he offered only to cover half of the costs. While his demands were unambiguous, he thought that the optics of the nuns paying their own way would not be lost on the locals. He wrote: ‘eight sisters in all would be required. Now I made no appeal for money to repay your expenses out. … I think if it be known that you have come out here by your own resources that much more will be done by the people when they see that act of generosity. By a first class sailing ship, one of Morey & Co … the travelling expenses for 8 persons, first class, will be £400. I am willing myself personally to bear half the expenses and I accordingly send you a draft of £200.’22 Generally, groups of women religious

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travelled first class as this meant that they had more privacy. They only shared cabins with their own party, and they were often offered a private saloon for dining and for praying. However, some Superiors were not keen to spend money on first class tickets. When Mother Gonzaga Joynt wrote from India to ask for novices to be sent to her from Australia in 1895, she insisted that second class passage would be perfectly adequate, and assured the Australia Superior: ‘Perhaps you will not like our taking 2nd class passages for the young people, yet the most respectable persons, I hear. … Our own Doctor and his family have just gone to England, 2nd class by the P&O Line.’23 When orders of women religious became established in other countries, they usually assumed responsibility for paying the travel costs of any additional nuns that they required in order to expand their overseas footprint. Once the Loreto nuns were established in Canada, Mother Teresa Ball indicated that she could not pay for further groups to travel there from Ireland. Consequently, the Canadian Superior, Mother Teresa Dease, sent ‘sixty pounds sterling’ to Mother Ball later that year, to cover the travel costs of three additional nuns, when the Toronto foundation was struggling following a series of illnesses in the community.24 The considerable choice in shipping lines working the North Atlantic meant that this amount was a reasonable contribution, though it probably did not cover all of the costs.25 The Superior of the Loreto foundation in Gibraltar provided all of the costs attached to brining Irish nuns there.26 Mother Teresa Ball’s reluctance to pay the passage of nuns was, in part, because it was important that each new foundation should become self-sufficient. It was also because—even without paying for the sea voyage—she still had to cover other travel expenses. Consequently, when she agreed to send the Toronto foundation an experienced religious—Mother Berchmans Lalor—she cautioned, ‘I will equip her for four weeks sail, but I have not means to defray her voyage’.27 Equipping nuns for departure was costly. Mother Ball was doubtless taken aback with the list of requisites that came from the Toronto Superior, who wrote: [A]s linen, flannel, and cloth &c are much cheaper in Ireland than in Canada, I will feel particularly obliged by your having them well supplied with clothes. They will want flannel waistcoats … they should bring four or five good flannel petticoats … [and] a cloak, plenty of stockings … [and] as we are obliged to change our guimpes &c oftener here from this until the

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month of September, therefore it would be well if … they would each bring eight.28

Another consideration when preparing nuns for travel was the provision of a chaperone. Sometimes the group was accompanied by clergymen who were either tasked specifically with this responsibility or travelling anyway and agreed to chaperone the nuns. The Loreto nuns who left for Canada in 1847 were accompanied as far as Liverpool by Dr Murphy, Bishop of Agra, for example.29 Occasionally, religious who had been questing for vocations would accompany those who agreed to return with them. Mother Mary McKillop rounded up a group of fifteen postulants and then accompanied them to Australia in 1874, for example.30 And sometimes nuns were entrusted to the care of friends who were travelling. When Mother Berchmans Lalor left for Canada in 1851, her Superior assured the Toronto convent that Mother Berchmans would be chaperoned by a Mr O’Neill.31 While it was not uncommon in the nineteenth century for gentlewomen to be chaperoned in public, the purpose of a chaperone for nuns was not merely to give the appearance of decorum on board ship. It was also to keep an eye on any postulants who might fall under the influence of other passengers or—worse still—sailors. Mother Gonzaga Joynt was alarmed to learn that two Loreto postulants had ‘proposals of marriage on board’, while making their way to India. ‘The Captain asked J. Scallan to be his wife and one of the officers made the same proposal to E. Powell’, she wrote. In both cases, the women declined the proposals and continued on their way to the convent in Calcutta. The Infant Jesus Sisters were less fortunate: one of their pioneering group to Penang was happy to accept the marriage proposal of the Captain of the La Julie in 1851. A second group had to be sent out in 1852. This group included Sr Gregory Connolly, the first Irish IJ missionary.32 Other risks attached to travel could not be mitigated by the presence of a chaperone, and the nuns knew this only too well. Severe seasickness could prove fatal, dangerous diseases could be contracted at any point on the journey, and random accidents could also happen. Mother Pauline Rodot, one of the ill-fated group of Infant Jesus Sisters who went to Penang in 1851, was struck by a loose pulley onboard La Julie; her injury proved fatal, and she was buried at sea off Christmas Island. The greatest risk was that a vessel would be shipwrecked in a storm. Mother Teresa Ball was painfully aware of this, having narrowly missed sailing on one such vessel in 1821. She and her nuns had been offered passage on either of

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two vessels, when travelling from England to Ireland to found the Loreto order: she chose the Waterloo which ‘happily arrived in Dublin on 12th August … the other vessel was wrecked’.33 Her letters to Loreto convents often recounted details of the travels of nuns, and of Loreto pupils such as Mary Brouet who was almost lost at sea. Brouet and her family were sailing from Mauritius to Calcutta, when their ship struck a rock and sank. Mother Teresa Ball recorded that twenty-eight of the passengers, including Mary, managed to get into a ‘lifeboat which wafted them to a desert island. They were in their nightdresses and without a change of garments.’34 Though all were rescued six weeks later, Mary Brouet’s misadventure made its way around Loreto convents, and doubtless struck fear in some of the nuns who were embarking on long sea journeys.

The Voyage Out With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the Red Sea was linked with the Mediterranean. This route was not immediately adopted for long journeys to New Zealand and Australia, which continued to use the traditional route, rounding the Cape of Good Hope. Some of the groups of nuns travelling to Australia, New Zealand and India towards the end of the nineteenth century did go via the new canal however; their diaries record passing through the Strait of Gibraltar, into the Mediterranean Sea; they then entered the Red Sea through the Suez Canal, and continued into the Indian Ocean. Those stopping in India included the group of Presentations who left Maynooth in 1841 to found the first Catholic school in British India. They set sail on the Lady Flora on 17 September 1841 and arrived in Madras on 13 January 1842. But those continuing to New Zealand could be at sea for as many as 120 days. While some of the groups discussed in this book travelled before the advent of steam ships, most went by vessels that were driven by steam and sail. The use of sail was not fully replaced by steam until the late nineteenth century, when sailing vessels still transported those who could not afford steam. Even when ships had steam engines, Captains also used sail in order to spare fuel, as they knew there were long distances between coaling stations. With strong winds, it was very possible to make headway under sail alone, and steamships going to New Zealand in the 1850s and 1860s went most of the way under sail. The English ports of Plymouth and London were the points of departure for missionary groups, who had travelled firstly to London where they usually received hospitality from another convent until their ship was ready

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to depart. Fully loaded vessels were towed to Gravesend where passengers embarked; nuns recorded clambering into tenders to be brought out to the ship, and then trying to discreetly climb up a ladder-like gang-plank to enter the vessel. At that point, they had to be sure to hold on to their small cabin bags containing enough basic necessities for several weeks, and changing climates, because their trunks were craned into the hold for the journey. When inviting the Dominicans to Maitland in 1867, Bishop James Murray wrote to Dublin to advise: In making their preparations for the voyage they must provide clothing for very cold weather as well as very hot, and their boxes or cases should be all numbered and well marked. Those that they may require in the voyage should be marked ‘wanted in voyage’, or not wanted as the case may be.35

Those going to foundations in North America made the more straightforward crossing of the Atlantic, landing in New York and then continuing over land. Some, such as the Presentations that crossed the United States to finally settle in San Francisco, used trains, covered wagons and mule to get to their destinations. Like sea journeys, these overland routes were charted in the travelogues of some Irish nuns and were occasionally illustrated. Mother Teresa Comerford kept an illustrated log of her journey from Ireland to San Francisco in 1854. Her pioneering group of Presentations boarded the Canada on 21 September and arrived at their convent thirteen days later. While the journey was considerably shorter than travelling to India or Australia, it still had its challenges; Comerford and her nuns took a second ship to Panama, crossed the Isthmus on mules and continued by train and steamer to California.36 It is important to recognise that, unlike many other women who wrote travel diaries, nuns did not write for publication or for the public eye. Rather, they wrote a log of their journey in order to share the account with other women religious—usually with those at home who might follow as part of another contingent of missionaries. The diaries were therefore not merely descriptive accounts of journeys; they were also full of practical advice and warnings. The accounts of journeys undertaken by pioneering Irish groups were also copied into the early pages of the Annals of new foundations. Although these records are a form of travel writing, they do not show evidence of the kind of narrative positions taken by nineteenth-century travel writers, such as the ‘adventure narrative’, in which the traveller shows courage and heroism, or the ‘sentimental’

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narrative, in which the narrator-traveller and indigenous people take part in a dramatic tale.37 It has been argued that women adopted discursive elements used by male travel writers, such as the discourse of ethnography, the discourse of racial superiority, the discourse of the savage, the discourse of the noble savage, and the discourse of empire. However, travel writing by nuns indicates that ‘they adopted different discourses: those of pilgrim and teacher’.38 Usually one nun took on the role of diarist for the group and recorded the daily experience of all of them. In so doing, the diarist sometimes depicted the journey as a kind of pilgrimage, or shared its spiritual significance. The account of the voyage to make a new foundation also recorded the bonds with the Irish convent from which the pioneering group had originated; in this way the travel diary confirmed the pedigree of the new foundation. Though nuns were not supposed to indulge in self-pity, their travel diaries occasionally betray their sense of loss at leaving their Irish convent community behind. Their descriptions are a reminder that these Irish nuns were in fact emigrating with little expectation of ever seeing their families and their religious communities again. Bound for Australia in 1867, a Dominican Sister-diarist wrote: ‘We launched out into the deep our hearts beating with grief. No one could speak a word. … It was all over. Swiftly were the poor emigrants swept away.’39 The young Brigidine aspirant, Bridie Moore, departing for Australia in 1894, commenced her journal: ‘Watched dear old Ireland as long as my eyes could see it. My last glimpse of Erin fell on Howth Head.’40 Mother Gonzaga Barry also kept a journal of the journey of the first Loreto group to go to Australia. At forty-one years of age, and with considerable leadership experience, she did not allow herself to record an emotional response to leaving. However, she wrote many years later: ‘I suppose no one will ever know what it cost me to leave Ireland … it nearly broke my heart’.41 Mother Gonzaga Barry’s diary is a reminder that nuns wrote logs of their voyages as pedagogic tools, from which other Sisters and pupils could learn. By posting the travel diary back to the convent from which they had departed, they provided future missionaries with valuable information about how to negotiate lengthy journeys. For example, Barry’s travel diaries advised future missionaries to purchase little folding chairs—deck chairs—for their comfort sitting around on deck, as ‘all experienced travellers are provided with these chairs’.42 Not having known about deck chairs before setting sail, the Loreto nuns had improvised by covering tin boxes with black cloth.43 As religious became more knowledgeable about sea

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voyages, they learned to prepare themselves. The Marist Sisters went a step further and bought ‘long deck chairs’, to use as beds to sleep on deck once they had entered the Tropics and the heat became unbearable, and the Carlow Brigidines bought some deck chairs at the Port of Tilbury, before setting sail for Australia in 1894.44 Advice was also given on what to wear, and how to manage both laundry and bathing. Typically, a set of clean clothes was fetched from the ship’s hold after the first month, and they could have a bath a few times during the journey. Mother Gonzaga Barry, having sailed from Plymouth on the 22nd May, recorded having her ‘first bath’ on the 8th June. Because she had been sea-sick almost every day, she ‘did not feel able to attempt it’ before then.45 When the party of Dominican nuns who voyaged to Maitland on 14 June 1867 were finally asked if they wanted anything from the hold on 10 August, they replied that their ‘white habits, the dear white habits, were the only things required’.46 Because groups of nuns often visited with other religious orders when docked at ports along the route, it is certainly possible that they were also occasionally able to bathe and change their clothes in the privacy of a convent. Nonetheless, unused to hot weather, the Irish nuns found the great heat of the Tropics particularly challenging. On the long voyage to India, Mother Berchmans Stafford admitted that the Loreto nuns only wore a ‘habit, black petticoat and chemise’.47 But even without the discomfort of their guimpes and flannel vests, the nuns wilted in the heat. Loreto Superior in Calcutta, Mother Gonzaga Joynt, was furious to learn that one group travelling from Ireland to India went so far as to throw most of their heavy clothing overboard, not expecting to need them ever again. The reality was that the Loreto nuns would experience cold winter months, especially in hill stations such as Darjeeling. Mother Joynt accordingly wrote back to Ireland to bring an end to what she saw as utter foolishness. ‘Will you get someone to tell them not to throw everything overboard but certain linen’, she admonished. ‘The three last postulants pitched nearly all their belongings into the sea, everything they used, even woollen garments!’48 For the period of the sea voyage, nuns who were normally busy teaching or managing schools occupied a place of suspended activity, as many of their daily routines had to be abandoned. While they tried to observe the reading of their Divine Office, with regular times for prayer, they could only have Mass if there was a priest on board ship. When the first group of Loreto nuns sailed to Australia, they were accompanied by Fr Carey who said Mass almost daily in his cabin on board the Somersetshire, unless

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storms made it impossible. He also ‘arranged a confessional’ in his cabin once a week, hanging up some ‘green baize for a screen’ and seating himself behind it on a trunk.49 One nun recalled, ‘The great difficulty was to remember your sins, recite contrition, and at the same time try to keep on your knees and avoid rolling into the confessor’s lap’.50 The Sisters of Mercy who travelled to New Zealand in 1875 were disappointed to find that there was no priest on board the Orient. As tenders brought successive groups of passengers out to the vessel, they stood on deck, ‘on the lookout for a priest’, only to be joined by ‘three of four ministers with any amount of hymn books’.51 The presence of the Protestant ministers, and several Protestant passengers, proved something of a trial for the nuns. ‘We were tormented, several asking us to join their services. … How sad it is not to have a single priest on board’, they wrote.52 Though long voyages meant that nuns lived outside their convent enclosure, they improvised to recreate that cloister. On board the Somersetshire, the Loreto nuns were given the use of a separate saloon. The Captain had been warned that they were ‘a very strict religious order and that even if a visitor came into [the] convent the nuns could not go to the parlour or speak without leave from the Reverend Mother’.53 This news had the effect that the Captain ‘neither spoke or bowed to [the nuns] until they were three weeks on board’. He eventually befriended the nuns, arranging that sailors should ‘nail up a screen to shut of the Lower Saloon from the officer’s quarters’, to give them privacy.54 The Mercy nuns travelling to Melbourne also attempted a kind of enclosure, writing that—in the absence of a priest—they spent Sunday mornings ‘In [their] cabin, hearing Mass spiritually’.55 However, there were limits to how much nuns could keep apart from others, when living in such close quarters on voyages that lasted six to eight weeks. While parties of nuns kept to themselves on board throughout sea journeys, they occasionally conversed with the Captain—and his wife, if she were on board. ‘Captain Campbell, Commander of the vessel, was extremely kind and attentive’, recorded the nuns who went from Dublin to Calcutta in 1841.56 When several parties of nuns were on board a vessel, they got to know each other. The Brigidine group sailing to Australia in 1894 found that there were some Irish Loreto nuns on board the Austral. ‘They are very nice and improve by acquaintance’, novice Bridie Moore recalled. ‘They are going to Gibraltar. Seven in number … very sweet, good-looking little things.’57 Sometimes nuns fell into conversation with Protestant passengers, who were curious about their habits. Following a stop to collect

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passengers at Falmouth on 9 June 1867, the Dominican diarist wrote: ‘Several strange passengers came on board, amongst them a couple of Protestant gentlemen to whom we were a great curiosity. … They remarked we wore rings and asked if we were married.’58 When the Loreto nuns struck up a conversation with a Protestant couple—Captain and Mrs Backhaus—Mother Gonzaga Barry did not waste the opportunity to share her ‘Catholic books’ in the hope of converting them, and later wrote that the Captain might consider ‘going over to Rome’.59 Barry’s lengthy diary also recorded the endless bouts of seasickness that she and her nuns experienced. A particularly bad storm blew up just days after their ship had crossed the equator. Mother Barry wrote: one of the sails … has been carried away … the cabins seem to turn upside down … waves are dashing up over the windows … darkening the room. … I got in between a bed and a trunk on the floor of our cabin [to commence] my letters home [and] every now and then a great heave of the vessel would turn things upside down. … During these little interruptions it was necessary to seize the ink bottle in one hand and hold on to the bed or the trunk with the other.60

The founding Mother felt green so often that she had to use a code word for seasickness, rather than refer to it directly. She was advised by the Captain of the value of champagne in curing seasickness, and he sent several bottles to the nuns’ cabins. Unlike priests and bishops, nuns rarely went ashore when ships docked to take on supplies and passengers. Their observation of cloister required that they stay onboard when possible, where they usually spent their time reading, sewing and praying. If a ship was refuelling or ‘coaling’, and they were required to go ashore, they made their way to a church or convent. When the Austral stopped for coaling at Port Said, the Brigidines made their way to a Franciscan church, and they ‘performed the Way of the Cross’. They then found a Good Shepherd convent, where an Irish nun offered them ‘wine and biscuits’ and a tour of the convent gardens.61 The absence of interactions with people, other than a handful of priests, ship’s officers and one or two genteel passengers, means that their travelogues are not comparable to those of other women travellers of the same period, that typically include representations of racial difference, and that reflect discourses of colonialism.62 Additionally, their limited occupancy of the space of the ships on which they travelled, means that their

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observances on shipboard life is more limited than that of the women emigrants examined in other research using shipboard diaries.63 All women travellers were segregated from each other by virtue of their class and wealth (steerage, second and first class), while single female travellers were segregated from male travellers by virtue of their gender (female accommodation). Nuns, on the other hand, were segregated from almost all other passengers by their need for a pseudo-cloister. Far from widening their knowledge of the countries that they passed through by visiting them, nuns relied on second-hand accounts from clergymen who had gone ashore to see the sights. Very occasionally, nuns went on deck and observed the kind of activity that went on around a port. During a brief stop in Colombo in 1907, the Loreto nuns travelling from Australia to Dublin recorded that it was ‘interesting to watch the stores brought on board. The SS India took in large quantities of tea and raw silk from China and sent off innumerable cases of fruit from Tasmania [and] Victoria.’64 On the few occasions when nuns went ashore, they were transported to convents where they were usually met by other Irish religious. In 1867, when the pioneering party of Irish Dominican nuns heading to Australia found themselves delayed in Plymouth, they stayed with the Notre Dame Sisters, some of whom had been educated by the Dominicans in Dublin.65 And once groups of nuns arrived at their final port, they were accommodated by other orders if they had to travel over land. When the Sisters of Mercy went to Pittsburgh in 1843, they were hosted by the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Jesus at in New York, and also stayed with the Sisters of Charity in Philadelphia for four days.66 The Loreto nuns travelling from Ireland to Canada stayed with Sisters of Mercy in Liverpool.67 Similarly, the Loreto group arriving in Australia in 1875 were welcomed into the convent of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd. When Mother Gonzaga Barry heard that some Brigidine Sisters and some Sisters of Nazareth were coming from Ireland to make foundations in Ballarat in 1888, she gave them temporary accommodation at her Loreto convent, while another group of nuns travelling there in 1894 were given ‘directions to the convent of the Good Shepherd’. There they had ‘refreshments’ in the parlour, and were then brought to pray in the convent chapel.68 This tradition of hospitality continued into the next century. When Mother Bernard Gorman brought a group of Marist Sisters to make a foundation in New

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Zealand, they made an impromptu call on a convent, when their ship stopped in Algiers. Mother Gorman’s diary entry indicates the confidence with which groups of religious could approach each other for hospitality: [W]e decided to find a convent … a very obliging French man directed us to the Convent of the Sisters of the Christian Doctrine. … We knocked on the Sisters’ hospital door and were kindly received by them. Very soon a lunch was placed before us and we enjoyed it very much.69

Though nuns did not socialise with passengers while travelling, and did not partake in deck games and entertainments during long sea voyages, the religious requirement for ‘modesty of the eyes’ was sometimes ignored. They recorded sightings of whales, flying fish, nautilus and albatross. They often enjoyed watching, albeit from a distance, the fancy dress parties and sports that took place when ships ‘crossed the line’, and gifts were given out by a sailor dressed up as Father Neptune. When the Austral approached the equator on 4 October 1894, ‘Father Neptune came on board … [and] he wished the nuns and the priests every success in their mission beneath the Southern Cross’.70 Somewhat winsomely, a sixteen-year old aspirant wrote: ‘There was a fancy dress ball on First Class deck tonight. … Mother M. John kindly brought us to it for half an hour; of course we were only on-lookers and did not take part in the dancing.’71 Women religious may have only had a tantalisingly brief glimpse of the world before entering the convent enclosure once again on arrival, but their travel diaries suggest that they knew they were seeing more of the world than most other women would see. One Irish nun who travelled with a camera, Mother Michael Corcoran IBVM, even managed to take a handful of photographs on board the Orizaba, while en route to convents belonging to her order in India and Australia in 190272 (see Fig. 3.3). And a few nuns wrote home about their travels in letters, or shared travel stories with their pupils.73 Embarking on their journeys, the thousands of aspirants, novices and nuns who left Ireland in the nineteenth and early twentieth century would form one of the earliest allfemale transnational networks—a network that would expand significantly upon their arrival.

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Fig. 3.3  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)

Notes 1. See for example M. Bernard, The Story of the Sisters of Mercy in Mississippi, 1860–1930 (New York: P.J.  Kennedy, 1931); Evans, The Spirit is Mercy; M. Xaverius O’Donoghue, Mother Vincent Whitty, a Woman Educator in a Masculine Society (Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 1972); Kathleen

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Dunlop Kane, The Presentation Sisters in Victoria: Adventures in Faith (Australia: PBVM, 1974); Susan Carol Peterson and Courtney Ann ­Vaughn-­Roberson, Women with Vision: The Presentation Sisters of South Dakota, 1880–1985 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988); Mary Ryllis Clarke, Loreto in Australia (New South Wales: University of New South Wales Press, 2009); Ann Power, The Brigidine Sisters in Ireland, America, Australia and New Zealand 1807–1922 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2018); Deirdre Raftery, Catriona Delaney and Catherine Nowlan Roebuck, Nano Nagle: The Life and the Legacy (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2019); Deirdre Raftery, Teresa Ball and Loreto Education: Convents and the Colonial World, 1794–1875 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2022). 2. For an account of these orders and international missions see 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), 515–16. The Infant Jesus Sisters began their first mission school in former Malaya in 1852 and expanded rapidly in South East Asia and Japan by the end of the nineteenth century. They relied heavily on Irish-­born nuns, to teach their English-speaking pupils. 3. ‘Irish Postulants for American Convents’, Cork Examiner, 1 March 1898. 4. For a discussion of Irishwomen’s lives, see Pauline Jackson, ‘Women in 19th Century Irish Emigration’, International Migration Review 18 (1984). 5. M. Teresa Ball to M. Teresa Dease, 17 March 1857, 3/13/3.5, Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary Canadian Province Archives (hereafter IBVMCPA). 6. See Raftery, Teresa Ball and Loreto Education, 149. 7. For a fuller discussion of these two missions, see Raftery, Teresa Ball and Loreto Education, 150–51. 8. See Anon. [the Sisters of Mercy, Manchester, New Hampshire], Reverend Mother M.  Xavier Warde: Foundress of the Order of Mercy in the United States (Boston: Marlier and Co., 1902), 90. 9. Bishop Michael Fleming, Relatio, translated into English and published as Report of the Catholic Mission in Newfoundland in North America, Submitted by the Vicar Apostolic of that Mission, Monsignor Michael Fleming, to His Eminence the Cardinal Prefect of Propaganda, Rome (Rome: Printing Press of the Sacred Congregation, 1837). 10. Bishop Michael Fleming, The State of the Catholic Religion in Newfoundland, Reviewed in Two Letters (Rome: 1836), 18. 11. Dr Armand de Charbonnel to Dr Daniel Murray, 14 Nov 1850, 3/26, IBVMCPA.

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12. John Francis Jamot to M. Teresa Dease, 9 Aug 1871. 4.1/21, IBVMCPA. 13. Mother Gonzaga Barry, MS Retreat Notes, Rathfarnham, 24 April 1875, Loreto Congregation Institute and Provincial Archives, Dublin (hereafter LCIPA). 14. Dr Daniel Murray to M. Teresa Ball, 20 Oct. 1820, TB/COR/9/3, LCIPA. 15. Kathleen Healy (ed.), Sisters of Mercy: Spirituality in America 1843–1900 (New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1990), 14. 16. M. Teresa Ball to M. Teresa Dease, 25 April 1851, 3/13/3.5, IBVMCPA. 17. M. Teresa Dease to M. Teresa Ball, 17 March 1851, TB/CAN/5, LCIPA. 18. See M.  Teresa Ball to Dr Daniel Murray, 5 Dec. 1845, Murray Papers, 32/2/28, Dublin Diocesan Archives (hereafter DDA). 19. Ibid. These postulants had entered for the new mission to India, but were unsuited to the India foundation. 20. M. Xaverius Lynch to M. John Power, 6 Jan. 1834, Presentation Archives Newfoundland (hereafter PANFL). 21. M. Joseph Rice to M. Berchmans Commins, 8 Oct. 1892, transcription in Hoy Papers, Women and Leadership Archives, Loyola University (hereafter WLA). 22. Bishop Michael O’Connor to M Scholastica Somers, 30 Dec 1874, 2/55/ C2/22, LCIPA, and see also Loreto Province Archives Australia (hereafter LPAAU), SER344/2-002. 23. M.  Gonzaga Joynt to M.  Gonzaga Barry, 13 Oct 1895, SER17/5(23), LPAAU. 24. M. Teresa Ball to M. Teresa Dease, 5 July [1851], 3/13/3/5, IBVMCPA. 25. For a study of passenger fares, see Drew Keeling, ‘Passenger Fares for Overseas Travel in the 19th and 20th Centuries’. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association, Canada, 2012. https://www.eh.net/eha/wp-­content/uploads/2013/11/Weissetal.pdf Consulted 10 April 2023. See also John Killick, ‘Transatlantic steerage fares, British and Irish migration, and return migration, 1815–60’, The Economic History Review 67, no. 1 (2014), 170–91. 26. M. Teresa Ball to M. Teresa Dease, 29 Nov 1851, TB/CAN/3/6, LCIPA. 27. M. Teresa Ball to M. Teresa Dease, 22 May 1851, TB/CAN/3/3, LCIPA. 28. M.  Ignatia Hutchinson to M.  Teresa Ball, 6 June 1850, TB/ CAN/5, LCIPA. 29. See Annals of Loreto Abbey Toronto, 1847–1870, 3/15/3/21, IBVMCPA. 30. She secured ‘fifteen good earnest postulants’; see Mother Mary of the Cross MacKillop to Cardinal Alessandro Franchi, 30 October 1874, AP/91 [17], Sisters of St Joseph Archives, Sydney (hereafter SSJAS). 31. M. Teresa Ball to M. Teresa Dease, 22 May 1851, TB/CAN/3/3, LCIPA.

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32. Of the group of five nuns who departed for Penang in December 1851, only two continued in their mission. See Catherine KilBride and Deirdre Raftery, The Voyage Out: Infant Jesus Sisters in Ireland, 1909–2009 (Dublin: IJS Centenary Committee, 2009), 107. 33. Annals of Loreto Abbey Rathfarnham, 1821–60, RATH/ LAC/1/1, LCIPA. 34. M. Teresa Ball to M. Teresa Dease, 29 Nov 1851, TB/CAN/3/6, LCIPA. 35. Dr James Murray to Fr. O’Rourke, 19 Jan. 1867, G1/04, Dominican Archives Cabra, Dublin (hereafter DAC). 36. Annals of the Presentation Convent, San Francisco, 1854–1889; illustrated journey of Mother Teresa Comerford, 1854, Presentation Sisters Archives, San Francisco (hereafter PASF) 37. Travel writing and discursive strategies are discussed in Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New  York: Routledge, 1992); Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism (London and New York: Routledge, 1991); Barbara Korte, English Travel Writing from Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Explorations; trans. Catherine Matthias (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000); Clare Olivia Parsons, ‘Women travellers and the spectacle of modernity’, Women’s Studies: an Inter-disciplinary Journal 26, no. 5 (1997), 399–422; David Seed, ‘Nineteenth-Century Travel Writing: An Introduction’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 34 (2004), 1–5. 38. Deirdre Raftery, ‘Into the swing of the sea: contexts and discourses in nineteenth-century travel diaries by nuns’, forthcoming 2024. 39. Account of the Voyage of the Sisters from St Mary’s [Dominican] Convent, Kingstown, on the Mission to Maitland, Australia, 1867, Sisters of Mercy Archives, North Sydney (hereafter SMANS). 40. Diary of Bridie Moore, 1894, Brigidine Archives Ireland (hereafter BAI). 41. Mother M. Gonzaga Barry, Diary of the Voyage to Australia, 1875, Loreto Province Archives Australia (hereafter LPAAU). 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 44. Diary of Bridie Moore, 1894. 45. M. Gonzaga Barry, Diary of the Voyage to Australia, 1875. 46. Account of the Voyage of the Sisters from St Mary’s [Dominican] Convent (1867). 47. Sr M. Berchmans’ Diary of the Voyage to Ballarat, 1875, GB/DI/2, LCIPA. 48. M Gonzaga Joynt to M Gonzaga Barry, 13 Oct 1895, Ser17/5(23), LPAAU. Mother Joynt’s oblique reference to ‘certain linen’ acknowledged that when the women were menstruating, they had to dispose of sanitary ‘linen’ by throwing it overboard.

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49. Sr M. Berchmans’ Diary of the Voyage to Ballarat, 1875. 50. Ibid. 51. Katie Ryan [Sr M. Joseph], Diary of the six-week journey from Gravesend to Melbourne, 1875, XE/369, MCAD. 52. Ibid. 53. Mother M. Gonzaga Barry, Diary of the Voyage to Australia, 1875. 54. Ibid. 55. Diary of the six-week journey from Gravesend to Melbourne, 1875. 56. Annals of Loreto, Calcutta, 1841–1896, IND /136, LCIPA. 57. Diary of Bridie Moore, 1894. 58. Account of the Voyage of the Sisters from St Mary’s [Dominican] Convent (1867). 59. Mother M. Gonzaga Barry, Diary of the Voyage to Australia, 1875. 60. Ibid. 61. Diary of Bridie Moore, 1894. 62. See for example the work of Karen M. Morin, ‘British Women Travellers and Constructions of Racial Difference across the Nineteenth-Century American West’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series 23, no. 3 (1998), 311–30. 63. See for example Lilja Mareike Sautter, ‘Femininity and community at home and away: shipboard diaries by single women emigrants to New Zealand’, Victorian Literature and Culture 43 (2015), 305–16. Other work which draws on travelogues or shipboard diaries includes Seed, ‘Nineteenth-­century travel writing; Parsons, ‘Women travellers and the spectacle of modernity’; Jeanne-Marie Warzesk, ‘Mapping the unknown: Gendered spaces and the oriental other in travelogues of Egypt by U.S. women, 1854–1914’, History and Anthropology 13, No. 4 (2002), 301–17; Jonathan Stafford, ‘Home on the waves: domesticity and discomfort aboard the overland route steamship, 1842–1862’, Mobilities 14, no. 5 (2019), 578–95. 64. Some account of our Voyage in the SS India May & June 1907 from Australia to Ireland, 1907, LPAAU. 65. Account of the Voyage of the Sisters from St Mary’s [Dominican] Convent (1867). 66. Anon. [the Sisters of Mercy, Manchester, New Hampshire], Reverend Mother M.  Xavier Warde: Foundress of the Order of Mercy in the United States (Boston: Marlier and Co., 1902), 97. 67. Annals of Loreto Abbey Toronto, 3/15/3/21, IBVMCPA. 68. Diary of Bridie Moore, 1894. The travels of nuns are discussed in Deirdre Raftery, ‘Teaching Sisters and transnational networks: recruitment and education expansion in the long nineteenth century’, History of Education 44, no. 6 (2015), 725–26.

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69. Mother Bernard Gorman, A Voyage via Panama, M3.1–3, Archives of the Marist Sisters, Province of Australia (hereafter AMSPAU). 70. Diary of Bridie Moore, 1894. 71. Ibid. 72. These albums have been digitised in a collaborative project by Deirdre Raftery and UCD Digital Library and are available on https://doi. org/10.7925/drs1.ucdlib_262000. 73. This kind of exchange is discussed in 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), passim.

CHAPTER 4

Founding and Teaching: Education Provision by Irish Nuns in the Nineteenth-Century Anglophone World

‘No bishop … No welcome … No convent … No school.’ Joan Lickteig PBVM, Tending the Light, 2011

Founding Narratives While Irish women religious may have had to rely on invitations from bishops in order to make overseas foundations, accepting those invitations gave many of them both autonomy and influence. Just as the Frenchwoman Mother Anne-Marie Javouhey ‘claimed power that was unavailable to her otherwise’ by making foundations in French Guiana,1 so too did Irish women religious claim control of their expansion projects, especially in Canada, Australia and America. Nuns who were particularly gifted at managing building projects, such as Mother John Byrne in Australia, Mother Teresa Dease in Canada, and Mother Frances Warde in the US, demonstrated considerable ability with the economics and practicalities of expanding the reach of their congregations.2 Retaining ownership of properties and land and managing the assets that they accrued from donations, dowries and investments were crucial if they were to have some independence from bishops, many of whom interfered in their initiatives. This kind of tenacity did not come easily to most women religious, however. The greatest challenges that they encountered were physical: often they found that inadequate school buildings and convents were awaiting © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Raftery, Irish Nuns and Education in the Anglophone World, Global Histories of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46201-6_4

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them when they arrived at their new missions; they struggled to adapt to the climate; and they succumbed to contagious diseases. Sources suggest that the foundations that survived and thrived often had the support of networks of wealthy Catholic immigrant families. In the early years, their schools were staffed with young Irish nuns who had themselves benefitted from a solid education before they had ever embarked on religious life. These foundations were also supported by the invisible labour of the lay sisters who ran the kitchens, sewed, scrubbed, tended poultry and grew crops. In convent Annals, the ‘founding narrative’ that records the establishment of new convents usually champions a supportive bishop and one or two strong Mother Superiors. That narrative is, however, incomplete. As will be seen in this chapter, the wider social context, and the abilities and diligence of the teaching sisters and lay sisters, were crucial to the day-to-day success of new convents and their schools.

Arriving A group of four Presentation sisters made their way from County Kilkenny to Iowa in 1874.3 Their Superior, Mother Vincent Hennessy, was a cousin of the bishop in Dubuque who had issued the invitation, and a warm welcome could have been expected. Their arrival in Iowa was recorded by a Presentation nun with faint irony: Bishop visits foreign country. Bishop calls at Motherhouse. Bishop requests sisters. Bishop promises shelter and amenities. Bishop returns home. Sisters volunteer. Sisters travel to America. Sisters arrive. Sisters seek shelter. No bishop. No welcome. No convent. No school.4

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The four Irishwomen were given temporary accommodation by the Visitation nuns, and eventually a convent was built for them by Bishop John Hennessy. The Loreto nuns, who arrived in Toronto in 1847, were similarly dismayed to find that no house had been prepared as a convent by the bishop, Dr Michael Power. He had also neglected to send anyone to meet them when they arrived in the city, and they had to make their own way to his residence only to find that he was away ministering at fever hospitals. When the Presentations first travelled from Galway to Newfoundland, they were equally concerned to find that, though Bishop Fleming had made many promises to their Galway Mother Superior, they were homeless. A tavern called ‘The Rising Sun’, attached to a slaughterhouse, was eventually prepared for them as a temporary convent.5 Archbishop Purcell in Cincinnati had also promised a convent to the Sisters of Mercy who arrived from Kinsale at his request in 1858; the house he provided for them was ‘a deplorable sight of neglect and filth’.6 The bishops who failed to prepare for the arrival of colonies of nuns had selfishly overlooked the basic needs of these women. They were already struggling with the social context in which they operated, and they persuaded nuns to join them in the hope that the women would ameliorate the situation by running schools and hospitals. But bringing nuns out from Ireland placed the women in danger, and precipitated the deaths of many of them. In Canada, the timing of the arrival of the Irish Loreto nuns could not have been worse. The influx of Irish immigrants in the first half of the nineteenth century had created a pressing need for Catholic parish priests, and nuns to run schools. The mass emigration from Ireland that took place during the Irish Famine meant that thousands of poorer Catholics arrived in British North America. Lacking in skills and education, many of them relied on charity; they also suffered from the diseases and malnutrition that accompanied dire poverty. Dr Michael Power, first bishop of Toronto, was the son of two Irish immigrants. He had brought French Jesuits to the city, and established confraternities and sodalities to help harness the support of those Catholics who were well-educated, and in some cases wealthy. By bringing the Loreto nuns from Ireland in 1847, he aimed at providing Toronto with women who could teach in the parish schools and set up convent schools for the middle ranks. If Dr Power were to successfully build an ultramontane Church in his city, then the education of the poor and the middle classes was necessary to bring about order and reform. But the bishop was somewhat economical in his advice to the Loreto nuns who agreed to leave their Dublin convent. The ‘free schools’

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that they would run would not provide them with any income, so a proposed boarding school would be their source of money. Power vaguely indicated that while the ‘Irish in Toronto could not afford to pay much for the education of their daughters’, the boarding school might attract anything from twenty to fifty pupils.7 Perhaps because he was so preoccupied with the Canadian typhus epidemic, the bishop neglected to give the Loreto nuns practical advice about the cold weather into which they would arrive. The freezing conditions, and the inadequate footwear that they brought from Ireland, resulted in one nun getting gangrene of the foot and dying a painful death. Nor were the women warned that Toronto was in the grip of the epidemic.8 Arriving in Canada in what would become known as Black ’47, the nuns were part of some 38,000 Irish that had travelled from Ireland at a time when typhus fever was spread easily on passenger ships, and was carried ashore by unsuspecting victims who were not yet showing symptoms. The close living conditions on ships also facilitated the easy transmission of other airborne diseases, including tuberculosis (TB). The party of Loreto nuns that arrived in Toronto on 16 September were not infected by typhus, but several later died from TB. Bishop Power, who ministered to immigrants at the ‘fever sheds’ at John Street and King Street, was one of the many who contracted typhus. He took ill and died within two weeks of the nuns’ arrival in Canada. Left without the support of the Irish bishop, they soon found themselves having to answer to his successor, Dr Armand François Marie de Charbonnel, who was unpopular with the Irish, and unsympathetic towards the Loreto nuns. The social context into which the Presentations had arrived in Newfoundland was equally chaotic. Like Power, Bishop Fleming was trying to build his Church by eradicating superstition, bad behaviour and drunkenness, and encouraging self-discipline, religious observance and education. A view common to ultramontane Irish bishops was that women religious should play a central role in educating girls to be good Catholic mothers, who would exert a strong social influence over their children and husbands. Dr Fleming believed that ‘virtue and religion’ should be ‘instilled into the little ones at their mother’s knee’.9 Visiting Archbishop Daniel Murray in Ireland in 1833, he spoke of his hope that ‘some ladies of the Presentation Convent of Galway [would] break asunder every worldly tie’ to accompany him to Newfoundland to educate ‘hundreds of poor children … [who were] in danger of being lost to religion, to their parents, to themselves and to God’.53 At that point, Fleming indicated

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that he had £1500 to spend on building a convent and schools, and promised that if nuns could be sent to Newfoundland then he would ‘build a suitable dwelling house with a school … and that until such an establishment would be ready … a comfortable dwelling should be provided’ for the Sisters.10 While Fleming was assiduous in accompanying the party of nuns all the way from Galway to Newfoundland, he did not manage to get the Catholics of St John’s to prepare a proper convent for them. However, he soon saw that the temporary dwelling beside a slaughterhouse that had been provided was not at all suitable for the women. On seeing a cow being driven through the convent to reach the slaughter yards, the bishop decided that he needed to move the nuns to better premises. The nuns moved to another rented property, where they remained until a convent was finally built a decade later. The first Presentations to go to America arrived in San Francisco in 1854, and found that their temporary convent was a ‘shantie’ with a ‘small yard twenty foot square’.11 Another colony of Presentations went to the Dakotas, at the invitation of Bishop Martin Marty who visited Ireland in 1879, calling at the convent at George’s Hill in Dublin. There he persuaded Mother John Hughes to return to America with him. She recruited her own sister, Mother Agnes Hughes of the Presentation Convent in Doneraile, County Cork, and was also joined by Sr Teresa Challoner, of the Presentation Convent in Manchester. In September 1880, the women finally arrived in Yankton, South Dakota and made their way by steamboat up the Missouri River to a town called Wheeler. There they found that their first convent was ‘a small sod-and-stone building, far from the nearest railway station … [with] no furniture’.12 While many ‘arrival narratives’ are a catalogue of hardship, there were some groups of nuns for whom preparations had been made. When the Loreto nuns arrived in Calcutta in 1841, at the invitation of Bishop Carew, they were given an exceptionally grand welcome as they sailed up the River Hooghly: Long before the appointed time the bank of the river was crowded with anxious spectators, rich and poor, European, East Indian and Indian, each more desirous than the other to witness the novelty of the first visit of nuns to the shores of Bengal. … The Strand was also crowded with the gentry in their conveyances, among them the Governor General Lord Auckland’s two carriages, with His Lordship’s sisters, the Honourable Misses Eden, and his suite. There was a large retinue of policemen and constables, but the con-

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course was so great that they in vain endeavoured to keep a clear passage. … The Sisters entered the carriages prepared for them and proceeded to the Cathedral which was specially illuminated for the occasion. Here they were received by Dr Carew in his pontifical robes.13

At the cathedral, Dr Carew preached a sermon about what the Loreto nuns would achieve in his diocese, anticipating their success as educators. A group of Protestant women, known as the ‘Ladies of the Convent Committee’, had been tasked with preparing a convent for the nuns.14 Situated on Middleton Row, the house had been so beautifully furnished that the Superior, Mother Delphine Harte, was somewhat alarmed that their new home was not humble enough for a convent. The Loreto group who arrived in Cadiz in 1852 was also given a fine house, with ‘terraces and sufficient space to take exercise in the open air’.15 Similarly, those who landed at Port Louis to make a Loreto foundation in Mauritius were given ‘the largest [house] in the town’.16 The fact that the Loreto nuns were a branch of the ‘English Ladies’, and were known to teach the upper ranks, may have accounted to some degree for the fact that they were often given such splendid welcomes. The presence of Protestants on hospitality committees that greeted them when they arrived in British colonies was not unusual. For example, in India Loreto schools welcomed British and Anglo-Indian families who did not want to send their daughters home to England for their education.17 A convent education was very attractive to such families, even if it did mean that their daughters were taught by Catholics. Dr Anastasius Hartmann, Bishop of Bombay, declared that both Catholic and Protestant gentry were ‘impressed’ with the nuns.18 As their reputation spread, they were soon teaching the daughters of ‘some of the highest Protestants’.19 And there were also reciprocal benefits: the nuns in Calcutta were offered the attention of a ‘Protestant army doctor’, who was more than happy to have his daughter educated by them in exchange for medical attention.20 This kind of local support made it easier for Irish nuns to settle into the project of opening schools. Congregations that arrived from Ireland were also given support by their own kinship and religious networks, without which some groups would simply not have survived. The help offered by other congregations of nuns was usually practical, such as temporary accommodation or gifts of books. Mother Teresa Dease wrote from Toronto to Ireland in 1857 to tell the Irish motherhouse about the ‘bond of friendship between us and the good Ursulines of Quebec, they really seem as much interested in our

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welfare as their own … we may justly regard them as benefactors and true Sisters’.21 Dease was also helped by Samuel Lynn in Toronto, who gave the nuns a temporary home when they arrived in Canada and found that there was no convent ready for them. His daughter Charlotte entered the congregation (becoming Mother Ignatia) in 1851. The Sisters of Mercy who arrived in Pittsburgh in 1843, similarly benefitted from the generosity of ‘a wealthy resident who in 1844, gave the Bishop one hundred and ten acres of land to be used as a site for a boarding-school for young ladies … [as] there was no such institution for Catholics in all Pennsylvania at that time’.22 Wealthy lay women were also helpful to nuns, though their contributions have been overlooked while the support of lay men and bishops has often been noted.23 Supporting new convents was a way for philanthropic women to demonstrate their largesse, and it was also a chance to be useful. Some of the records of contributions made by supportive women show that they were thinking carefully about the practical needs of newly arrived nuns—arguably far more so than many bishops. In Australia, Mother Gonzaga Barry and her nuns were given the use of a carriage owned by the Walsh family when they commenced a foundation in Sydney in 1892. Mrs Walsh continued to send useful gifts to the convent, including blankets, sheets, and ‘a real grand cow’.24 When the congregation opened a second Canadian convent in Stratford, they were given temporary accommodation at ‘the home of one of the most prominent Catholics, Mrs Corcoran’ who also gave them the use of her carriage.25 As the Sisters of Mercy expanded in America, they relied on supportive women like Emily Harper and her wealthy mother, Mrs Goodloe Harper. The Harpers helped to bring the congregation to Rhode Island by giving the nuns a house in Newport.26 Unsurprisingly, several of the families who helped nuns to establish schools in nineteenth-century America were Irish Catholics. In Missouri, for example, the wealthy Mullanphy family championed the efforts of the Society of the Sacred Heart. John Mullanphy had emigrated from County Fermanagh in 1792, becoming a very successful merchant in the Mississippi Valley. Mullanphy offered the nuns ‘a brick house, pleasantly situated … [and] $1000 to cover the initial expenses’.27 In India, some of the building work at the Loreto Convent in Calcutta, in 1842, was funded by ‘[an] Irish lady, Mrs Prendergast’.28 Other support came from people who belonged to influential confessional networks. The Indian mission of the

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Loreto nuns benefitted from the family of a papal count, John Lackersteen, recording in their Annals: It is a pleasing duty for us, especially to record, with deepest thanks, the unlimited generosity and devoted services of the respected family of Count John Lackersteen who, with his brothers, Chevaliers Robert and William Lackersteen, have ever proved themselves the finest supports of religion in Calcutta … they gave a large portion of their princely fortune for the purchase of our convent and have since been amongst the most sincere friends. … The Jesuits were among their most steadfast friends.29

Similarly, the Loreto foundations in Cadiz benefitted considerably from women such as Christina Gordon y Prendergast and Teresa Magawly, whose networks were not only elite, but were also connected to old Catholic Irish dynasties. Christina Gordon, whose family had extensive vineyards in Cadiz, had been educated with Teresa Ball in York and remained a close friend thereafter. She married José Prendergast y Sweetman and sent her daughters and grand-daughters to Dublin to be educated at Loreto Abbey, when it was founded by Ball.30 Her Cadiz network was available to the Loreto nuns when they arrived in Cadiz, and she even attested to the excellence of Loreto education to Isabella II. Teresa Magawly (Condesa de Calry) was similarly supportive. Descended from a Jacobite family from Westmeath, Teresa Magawly shared social and confessional networks with Mother Teresa Ball’s family.31 She also had a school in Cadiz, the Colegio de San José, which she gave to Ball when she was looking for convent premises in Cadiz.32 Not all of the Irish hospitality came from elite Catholics; in July 1867, the Irish Dominicans who arrived in Sydney were hosted by Mrs Casey who ‘showed [them] she was more Irish than the Irish themselves’.33 They continued their journey to their convent in Maitland, to be greeted by crowds of local people ‘from the good old land’, who welcomed them by kissing their hands and blessing them.34 ‘Every place we went there were crowds at the doors. Many of them dipped down to the ground as we passed’, they recorded.35 Nuns were also welcomed by networks of past pupils or ‘old children’. In Richmond, Melbourne, the Faithful Companions of Jesus who arrived in 1882 were greeted by ‘Mrs Ryan … an old child of Laurel Hill [Convent, Limerick]’, who was married to a local doctor. The nuns recorded: ‘She said to one of us whom she had known at Laurel Hill: “Mother, if one of

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you but scratch your finger, send for my husband. He will be to you another myself.”’36 Even with the support of enthusiastic Catholics and kinship networks, the nuns who arrived from Ireland rarely had a school building ready for them on arrival. Just as they had to live in temporary convents at the outset, they also had to teach in whatever building could be made ready very quickly. The speed with which they opened schools is therefore noteworthy; irrespective of the country to which they had been sent, they were usually at work in the classroom within weeks—or even days—of their arrival. The Galway Presentations who arrived in Newfoundland on 21 September 1833 enrolled 450 children when they opened their first school exactly four weeks later in a disused tavern.37 Though the Sisters of Mercy who arrived in Cincinnati in 1858 had no proper convent, within three months they had 200 ‘grown girls’ attending their night school, and eighty ‘infant boys’ in the day school.38 In Dubuque, Iowa, numbers were smaller when the Presentations started a school on 5 February 1875, having arrived from County Kilkenny on 7 January. The Superior, Mother Vincent Hennessy, ‘presented their teacher, Sister Alice Howley to a group of 20–30 eager children assembled in the bare parlor of the convent’, and lessons began. Exactly two years later, Mother Vincent responded to a request for a school in Ackley, Iowa; it opened within weeks of the arrival of the nuns, ‘with 163 pupils enrolled the first day’.39 On 15 August 1878, the Loreto nuns arrived in Stratford, Ontario. On 2 September they opened a day school in ‘a rented house which offered very poor accommodation being unfurnished’.40 The girls’ classroom had 106 pupils, while seventy boys were squeezed into the second classroom, and the nuns who taught them ‘had scarcely room to sit down’.41 In Melbourne, the Faithful Companions of Jesus sailed into Hobson’s Bay on 1 June 1888, and opened a parish school for 400 children eleven days later. The Presentations in Queensland lived in a cottage for two years, until their convent was ready in 1902; however, they managed to open a school on arrival there in February 1900. In a church made from corrugated iron, they accepted eighty-nine pupils on the first day of enrolment, and ‘within a few weeks this had increased to 150’.42 In conditions that were often far from ideal, teaching commenced. When running free parish schools, with large numbers of pupils, nuns were overseen by clergy who were often demanding and unsympathetic. In their own private ‘academies’ and fee-charging schools, conditions were usually good and pupil numbers were much

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smaller. But, whether working in a free day school or an elite boarding school, all of them had to prepare themselves for their mission: to teach.

Teaching When Loreto nuns left Ireland to teach in the British colonies, the instruction concerning pedagogy was simple: ‘teach from your abundance’, their Superiors advised. Loreto nuns, like most of those who left Ireland in the nineteenth century to work in education, had very little formal teacher training, and few had qualifications. They simply taught what they had learned when they were schoolgirls. The expectation that Loreto nuns had received an ‘abundance’ of knowledge when they were pupils was not ill-­ founded; many had been educated in Loreto schools in Ireland, where academic standards were high, and music was very well taught. Other orders also sent out postulants and nuns that had been their own pupils: the Sisters of St Joseph of Cluny, the Marists, the Brigidines, the Society of the Sacred Heart, the Dominicans, the Faithful Companions of Jesus and the Ursulines all educated Irish girls who later joined them, and then went to teach overseas. Research indicates that while many of the Presentation and Mercy nuns who went overseas had been educated in their own schools, they also recruited and sent out women who had been educated within the free, state-supported national school system. Indeed, as will be seen, Presentation and Mercy primary schools were often formally affiliated to the state system. These convent national schools were unable to give time to ‘accomplishments’, such as French, music and painting, that were always offered in fee-charging convent schools. On the other hand, they followed a highly coordinated national curriculum that emphasised ‘literary instruction’: reading, writing, arithmetic, geography and history. This solid education, which could also include an apprentice-­ style training in teaching methods, was a good grounding for girls who entered teaching orders. Girls who had no dowry, but a sound national school education, were very useful additions to any colony of postulants and nuns who were heading overseas. By scrutinising what women religious learned when they were schoolgirls, it is possible to get insight into the influences that helped to form them as teachers, and the knowledge that they carried with them when they left Ireland. Irish-born nuns who were working in education by the mid-nineteenth century had been at school between the 1820s and 1840s. At that point, there were only a handful of convent schools in Ireland. The fee-charging

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schools founded by the Dominican, Ursuline and Loreto congregations, had developed a reputation for high-quality schooling, with an emphasis on music, French, and the study of English literature and history.43 These convents were seed beds for growing vocations among the daughters of elite Catholic families. For example, Mother Xavier Murphy, Superior at the Sacred Heart Convent in Grand Coteau in 1825, had been educated in Cork by the Ursulines, before entering the Society of the Sacred Heart in Paris, in 1820. The influence of these cosmopolitan orders on shaping pupils who later entered religious life was significant. They not only prepared girls to enter their own convents as teaching sisters, but also educated girls who were amongst the earliest members of other congregations that spread rapidly across Ireland from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Other early foundations, such as South Presentation Convent in Cork (1776) that taught poor girls, were equally rooted in education practices and traditions that came from continental Europe. Several nuns at South Presentation Convent had been educated by the French Ursulines. In turn, Cork Presentations would educate girls who entered very different congregations; for example, past pupils of the Presentation Convent in Youghal, County Cork, entered a wide range of congregations including the Sisters of Mercy, the Dominicans, the Sisters of Charity, and the Loreto congregation. Additionally, well into the mid-nineteenth century, some Catholic families continued to send their daughters out of the country to be educated— a practice that had been more common during the penal period when Catholics were debarred by law from owning or running schools in Ireland.44 As noted earlier, Mother Teresa Ball, Loreto foundress, had been sent to board at the Bar Convent in York in 1803. Several Irishwomen who entered the Society of the Sacred Heart were educated in elite English schools in the mid-nineteenth century. These included Kathleen Heathcote and Sarah Hartigan who attended the Convent of the Holy Sepulchre (New Hall) in England; Margaret Dunne who attended St Leonard’s and the Sacred Heart Convent in Roehampton; and Elizabeth Ennis who boarded at the Bar Convent, York.45 Other wealthy Catholics educated their daughters firstly in Ireland, and then sent them to the continent to be ‘finished’. Born in 1838 in Cork, Dora Ashlin was at school with the Loreto nuns in Dalkey, County Dublin, before being sent to Liège; she entered the Society of the Sacred Heart in 1868. Several other women who entered the Society of the Sacred Heart in the nineteenth century were similarly educated: Annabella Power was at school with both the

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Loreto and Ursuline nuns in Ireland, and was then sent to boarding school in Marmoutier; Catherine Cavanagh was educated by the Dominicans in Drogheda in the 1850s, before going to Paris for her secondary schooling; Longford-born Mary Egan was also Dominican educated, before going to the Dames Anglaises (IBVM) in Bavaria and, as noted earlier, the four Bodkin sisters were educated by governesses at home and then, variously, at boarding school in Roehampton, Dooreselle and Bruges.46 Nuns who had enjoyed an elite education, and indeed those who were schooled by nuns whose education had been cosmopolitan, placed a value on instilling good manners and decorum into their pupils in their schools in Ireland. But an education in la politesse was only part of what these nuns provided. Their schools developed reputations for excellence in choral and instrumental music, and school orchestras were to be found in even the most modest boarding schools for the middle ranks. In elite boarding schools, girls were required to use French throughout the school day, and the importance of drama and English literature was emphasised. Archbishop Paul Cullen, who had many nieces and cousins who became nuns, would have been gratified by a letter from the young Mary Cullen, who was a boarder at the Ursuline Convent in Waterford: We have just completed a course of lectures on botany and architecture which I found very interesting particularly the former. … I am learning music, singing, drawing, French and the general course of English education. I have not as yet command of Italian but I expect to commence it very soon when I become more accustomed to the lessons which are said here. … A French young lady came here about a month ago. She could not understand one word of English. The French will be a great advantage to the class as we are allowed to speak nothing else during the day.47

Like the Ursulines, the Dominican and Loreto nuns spoke French to their pupils and provided a musical education. They also taught a broad range of subjects. From 1789, the Dominican Convent in Cabra, Dublin, provided lessons in ‘Writing, Accounts, Arithmetic, Geography and use of the Globes’, and a ‘Dancing Master was also engaged’.48 At Loreto Abbey, in Dublin, the curriculum included French language and literature, and the Superior, Mother Teresa Ball, sent some of her nuns to France to improve their spoken French. She also recruited a novice from another foundation, who could offer ‘French or Italian or even Spanish’, and was delighted to note by 1851 that Loreto pupils demonstrate ‘the same facility in speaking

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French as English’.49 The Society of the Sacred Heart, which opened several schools in Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century, including Mount Anville Convent in Dublin, was equally keen to have teaching sisters with a good education (see Fig. 4.1). They therefore questioned potential novices closely about their education, asking ‘what languages do you know? … What History have you studied? … What have you learnt of Mathematics and Experimental Science? Have you any experience in teaching?’50 The nuns at Mount Anville were so keen to get the pupils to speak French, that in 1883 they rewarded its use during Lent, noting with satisfaction: ‘During this holy season the children have undertaken to speak French at all times except at English class. Their fidelity is to be rewarded every

Fig. 4.1  Society of the Sacred Heart Convent, Mount Anville, Dublin, c.1866 (By kind permission of the Society of the Sacred Heart Archives, Dublin)

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evening by a penny or a halfpenny, the money will be sent to Mrs Power Lalor who has organised a fund for the relief of the poor children of Donegal.’51 The academic strengths of some of the elite convent boarding schools became more obvious from 1878, with the passing of the Intermediate Education (Ireland) Act, which allowed girls to compete in the same second-­level examinations as boys. The successful performance of schools was recorded in newspapers and, as girls from these schools began to progress to university degrees, it became clear that some convent schools were particularly strong in academic subjects.52 Pupils who attended Loreto, Ursuline and Dominican schools had regular success in the examinations, while the Faithful Companions of Jesus and the Sisters of St Louis were also noted for providing academic schooling. For example, the Annual Report of the Intermediate Education Board (1894) showed that the Loreto schools in Dublin, Kilkenny and Wexford, together with the Dominican schools in Dublin, the Ursuline schools in Sligo and Cork and the St Louis convent in Monaghan, were the leading Catholic academic schools for girls.53 Unsurprisingly then, nuns who had been schooled in elite boarding schools were well placed to lead overseas foundations. Born in 1856, Mother Helena Carroll had been educated by the Faithful Companions of Jesus, at their boarding school in Limerick, before entering the congregation in 1875; she went to Melbourne in 1882 and became Headmistress of St Ignatius Girls’ School in 1894. ‘Give Mother Helena a book on Chinese and in half an hour she would be teaching Chinese’, one past pupil said. ‘She taught Latin, French, Italian, German, Mathematics and Botany—though not at the same time. She also taught English—including Grammar—Sewing and Fine Needlework.’54 The Faithful Companions of Jesus had also educated the young Limerick girl that would become the founding Superior of one of the Australian Presentation convents: Mother Mary Paul Mulquin, who established a foundation in Victoria, in 1873. An accomplished musician, Mother Mary Paul was also a linguist and spoke French and Italian fluently. On her way to Australia, she wasted no time on board the Great Britain, and set about passing on her knowledge of French and Music to two young Presentation aspirants who travelled with her.55 Intergenerational exchange between nuns, aspirants and novices provided an informal but crucial form of teacher education, and was the means whereby those educated at elite convents could pass on their knowledge to other young women who had not attended such schools.

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Upon opening a foundation in Victoria, Mother Paul insisted that the social graces she had learned as a pupil in Limerick should be passed on to the Australian pupils: ‘the noiseless opening and closing of doors, the proper way to fold a letter, the courteous inclination of pupils when passing their teachers, the keeping of appointments or a timely excuse for failure, the immediate expression of gratitude for favours’.56 Her methodology was informal: ‘a talk on prayer, a few minutes’ French conversation, a hymn, an instruction on etiquette, a song, a writing lesson’.57 A past pupil recalled that Mother Paul imparted learning ‘with the informality of a mother in a private home’.58 She also developed the social graces of her pupils and ‘delighted in such events as soirees … usually held from 8pm until 9pm., [which were] as much a training ground as a diversion. Appropriate dress, the art of conversation, poise, good taste—indeed all the social graces were judged according to accepted standards.’59 Other ‘soirees’ and entertainments at convent schools included concerts, plays and pageants. ‘In the evening a French play was acted in the school by the 3rd division of French’, the Mount Anville convent annalist recorded on Easter Sunday, 1875.60 The performance of tableaux vivants portraying biblical scenes was also popular in schools.61 And, importantly, boarders observed religious festivals and feast days. As Mary Cullen continued in her letter to her uncle: ‘We have very nice processions sometimes on our Blessed Mother’s feasts and the principal feasts of the year. On the feast of the nativity of the Blessed Virgin we had a very nice one at which we walked round the grounds followed by the religious and our Mother. The latter carried an image of the Blessed Virgin. A silk canopy was held over her supported by four young ladies. The cross was borne by a young lady in a scarlet cloak and two young ladies carried lamps on high poles.’62 All of these practices gave convent schools a certain cachet, and it was precisely this cachet that was desired by Irish bishops who urged Irish nuns to make foundations in parts of the Anglophone world where Irish and European emigrants had settled. The Loreto nuns reproduced such practices in their convent schools in India, Australia and Canada. Within days of their arrival in Calcutta in 1841, the Bengal Catholic Herald announced that the Irish nuns would be educating ‘young ladies’ in dancing, drawing, grammar, geography, history, the use of globes, French and ‘every branch of Useful and Ornamental Needlework’.63 And the concerts and entertainments familiar to the Irish nuns would soon be reproduced by their pupils.

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The Sisters of Mercy were also expected to reproduce genteel European educational practices in their fee-charging schools in America. For this reason, they tried to recruit young Irishwomen who had experienced a cosmopolitan kind of convent schooling. When Mother Frances Warde was expanding elite education in Pittsburgh, she went to Ireland in August 1845 to ‘procure some good postulants for the American Mission. … Miss O’Gorman and Miss Kelly, graduates of the Ursuline Convent in Cork and three professed sisters.’64 These young women could reproduce the kind of convent accomplishments that were almost as important as the delivery of the curriculum. However, while the past pupils of elite Irish schools were desirable as teaching sisters, they were not infinite in number. The past pupils of convent national schools were not only more numerous, but were also well-­ educated; these young women would prove invaluable in overseas schools. They drew on their own experience of national schooling, not only for the content of their lessons but also for teaching methodologies, and were very much ‘formed’ in the mould of the system in which they had been educated. Established under the National Education Board in 1831, the system was designed by Lord Stanley, the Chief Secretary to Ireland, who wrote to the Lord Lieutenant outlining a plan for the government of Earl Grey, regarding a system of national education for Ireland. This education plan became known as the Stanley Letter.65 The establishment of a system of state-supported national schools was in part a response to the fact that elementary education was being provided in an ad-hoc fashion, by voluntary Protestant and Catholic groups, while some children were attending ‘pay schools’ run as private ventures by masters or mistresses. Though Protestant societies, such as the Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor of Ireland (known as the Kildare Place Society) and the Association for Discountenancing Vice, were in receipt of government support, they were criticised for proselytising, and were distrusted by Catholics.66 Many families therefore continued to favour the ‘pay schools’ that had survived the penal period, having been set up illegally to cater for Catholics. Though these schools were not in receipt of government grants, by 1824 this unofficial system of schooling accounted for 10,096 of the 11,823 schools that existed.67 Elementary schooling was also offered to Catholics by religious orders such as the Christian Brothers and the Presentation Sisters in their ‘poor schools’ or ‘free schools’, but they could by no means cater for the entire Catholic population in the 1830s. The lack of a coherent form of elementary schooling in Ireland impelled Lord

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Stanley to propose ‘a combined literary and separate religious education … for the poorer classes of the community’ and ‘to unite in one system children of different creeds’.68 A board of Commissioners of National Education was established, with representation from the Catholic church, the Established (Protestant) church and the Presbyterian church, and this board had control over the funding to be supplied annually and the books that were to be used in all national schools. To achieve the aim of a non-­ denominational form of education, Stanley proposed that national schools should offer ‘literary’ instruction on five days of the week, while all religious instruction should take place separately, either after school or on the remaining two days of the week. The principle of non-denominational education proved controversial in its early decades, as the various churches were initially hostile to the system. However, the Catholic church generally adopted a benign approach, recognising that free education would greatly contribute to an improvement in literacy amongst the Catholic majority. Many religious congregations chose to connect their ‘poor schools’ with the national system. By 1868, 133 of the 229 convent schools in Ireland were affiliated to the National Board of Education. An affiliation meant that their schools could benefit from supplies of books and materials. Additionally, payments were made to convent national schools on a capitation basis, but salaries were not paid to individual teaching sisters as they were not willing to become part of the teacher classification system which involved subjecting themselves to inspections and examining by male inspectors. The cheap cost of the labour of nuns meant that they were an attractive solution to the National Board of Education, as it sought to provide teachers for the growing number of national schools. The disadvantage for congregations was that the national system was non-­ denominational, and nuns were not supposed to give religious instruction during the school day. The two congregations that had the largest presence in delivering ‘poor’ schooling were the Sisters of Mercy and the Presentations. The Sisters of Mercy decided to connect their schools with the national system in 1839, though they continued to also run some fee-charging day schools, and boarding schools. While various Presentation free schools became connected to the national system at different times, the congregation affiliated twenty-eight schools during the 1830s. Affiliation was not a smooth process for nuns: they were expected to remove religious iconography from their convent national schools, and were not supposed to say prayers

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with the pupils. However, the religious basis of Catholic education was integral to the work of teaching congregations; therefore, they had to observe their ethos while somehow avoiding the censure of inspectors. One of the ways that they got around the regulations was by concealing religious iconography inside a cupboard that could be opened to reveal the icon or statue, if there was no danger of an inspection taking place. They also favoured ‘silent prayer’, as this could not be proven to take place at all. In the 1840s, following a relaxation in the regulations concerning religious instruction, nuns could indicate the hours of religious instruction via a notice that was hung in classrooms. By the middle of the century, convent national schools were very clearly denominational in character, and provided an alternative form of free schooling to Catholic families who did not want to send their children to non-denominational schools, or to the various schools run by Protestant charities. By 1868, there were 185,602 girls attending national schools. They were provided with a course of instruction that included reading, writing, arithmetic, grammar, dictation, geography and needlework (sewing, knitting and straw plaiting). The Commissioners of National Education published a textbook specifically for the instruction of girls. The Reading Book for Use of Female Schools (1850) contained prose and verse extracts that communicated the values that were deemed important for girls.69 The Reading Book taught girls to be dutiful, submissive, caring and gentle. Cleanliness and obedience were emphasised and important: ‘cleanliness … is a mark of politeness … as it bears an analogy to purity of mind’, the Reading Book advised. Further books for girls followed: the Girls Reading Book for the Use of Schools (1864) and the Manual for Needlework for Use in National Schools (1869) gave considerable practical guidance to girls, and contained useful sewing patterns.70 By the end of the century, laundry work was a school subject for girls at national schools, and ‘hygiene’ was part of the course in domestic economy. This kind of education was invaluable to girls who emigrated, especially during and after the Irish Famine— including those who entered convents as both choir and lay sisters.71 It was also crucial for those who stayed at home and needed to earn a living. Indeed, research has shown that girls made better use of their national schooling than boys. They overtook boys in school attendance by 1880, and stayed in school longer. They were also less likely to play truant, and they reached higher standards: ‘The superior performance of girls reflected … their possibly stronger desire to better themselves. … Those who stayed at National School usually hoped to become monitors and

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eventually National teachers, a profession dominated by women.’72 For example, fifty-three pupils who attended Rahoon Female Convent National School in Galway had become teachers with the National Board by 1864, and a further seven became governesses.73 The newly emerging opportunity to train as a ‘monitor’ or an apprentice teacher would mean that many girls who entered religious orders, did so having had a sound education and a useful preparation for teaching. The National Education Board established model schools, where pupils could serve as pupil-teachers, before continuing on for formal teacher training.74 Other national schools that were not classed as model schools also developed a system whereby older pupils could train to become classroom monitors, teaching the younger pupils by doing drills and repetitions of lessons. They drew on the ‘Lancastrian system’, an approach developed in England by Joseph Lancaster in the early nineteenth century, that promoted the use of monitors or pupil-teachers as an economical way of educating large numbers of children, while also training older pupils to become teachers. Monitors could be used ‘to teach a spelling lesson, a lesson on tables, to teach the alphabet … and other minor duties’.75 Additionally, monitors were given training in their free time, when experienced teachers and nuns showed them how to ‘frame questions’, discipline pupils and keep order in class. The Lancastrian system was introduced in Ireland by the Kildare Place Society, and was adapted and modified across the nineteenth century.76 It was the approach favoured by the Presentation Sisters, as it allowed them to manage large groups of children in their schools. Some of their national schools catered for several hundred children, and the nuns had to hire lay women to teach ‘industrial’ subjects such as needlework and lace-making. In addition to industrial subjects, their convent national schools taught the core curriculum (reading, writing, arithmetic, spelling, grammar and geography) and they also taught ‘Vocal Music and Drawing’. Their large classes were divided into groups of twelve pupils, with a monitor for each group, and their own Presentation Directory (1850) advised the use of reading, repetition and questioning.77 The Annals of the Presentation Convent Clondalkin indicate that this method of teaching reading was in use until around 1874. The Directory also advised on how to teach writing. Nuns were to play close attention to the pupils as they started to learn to write, and were to move around the classroom, observing the children carefully, so as to ensure that they held their pens correctly. Arithmetic was to be taught by commencing with instruction in the nine figures, and zero

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or naught. Once the pupils understood their numbers, they could begin to learn addition. Needlework was taught by the nuns through the use of examples. They showed firstly how to hem a piece of cloth, and then progressed to more difficult skills. Practice and repetition was the ‘method’ common to teaching all subjects. The Directory was used in every country in which the Presentations made a foundation, and contributed to standardising the experience of Presentation convent schooling and convent life. Additional teaching skills were developed in Presentation schools, via the hiring of the services of an ‘Organising Mistress’. This was an expert, selected from one of the best of the national schools, who went to other schools to give demonstrations. In Cork, Galway and Offaly, Presentation convents hired organising mistresses to improve the teaching skills of their nuns.78 Like the Presentations, the Sisters of Mercy also favoured the monitorial system. Their national schools were noted for giving a sound secular and religious education, while their teaching methods were described by inspectors as ‘intelligent and successful’.79 At the Mercy Convent National School in Kinsale, inspectors noted that ‘the highest classes are very smart at composition, history, elementary astronomy, physiology, and electricity’, adding that the girls were more impressive than some of ‘those ladies who attend the public lectures in Dublin and elsewhere’.80 Mother Vincent Whitty, who made the first Mercy foundation in Australia, brought the monitorial approach with her, having witnessed its success in national schools run by the Sisters of Mercy in Dublin. Whitty ‘learned to combine the pedagogical methods of the Presentation Sisters and of the Kildare Place Society, which resulted in a modified form of the Lancastrian system’.81 Her own professional education included ‘observing and participating in the work of the Dublin [Mercy] schools. The day began with twenty minutes of Christian doctrine, after which regular school work commenced, with occasional breaks for reflection or prayer.’82 Unusually for her time, Whitty completed her training and obtained her teacher’s certificate in 1843. Mother Austin Carroll, who brought the Sisters of Mercy to New England in 1856, had also been trained in the monitorial system. She had the added benefit of having trained at Clonmel Model School, which was run by the Board of Education, and had obtained her teacher’s certificate; Mother Carroll was therefore immersed in the content and teaching methods of the national system of education. These women were very well placed to lead education foundations overseas,

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having both experience and qualifications, and to reproduce what they had learned at school in Ireland. Because the national system was highly bureaucratic, it generated a substantial corpus of records. As a result, it is possible to get considerable insight into what girls learned in convent national schools, and how that learning was reproduced in other convent schools in Ireland and overseas. In 1864, a special report on convent national schools was prepared by the National Board, following an inspection that examined the adequacy of teaching and the performance of pupils. The Report on Convent Schools (1864) indicates that pupils in convent national schools were often taught by well-educated nuns who had attended elite schools. For example, the inspector who visited the Presentation Convent National School in Midleton remarked that the ‘ladies in charge of this school have been educated in the most respectable convents and private schools’ and had also been ‘trained up inside the convent in school management and class teaching by the older and more experienced members of the community’.83 At the Presentation Convent National School in Youghal, all nineteen teaching nuns were recorded as having been ‘educated at convent or private schools’.84 In Tullow, at the Brigidine Convent National School, the teaching nuns were found to be ‘most superior’, and the inspector added that the pupils were taught music by the same nun that taught ‘music to the daughters of the surrounding gentry of every denomination’.85 In Carlow, the inspector for the Mercy Convent National School found that all of the nuns had received ‘a superior, some of them the very highest, education. Most of them know French, Music and drawing; some [know] Italian and German.’86 The ability of many capable teaching sisters served to foster a teaching vocation in young girls. As early as 1839, the Mercy Convent National School in Carlow had produced eighty-seven national school teachers; it had also educated twenty-eight girls who became nuns, six of whom went to American foundations to teach.87 By 1864, fifteen past pupils of the Mercy National School in Fermoy had become national school teachers, and the school employed a further eleven girls to work as paid monitors.88 In Newtownsmith, on the north side of Galway city, where the Sisters of Mercy were educating 899 pupils in 1864, the inspector praised the excellent music and discipline, and noted that many of the pupils became teachers or governesses.89 Many more became nuns, entering the congregations that had educated them and reproducing the teaching methods and curricula with which they had become familiar. Like Mother Paul Mulquin in

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Australia, who ‘gave to her pupils what seemed essential in any given moment’, nuns who left Ireland to teach in convent schools relied on the knowledge that they carried with them.90 This became the ‘abundance’ from which they taught.

Notes 1. Sarah A. Curtis, Civilizing Habits: Women Missionaries and the Revival of French Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 261. 2. Mother Frances Warde stands out as a Superior whose leadership was very significant, in that she established the Sisters of Mercy in many parts of America such as Pittsburgh, Chicago, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Nebraska, Vermont, Maine, New Jersey and Philadelphia. Other significant early ‘leaders’ amongst the Irish Sisters of Mercy included Mary Agnes O’Connor in New York; Baptist Russell in San Francisco; Teresa Maher in Cincinnati; Teresa O’Farrell in Arkansas; Mary Agnes Healy and Teresa Perry in Connecticut. 3. The first group of Presentations to go to Iowa went from the Presentation Convent in Mooncoin, Co. Kilkenny, in 1874. The group comprised Mother Vincent Hennessy, her niece Kate Reide, Alice Howley, and Ellen Ahern. They left Mooncoin on 29 October, arriving in Dubuque on 13 November. 4. Joan Lickteig, Tending the Light: An Informal History of the Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Dubuque, Iowa, USA 1874–2008 (USA: PBVM, 2011), 41. Limerick-born John Hennessy (1825–1900) was appointed bishop of Dubuque in 1860; he visited Ireland several times to recruit nuns, priests and seminarians for his diocese. Hennessy was particularly dedicated to promoting Catholic schooling, by supplying sister teachers to parish schools. He was elevated to Archbishop in 1893. 5. See Mary James Dinn, Foundation of the Presentation Congregation in Newfoundland (Newfoundland: PBVM, 1975), 17; Deirdre Raftery, Catriona Delaney and Catherine Nowlan-Roebuck, Nano Nagle: The Life and the Legacy (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2019), 65. 6. 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), 65. 7. Deirdre Raftery, Teresa Ball and Loreto Education: Convents and the Colonial World, 1794–1875 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2022), 162. 8. Ibid., 163. 9. Dr Michael Fleming, Letters on the State of Religion in Newfoundland addressed to the Very Rev. Dr. A. O’Connell (Dublin: James Duffy, 1844), 18.

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10. Ibid. 11. Annals of the Presentation Convent, San Francisco (1854–1906), 7, Administration Records, 1855–1889, Presentation Sisters Archives, San Francisco (hereafter PASF). 12. Raftery et  al., Nano Nagle, 190. For an account of the arrival of the Presentations in the Dakotas, see Susan Carol Peterson and Courtney Ann Vaughn-Roberson, Women of Vision: the Presentation Sisters of South Dakota, 1880–1985 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988). 13. Annals and chronicle of Loreto House Calcutta, 1841–1926, 8–9, Loreto South Asia Province Archives, India (hereafter LSAPA). 14. M. Delphine Hart to M. Teresa Ball, 19 Jan. 1842, IND/4/1/, Loreto Congregation Institute and Provincial Archives, Dublin (hereafter LCIPA). 15. M. Teresa Ball to M. Teresa Dease, 29 Nov. 1851, 1/3/13/4, Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary Canada Province Archives (hereafter IBVMCPA). 16. M. Austin Hearne to M. Teresa Ball, 1 Apr. 1846, TB/MAU/1/3, LCIPA. 17. This is discussed in detail in Raftery, Teresa Ball and Loreto Education, 170–71. 18. Bishop Hartmann to M. Teresa Ball, 30 Aug. 1850, TB/IND/2/4, LCIPA. 19. M. Benigna Egan to M. Teresa Ball, 2 Feb. 1856, TB/IND/5/13, LCIPA. 20. M.  Philomena Frizelle to M.  Teresa Ball, 28 June 1849, TB/ IND/1/10, LCIPA. 21. M. Teresa Ball to M. Teresa Dease, 1857 [n.d.], TB/CAN/2/11, LCIPA. 22. Anon. [The Sisters of Mercy, Manchester, New Hampshire], Reverend Mother M.  Xavier Warde: Foundress of the Order of Mercy in the United States (Boston: Marlier and Co., 1902), 120. 23. For a discussion of this, and a study of women who were substantial supporters of convents, see Deirdre Bennett and Deirdre Raftery, ‘The financing of Irish convents by women, 1774–1860’, forthcoming, 2024. See also Maria Luddy, ‘“Possessed of fine properties”: power, authority and the funding of convents in Ireland, 1790–1900’ in M. Van Dijck et al., The Economics of Providence (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2012). 24. Diary of Foundation of Sydney [1892], SER 211 (84), Loreto Province Archive Australia, Ballarat (hereafter LPAAU). 25. Annals of Loretto, Stratford 1878–1937, 15/17, IBVMCPA. 26. See Kathleen Healy, Frances Warde: American Founder of the Sisters of Mercy (New York: The Seabury Press, 1973), 238. 27. MS Journal of the Society of the Sacred Heart, St Charles 1818–1840, SER IV, Provincial Archives, Society of the Sacred Heart, United States-­ Canada Province, St. Louis, Missouri (hereafter PASSHUSCP). 28. Annals and Chronicle of Loreto House Calcutta, 1841–1926, Loreto South Asia Province Archives (hereafter LSAPA).

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29. Ibid. 30. Christina Gordon’s daughters, Rosa Prendergast y Gordon and Elena Maria Prendergast y Gordon arrived at Loreto Abbey, in 1827. Her grand-­ daughters, Camilla, Christina and Maria Gordon were also enrolled at Loreto Abbey, Rathfarnham in 1847 and 1848 respectively. Loreto Abbey Register, LCIPA. 31. Teresa Magawly’s father was Patrick Awly Magawly of Frankford, Co. Offaly. A Count of the Holy Roman Empire, he was also, like Teresa Ball’s father, a member of the Catholic Committee. Their networks overlapped in several ways. See Raftery, Teresa Ball and Loreto Education, 155–6, 171. 32. The support of Teresa Magawly was something of a mixed blessing; it emerged that Magawly had only rented the premises, and in time the rent proved a problem for the nuns. See Raftery, Teresa Ball and Loreto Education, 155. 33. Account of the Voyage of the Sisters from St Mary’s [Dominican] Convent (1867), Sisters of Mercy Archives North Sydney, Australia. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. Annals of Mount St Joseph, Richmond, Vol.1, 1882–1889, cited in Aileen Ryan, Twelve Came First: the FCJ Mission to Australia. Richmond (Va: FCJ, 2010). Ryan, Twelve Came First. 37. Mary James Dinn, Foundation of the Presentation Congregation in Newfoundland (Newfoundland: PBVM pamphlet, 1975), 17. 38. 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), 70. 39. Lickteig, Tending the Light, 49. 40. Annals of Loreto Convent Stratford, 1878–1973, 15/17, 9, IBVMCPA. 41. Ibid. 42. Mary Rosa MacGinley, A Place of Springs: The Story of the Queensland Presentation Sisters 1900–1960 (Queensland: Congregation of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, 1977), 49. 43. For an insight into the curriculum and teaching at the boarding schools run by these congregations, see Raftery and Parkes, Female Education in Ireland, 1700–1900; Máire M.  Kealy, From Channel Row to Cabra: Dominican Nuns and their times 1717–1820 (Dublin: Columba Press, 2010); Máire M.  Kealy, Dominican Education in Ireland 1820–1930 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007); Ursula Clarke, The Ursulines in Cork Since 1771 (Cork: Ursuline Convent, 2007); Raftery, Teresa Ball and Loreto Education. 44. 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.

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While the Act to Restrain Foreign Education was designed to prevent Catholics from sending their children out of the country to be educated in Catholic schools, it is clear that many families succeeded in quietly slipping their children out, to Belgium, Spain and France. 45. Data compiled from biographical files, Society of the Sacred Heart Archives, Dublin (hereafter SSHAD). 46. Ibid. 47. Mary Cullen to Dr Paul Cullen, 4 January 1849, CUL/1697, Archives of the Pontifical Irish College Rome Archives (hereafter APICR). At that point, Dr Cullen was Rector at the Irish College. He became Archbishop of Armagh later that year, and was transferred to the See of Dublin in 1852. 48. Máire M Kealy, From Channel Row to Cabra: Dominican Nuns and their times 1717–1820 (Dublin: Columba Press, 2010), 90. 49. M.  Teresa Ball, 14 July 1842, TB/COR/8, LCIPA; M.  Teresa Ball to M. Teresa Dease, 29 Nov. 1851, 1/3/13/4, IBVMCPA. 50. ‘Questions to be answered on entering the Juniorate’, MAV/454 (9), SSHAD. 51. Mount Anville Journal, 1853–1883, MAV/93 (1), SSHAD. 52. See Deirdre Raftery and Susan M.  Parkes, Female Education in Ireland, 1700–1900: Minerva or Madonna. (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007), passim. The education of Catholic elites is also discussed in Mary Hatfield and Ciaran O’Neill, ‘Education and Empowerment: Cosmopolitan Education and Irish Women in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Gender and History 30, no. 1 (2018): 93–109. 53. Report of the Intermediate Education Board for Ireland for the Year 1894, 1895 (c.7677). 54. See Aileen Ryan, Twelve Came First: the FCJ Mission to Australia (Richmond, Va: FCJ, 2010), 106. 55. See Australian Dictionary of Biography, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/mulquin-­katherine-­7681. 56. Kathleen Dunlop Kane, The Presentation Sisters in Victoria: Adventure in Faith (Australia: PBVM, 1974), 65. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid. 60. Mount Anville Journal, 1853–1883, MAV/93 (1), SSHAD. 61. See for example the ‘tableau vivant representing the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary’, prepared by the pupils of Mount Anville Convent, Dublin, on 15 August 1874, Mount Anville Journal, 1853–1883, MAV/93 (1), SSHAD. 62. Mary Cullen to Dr Paul Cullen, 4 January 1849, CUL/1697, APICR. 63. See Raftery, Teresa Ball and Loreto Education, 170.

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64. Anon., Reverend Mother M Xavier Warde, 129. 65. The Stanley Letter, in Royal Commission of Inquiry into Primary Education (Ireland), Vol. I, Pt. I: Report of the Commissioners; with an appendix, pt. i.: 22–26. 66. See John Coolahan, Irish Education, History and Structure (Dublin: IPA, 1988), 8–10; Akenson, The Irish Education Experiment, 80–5. 67. Graham Balfour, The Educational Systems of Great Britain and Ireland. 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1903), 79. 68. The Stanley Letter, in Royal Commission of Inquiry into Primary Education (Ireland). 69. Reading Book for the Use of Female Schools (Dublin: Commissioners of National Education in Ireland, 1850). 70. Girls Reading Book for the Use of Schools (Dublin: Commissioners of National Education in Ireland, 1864); Manual for Needlework for Use in National Schools (Dublin: Commissioners of National Education in Ireland, 1869). 71. For an account of Irish female emigrants who later became lay sisters in convents in America, see 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, 49:4 (2013), 527–8. 72. David Fitzpatrick, ‘“A share of the honeycomb”: education, emigration and Irishwomen’, in Mary Daly and David Dickson (eds), The Origins of Popular Literacy in Ireland: Language, Change and Educational Development (Dublin: Department of Modern History, Trinity College Dublin, 1990), 172. 73. Special Report made to the Commissioners of National Education on Convent Schools in Connection with the Board, H.C. 1864 (405) XLVI.63, 101. 74. By 1867, the National Education Board had established sixty-seven model schools, and many candidates for the Training College, Marlborough Street, had been pupil-teachers in model schools. See Thomas Durcan, History of Irish Education from 1800 (Wales: Dragon Books, 1972), 59. 75. R.  Robinson, A Manual of Method and Organisation Adapted to the Primary Schools of Great Britain, Ireland and the Colonies (London: Longman, Green and Co., 1863), 406–8. 76. See Susan M.  Parkes, Kildare Place: the History of the Church of Ireland Training College and College of Education, 1811–2010 (Dublin: CICE, 2011), 19–20. 77. A Directory for the Religious of the Presentation Order According to the Practices of the Parent House, founded in the year 1775 by the Venerable Mother Nano Nagle, in Douglas Street, Cork (Cork: Wm. Hurley, 1850). See also Deirdre Raftery and Catherine Nowlan-Roebuck, ‘Convent

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schools and National Education in nineteenth-century Ireland: negotiating a place within a non-denominational system’, History of Education 36:3 (2007, 363). 78. The means whereby the Presentations developed their teaching skills in the nineteenth century is discussed in Raftery et al., Nano Nagle, 83–93. 79. Special Report made to the Commissioners of National Education on Convent Schools in Connection with the Board, H.C. 1864 (405) XLVI.63. 7. 80. Ibid., 39. 81. M. Xaverius O’ Donoghue, Mother Vincent Whitty, a Woman Educator in a Masculine Society (Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 1972), 14. 82. Ibid., 13. 83. Special Report … on Convent Schools in Connection with the Board, 43. 84. Ibid., 56. 85. Ibid., 20. 86. Ibid., 14. 87. Ibid. 88. Ibid., 37. 89. Ibid., 96. 90. Kane, Adventure in Faith: the Presentation Sisters in Victoria, 65.

CHAPTER 5

Expanding the Reach of Irish Nuns in Education: Convents, Schools and Academies in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

The education provided by Irish sisters was mainly given in parish schools, and in their own free schools and convent boarding schools, sometimes known as ‘academies’ or ‘select schools’. Attached to many boarding schools were private day schools; this model of provision imitated the French pensionnats and demi-pensionnats that had become popular in Europe and that gave nuns a much-needed source of income. Though some of these fee-charging schools were for the wealthy elite, most were for a growing Catholic middle class. This chapter explores the work of Irish women religious in free and fee-charging schools. While their largest impact was in America and Australia, the chapter also notes the experience of those who went, albeit in smaller numbers, to other countries where English-speaking teachers were in demand in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These women became part of the wide canvas of education provision, yet have remained almost invisible within the history of education. This is in part because they mainly lived inside convent walls, and their vowed life did not allow them to seek attention for their achievements. The doctrine of ‘separate spheres’, that historians have applied to the nineteenth-­century social worlds of men and women, equally applied to those in religious life. Women religious were expected to work quietly, leaving few records of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Raftery, Irish Nuns and Education in the Anglophone World, Global Histories of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46201-6_5

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their achievements. In addition, they were very much overshadowed by male religious. Bishops and priests had a much more public presence, and they often exercised considerable control over women religious. For example, the male hierarchy dominated American religious life even though there were far fewer priests than nuns in America in the period under review here.1 Priests and bishops could mix openly with parishioners, comment on current issues, socialise with the laity—including influential and wealthy supporters—and get direct access to Rome when they needed it. Many prominent churchmen left copious records of their achievements, in the expectation that they would eventually be written about. Nuns, on the other hand, had to allow their individuality to be subsumed into the collective identity of their communities. They left very few personal records, and did not enumerate their ‘success stories’. The paucity of material on individual women religious makes it a challenge to bring them to the foreground of the historical narrative. While this chapter aims to throw light on the collective work of Irish women religious in expanding education provision, it also attempts to bring into focus the activities of a small number of individual nuns, in order to better understand how they experienced the education expansion of their orders. The women discussed below are Mother Xavier Murphy (Society of the Sacred Heart, America); Mother Delphine Harte (Loreto, India); Mother Frances Warde (Sisters of Mercy, America) and Mother Gonzaga Barry (Loreto, Australia). Those selected for discussion are women who held leadership roles, expanding the education reach of their orders. The fact that these women were leaders means that they are nuns for whom there are some records: their work is noted in convent annals and obituaries, for instance. Because they worked with many teaching sisters and pupils, they become a prism through which we can see into daily life in convents and schools. Far less is known about the individual nuns who worked as teachers in the schools. And there are scant records in most congregational archives concerning the lay sisters or ‘house’ sisters who worked in the kitchens and laundries attached to convents. Nonetheless, the chapter will attempt to identify some of the Irish lay sisters whose work was crucial to the success of the project of expansion. Recording the experience of a handful of nuns will, it is hoped, put some flesh on the bones of the much bigger beast that was the project of expanding Catholic education in the nineteenth century.

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The Experience of Expansion: Convent Schooling in the Towns and on the Frontier In 1818, the Society of the Sacred Heart made its first American foundation in New Orleans. The founding superior was a French woman, Mother Philippine Duchesne, who spoke no English. When dealing with monoglot English speakers, she often relied on Irish-born nuns to communicate on her behalf.2 She was joined at an early stage by an Irish woman, Anna Murphy from Cork, who became an important addition to the small group of nuns who were ‘building on the frontier’.3 A near-relative of Dr John Murphy, Bishop of Cork, Anna had been educated by the Ursulines in Cork, before going to Paris to become a postulant with the Society of the Sacred Heart in 1820. When she wrote to Mother Duchesne in 1821, offering herself for the American foundation, it was clear that her Ursuline education had made her a promising teacher. Duchesne wrote to France to indicate to the Superior General, Mother Sophie Barat, that she was impressed by ‘the Irish woman’, adding: ‘I was delighted with the letter from the Irish novice. Her command of English will make her most useful here.’ Philippine Duchesne was concerned, however, that Anna Murphy did not understand what lay ahead of her. She continued: [S]he should be given a true picture of our position—inconvenience everywhere, especially our lodging, having no place even to put a sewing basket or writing pad, not a table for one’s own use, food that is often disgusting, and very little variety in it, severe cold, prostrating heat, and practically no spring weather.4

The ‘inconvenience everywhere’ of which Duchesne warned was not merely a lack of physical comforts. Duchesne described the hardship of living in a ‘remote corner of the world, cut off by the Mississippi and the Missouri rivers’: We look on potatoes and cabbage as … rare delicacies. There is no market. The gift of a pound of butter and a dozen eggs is like a fortune received. … Many of the cows are almost dry. … If we have to buy milk it costs twelve cents a bottle, and fifteen cents in winter. … The well in our garden is dry and it costs twelve cents every time we send someone to the Missouri to get us two little buckets of water.5

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Anna Murphy was not deterred; she arrived in America on 1 April 1822, and was sent immediately to Louisiana to open a new convent in Opelousas.6 Mother Duchesne expected that Anna Murphy would be able to cater to about thirty boarders. By 1825, she was serving as Superior in Grand Coteau. She died unexpectedly in 1836 from ‘a violent fever [which] carried her off in a few days’, and which would also claim the life of the nun who nursed her.7 The presence of tuberculosis in the convent where she lived suggests the possibility that she either contracted it there, or had asymptomatic TB when she had first arrived from the French novitiate. Murphy was the first of many Irishwomen who joined Duchesne to expand her frontier convents and schools (see Appendix B). Some arrived from Ireland in order to enter the Society, and others were immigrants who worked in service before finally offering themselves to the American mission of the Society of the Sacred Heart. The ‘inconvenience everywhere’ of which Duchesne had warned faced all of the women religious who played pioneering roles in education. The greatest challenges were the difficulties of travel—on ships, covered wagons, mules and by foot; the need to adapt to harsh climates, such as the freezing temperatures in Newfoundland or the heat of Calcutta; and the diseases which resulted in hundreds of nuns dying within a few years, or even weeks, of arriving from Ireland to their new mission. Tuberculosis, cholera and typhoid claimed many lives. One Irish Superior whose community was rapidly depleted by disease and death was Mother Delphine Harte. Born in Dublin in 1817, she entered the Loreto order there at the age of eighteen. Delphine was professed within two years, and at the age of twenty-five she was named as Superior to the first Loreto foundation in India. When she set sail for Calcutta in August 1841, the small band of nuns and postulants with her included her sixteen-year old sister, Isabel, who entered the Loreto Institute in India a year later. The four-month journey to India, on board the Scotia, was unusually uneventful, and the women were given a warm welcome on arrival. The welcoming party, which included the Governor General, Lord Aukland, transported the nuns in carriages to their new convent which had been prepared with great care by the ‘Ladies of the Convent Committee’. Harte was initially optimistic about the foundation that she was asked to make; her Jesuit neighbours were attentive, and she felt confident of the support of the bishop, Dr Carew. As soon as her nuns were settled, she wrote home to Loreto Abbey:

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Providence has appeared to bless every stage of this undertaking if we may call it a blessing to have the prospect of every worldly success … …[Dr Carew] provides for all our necessities without the slightest trouble on our side. … The Jesuits are almost continually preaching to us about the preservation of our health. … Benefactors … even Protestants have been extremely liberal to us.8

Mother Delphine’s experience of her mission soon changed. Dr Carew was zealous and overbearing, insisting that the nuns should take on responsibilities for which they had no training. Within six months of opening their first school in Calcutta, they were required to take over an orphanage at Chandernagore, and Carew then required them to take over running the women’s section of a hospital. Even as demands on the community increased, their number began to decline: Sister Xaveria McDonough died in September 1842. When a cholera epidemic broke out in Calcutta, two more nuns died having nursed victims in the hospital. In 1844, Delphine Harte wrote to Teresa Ball describing the ‘ravages from small pox and cholera’.9 Her letters offer a lens through which a nun’s own view of her mission can be glimpsed. They also show the kind of hardship that was encountered by nuns, as a consequence of having responded to a bishop’s request for a convent boarding school. While the Church triumphed in the arrival of nuns and the expansion of convent schools, the women who had agreed to do the work were often destroyed in the process. By 1858, Mother Delphine was in despair, and wrote home: ‘I am heartfelt sick of my public life in India. … Some of my best teachers are breaking down in health so that it is absolutely necessary for me to get a supply of members.’10 More nuns were sent out from Ireland (see Appendix C). However, the heat and the prevalence of disease brought about the deaths of forty-two Loreto nuns within twenty years.11 Meanwhile in frontier America, the Sisters of Mercy had arrived from Ireland under the leadership of Mother Frances Xavier Warde. As noted in Appendix A, her foundations would exceed that of any other nineteenth-­ century Irish Superior. Frances Warde was born in 1810, in Queen’s County (now Co. Laois). A cousin of the future Cardinal Cullen, she belonged to a well-established land-owning Catholic family. In 1833, she became a Sister of Mercy, entering the Convent of Mercy, on Baggott Street in Dublin. Her religious formation took place under the foundress of the order, Mother Catherine McAuley, and Frances Warde became her secretary and trusted friend. Between 1837 and 1843, Warde established

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twelve Mercy institutions in Ireland. This augured well for her ability to expand the congregation in America when she was chosen to make the first American foundation of the Sisters of Mercy. While another of the Cullen dynasty—Sr M.  Josephine Cullen—had initially been chosen to lead the colony to Pittsburgh, Frances Warde was finally appointed because of her ‘judgement and experience’.12 Within a year of her arrival in Pittsburgh, Mother Frances Warde established St Mary’s Convent. In September of that year, she opened St Mary’s Academy for girls, and in 1844 she opened a free day school. In the day school, Warde adopted the monitorial system with which she had been familiar. She also followed the daily routine of the Irish Mercy schools: the free school opened at nine and closed at four o’clock, and the pupils were given a two-hour break in the middle of the day, for food and recreation. They were taught mathematics for an hour each day, always in the early part of the morning when they were most alert. Other subjects included reading, writing, geography, history, English and book-keeping. Religious instruction took place for half an hour each day. At the free school, pupils were taught ‘graceful carriage [and] … civility of manners’, much as the boarders at the elite academy were taught, and Warde introduced a circulating library and encouraged reading for pleasure. In the convent parlours, the nuns taught music. In 1845, Warde opened St Vincent’s Academy outside Pittsburgh, and two years later (1847) she established the Mercy Hospital, Pittsburgh. The success of the Mercy schools required that Warde return to Ireland in 1845, to recruit more nuns. In 1846, she travelled to Chicago which was, at that time, a small town of muddy streets and timber houses. Warde and her nuns transformed an old building into a boarding school for girls on Lake Michigan, called St Xavier Female Academy of Chicago. A second select school, St Agatha’s Female Academy, followed. Her work in Chicago and Pittsburgh was replicated in many parts of the US, including New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Philadelphia. It is a narrative that suggests unbounded success, but the reality was that Warde’s nuns met many challenges. For example, during a typhoid epidemic in Pittsburgh in 1848, she lost four nuns who had nursed men in the isolation ward of the Mercy Hospital. Other young nuns died from tuberculosis around the same time. The annals of St Leo’s Convent in Carlow record that the Pittsburgh mission lost seven nuns within a few years of opening.13 Her project of expansion also included many ‘tortuous and perilous’ journeys across difficult terrain, in covered wagons, with little or no food.14 While her work

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supported the Church, it was not always supported in return by the hierarchy. For example, days after his arrival in the Diocese of Portland in 1875, Bishop Healy began to be a thorn in her side. He objected to the amount of freedom that the pupils had at Mount St Mary’s Academy, and forbade them from dancing and wearing jewellery. At school plays, he stopped performances if he did not approve of the costumes worn by the girls, or if he thought that ‘lace pantaloons’ could be glimpsed.15 He chastised nuns if their habits were worn or dusty, and interfered in the academic programme of the school. Unable to give freedom or control to nuns under his authority, he also ring-fenced a bequest made to support the nuns. A gift of $50,000 had been left by Winifred Kavanagh, to his predecessor, Bishop Bacon, to build a new convent for the Sisters of Mercy.16 Bishop Healy took over the premises, to establish a Cathedral school in Maine, and the nuns were obliged to remain in their old convent. If Mother Warde was facing setbacks in Maine in 1875, another convent Superior was about to make strides in female education in Australia: Mother Gonzaga Barry, together with a small group of Irish nuns from Loreto Abbey in Dublin, arrived in Ballarat that year (see Fig. 5.1). Like Warde, Barry came from a prosperous and well-educated family. Her father had a well-stocked library at their home in Enniscorthy, and her aunts encouraged music and French conversation. Educated firstly by a governess, she then boarded at the Loreto convent in Gorey, Co. Wexford, from 1848 to 1850. Her education continued at Loreto Abbey in Rathfarnham, Co. Dublin, where her spiritual development was influenced by the Loreto foundress, Mother Teresa Ball. By then, Ball had begun to send some of her most able nuns to make foundations in Canada, India, Mauritius and Spain. Ball also received a request from Archbishop Goold to make a foundation in Australia in 1851, but she declined.17 She may have thought that it would further deplete her convent of women religious, or that the context would be too challenging and too far from Ireland. Dr Goold later said Mother Ball ‘did not think Australia was within the pale of the civilised world’.18 In 1874, when the diocese of Ballarat was formed, Dr Michael O’Connor was appointed bishop. He had been the parish priest of Rathfarnham, and—being known by the community—was in a good position to ask them to consider once again the possibility of sending a colony to Australia. Mother Gonzaga Barry was requested to lead the group and, though she dreaded the long sea journey, she agreed to the mission. The group left Ireland on 20 May 1875.

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Fig. 5.1  Mother M. Gonzaga Barry, IBVM. (By kind permission of the Loreto Province Archive Australia)

Because Mother Gonzaga Barry kept several diaries, including a detailed diary of her first journey to Australia, and because she was a regular letter-­ writer, she is one of the Irish religious for whom it is possible to get insight into how she experienced her mission. In her diary, she was unusually forthright about her emotions as she left Ireland. She described being ‘haunted by the idea of a violent death’, by either drowning at sea or being ‘killed on land’.19 Many years later, recalling her departure for Ballarat, she wrote: ‘I suppose no one will ever know what it cost me to leave Ireland and my Irish friends. It nearly broke my heart.’20 On arrival, however, Barry and her group settled quite quickly, and they were pleased with the temporary house that had been prepared for them, and the orchard and gardens around it. Gonzaga Barry established a convent routine,

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including prayer and recreation, and the nuns spoke French for an hour each day. The Ballarat Courier announced their intention to open some ‘young ladies’ seminaries in connection with the Roman Catholic church’, adding that the nuns were ‘highly educated, and capable of teaching more than the usual accomplishments, including several languages’.21 A fine property was then purchased as their permanent convent, and they opened Mary’s Mount boarding school for girls. While the bishop was credited with paying for Mary’s Mount, Gonzaga Barry later corrected this by pointing out that she had raised funding for it, and had also taken a substantial bank loan. With careful budgeting, she managed the foundation so that its outgoings did not exceed the income from the day and boarding fees.22 The boarding school developed a reputation for providing girls with an elite European education. Most of the nuns who taught at Mary’s Mount had taught in one of the Irish Loreto schools and could teach French, Italian and German. They also provided tuition in mathematics, geography, elementary science and literature. Their own advanced training in music meant that the standard of music in the school was high; they also taught calisthenics and painting. Mother Gonzaga Barry had a very clear vision of the scope and use of female education, and articulated it in an essay called ‘A Sensible School for Girls’ (1890). It described the ideal ‘college’ for young women, which would have ‘a school of art, an astronomical observatory, a chemical laboratory, a library, museum, and gymnasium’. The students should also be able to study dairy and poultry farming and domestic economy. The education of girls and young women, she argued, was particularly important for those who were forging a place in a ‘new country’. As the mothers of future generations of Australians, girls needed an excellent education.23 If her education philosophy was designed to educate mothers, it also succeeded in attracting many young women to religious life: sixty-seven of the 332 pupils at Mary’s Mount, across its first fifteen years, entered religious orders. ‘I never like to see a Loreto convent without a school for the poor’, Mother Gonzaga Barry wrote in 1891. She expanded the reach of the order quickly in Victoria, establishing day schools and free schools for the poor. Some of this expansion was undertaken very shortly after the arrival of the nuns. For example, a day school called Loreto Ladies’ College was opened in Dawson Street, West Ballarat, and the nuns took over a parish school. In 1877, at her own expense, she built a parochial school, and 358 pupils enrolled at the start of the first term. She then expanded into other

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parts of Victoria, opening a house in Portland, and taking over the parish school of All Saints; she also eventually opened a school for boys there. In 1888, she expanded into Melbourne, and in 1892 she opened the first Loreto convent in Sydney. In 1895, she accepted an invitation from Dr Gibney, Bishop of Perth, to make a foundation in Western Australia. In 1905, she made the first Loreto foundation in South Australia, opening a convent and day school in Adelaide, and later opening a boarding school. The speed with which Gonzaga Barry expanded the Loreto Institute in Australia belies the challenges that were involved. For example, when she arrived at the proposed convent house in Adelaide, it had no furniture whatsoever. She later wrote, ‘All our foundations have begun in poverty, yet have succeeded, thanks be to God and Our Blessed Mother’.24 Foundations also succeeded thanks to the work of generations of lay sisters. These are the women about whom least is known. While they are recorded in the entrance records of religious orders, there is very little record of how they experienced their religious lives. However, the Society of the Sacred Heart recorded biographical details of their ‘coadjutrix’ sisters in obituaries and convent necrologies, and it is possible to use these to get some sense of how Irishwomen became lay sisters in nineteenth-­ century America.25 Many of their Irish lay sisters had been at national school with the Sisters of Mercy or Presentations, before leaving for America. It is likely that girls were more disposed to enter religion if their national school had been a convent national school, though some were educated in non-Catholic schools. For example, Johanna Flannagan, born in 1800  in Cork, had received some primary education in a ‘Protestant school’. She worked in service in England for fourteen years before entering the Society of the Sacred Heart, at the age of forty-five. While the norm was that a novice should not be more than thirty, the Society accepted many older women. For example, Honora Moran, a Roscommon woman, ‘presented herself, in 1841, to [the] Mothers in Houston Street, New York’. The nuns agreed that Honora ‘appeared far from young’, but could not get her to give a clear indication of her age. The Superior, Mother Hardey, guessed that Honora was in her thirties, but was pragmatic about not turning her away: ‘our Mothers had only just arrived in New York … a person full of good will and a strong constitution was not to be treated with disdain’.26 Mother Hardey also accepted Mary Fitzpatrick. Born in 1821, Mary had ‘left Ireland for America where she worked as a domestic for a respectable family in New York’. She was directed by a Jesuit, and she entered the

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Society at their Manhattanville convent in 1860. When Mother Hardey asked her age, Mary Fitzpatrick replied that she was ‘thirty years and a wee bit’, though she was closer to forty. She served in several convents, including in Halifax where she was employed at ‘the most laborious tasks. She was to be seen, in winter, during the worst frosts, digging out the snow and bringing in the coal.’27 Bridget Condon was about forty when she was accepted into the Society in St Louis, Missouri. Born in Limerick around 1817, she had travelled to America ‘while still young’ to work in service. She entered the Society of the Sacred Heart in 1857, and ‘worked in the boulangerie where the workers were few and she had to get up at 3 o’clock in the morning’. Later she worked as infirmière. Her obituary records: ‘For many years she was in charge of the lighting; at that time it was an onerous task. Large quantities of lamps, lanterns to be prepared, and the maintenance of them, to be carried and carried again.’28 Lay sisters rarely had any kind of dowry when they entered convents. It was enough that they brought a ‘dowry of virtue’.29 They also brought skills that were invaluable in convents, and in boarding schools. They cared for sick pupils and nuns, did all of the cooking and cleaning, kept poultry, carried water, and set the fires. Those who could repair shoes, or make and mend clothes, were particularly useful. Waterford-born Ann Butler had some schooling and ‘then served her time with a dressmaker where she acquired all the needle skills which she was to use throughout her life’.30 In 1858, at the age of thirty, she emigrated to Canada with two brothers and a sister. Two years later, she asked Mother Hardey to accept her at the Manhattanville convent, and for about thirty-six years her responsibility was to make the uniforms for the boarders. Marguerite Lamb was another Irishwoman who became a religious, having been brought to America by a cousin. Originally she intended to work in service, but in 1859 she asked to be received into the Society. By then, she was thirty years old and, like many women who struggled to survive alone in America, she turned to a convent. Her obituary records that she was ‘very strong physically and was always employed in heavy work, the farmyard, the laundry, the garden’.31 Catherine and Mary Duffy also emigrated from Ireland, in the hope of working in service in New York: both sisters entered the Manhattanville convent as coadjutrix. They had been born in Armagh, where there was a Sacred Heart Convent, and may well have known about the American houses of the Society. It is likely that convents run by familiar orders were seen as a safer and more secure option for women immigrants, than trying to eke out a living as servants.32 In

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convents, their work was easily as hard—sometimes harder—than the work that women servants did in private homes. However, the convent provided safety from predatory employers, and the dangers of rape and physical abuse.33 Convents also offered security in the face of possible homelessness, when women became too old to find work as domestic servants.

Popular Education: The Demands of Catholic Prelates and Parishes In America, the work of Catholic women religious was ‘closely connected with the creation of a massive parochial school system in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries’.34 Parochial schools provided both academic and religious education, and were a crucial part of the growth of Catholic parishes.35 In part they were a ‘reaction to the Protestant hegemony of the public school system’.36 Protestant evangelicals had developed and consolidated a free urban school system in the 1820s and 1830s, and a Sunday school movement that demonstrated the fact that religious education could be delivered outside school hours. The curriculum was, nonetheless, ‘heavily infused with … Protestant values and culture’.37 Across the middle of the nineteenth century, with the growth of the tax-­ supported public school system, Catholics found themselves ‘caught up in a whirlwind of educational change’.38 While some were content to send their children to public schools, Church leaders pressurised their flock to attend Catholic schools. Though many Catholics resisted this pressure, the hierarchy nonetheless strenuously promoted a system of parish schools. For the Church, separate schools were ‘a natural and necessary extension of Catholic family life, clerical responsibility, and the Church’s mission to America’. It has also been argued that the growth of separate Catholic schooling was ‘a response to the rapid development of a Protestant-based public school system, often guided by people who felt themselves alienated from America’s dominant culture’.39 The influx of poor Catholic immigrants into the country in the 1840s and 1850s changed the face of American Catholicism, and the Church ‘became identified with the displaced, impoverished, and alien residents of America’s cities’.40 With the spread of Catholic ethnic immigrant groups into frontier America, the demand for schools accelerated. Catholics lobbied priests and bishops to find congregations of nuns, priests and

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brothers, who would provide the free labour needed to run schools. Where large communities of Irish immigrants had settled, the presence of Irish teaching sisters to run parochial schools was urgently needed. These schools would save Catholics from attending non-denominational public schools; additionally, a supply of nuns could also provide for the need to give separate religious instruction to Catholics who attended public schools. Bishops argued that Catholic schooling, together with catechetical instruction, would prevent the kind of ‘leakage’ from the institutional church that was feared by the hierarchy—that is, ‘the loss of Catholic identity through neglect, apathy or, in an era of revived nativism and xenophobia, proselytism and apostasy’.41 Bringing a separate school system firmly under the control of the hierarchy became the responsibility of priests in their parishes, from 1866.42 Nuns, in short, were needed if priests were to achieve this, and Irish nuns—who spoke English and typically had a good education—were particularly useful. Irish nuns who arrived in the US in the nineteenth century were part of the rapid growth of communities of women religious. The number of nuns in the US increased from 220 in 1820, to 49,620 in 1900. While the first ten orders of women religious that became established in the US had ‘made their initial foundation in slave states’, this pattern changed in the 1840s, with the result that two-thirds of all convents were above the Mason-Dixon Line, by the Civil War.43 Many of the Irish nuns who travelled to America in the mid-nineteenth century worked in parochial schools, and even more were needed after the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore (1884), at which bishops voted on the building of Catholic schools in every parish and required Catholic parents to send their children to parochial schools wherever possible.44 The education that was provided in parochial schools was somewhat uneven at first due to the fact that few congregations had experienced formal teacher training; however, many of those who arrived from Ireland had the benefit of either a teacher apprenticeship at national school, or a good academic education at a convent school. For example, the Presentation Sisters who arrived in San Francisco in 1854, and those who followed them from the Presentation aspirancy that was established in Co. Kildare to prepare novices, were generally well-educated and had some training in how to manage a classroom. The ‘holy and excellent function of educating the poor’ was instilled into Presentations, who followed the teaching methods that were laid down in the Presentation Directory.45 Similarly, the aspirants and novices that arrived from St Brigid’s Missionary School, and nuns from the many

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Mercy convents in Ireland that supplied religious to America, were generally well-placed to either commence running their own free elementary schools, or take over a local parochial school that needed teachers. It is for this reason that they managed to start teaching so quickly upon arrival. The Sisters of Mercy would supply the largest numbers of Irish nuns to the US in the nineteenth century, while the Presentations also sent significant numbers in their early decades in America. Other congregations sent a steady supply of Irish religious, though this has tended to be overlooked in scholarship. As already noted, the Loreto order (IBVM) supplied nuns to Illinois and to many convents in Canada to advance the expansion in education (see Appendix D). The Society of the Sacred Heart also had a substantial number of Irish-born religious in America.46 Though the Sisters of St Joseph of Carondolet (CSJs) had no convent in Ireland, they still recruited young Irishwomen for their expanding number of schools and hospitals in Minneapolis. In 1902, thirty novices came from Ireland; a further nine followed in 1903, and sixteen in 190547 (see Fig. 5.2). The reputation of Mother Seraphine (Ellen) Ireland CSJ, and indeed that of her brother, Archbishop Ireland, would have contributed to knowledge of the congregation at home. The Ireland family had emigrated from Kilkenny to the US in 1849; Ellen was educated by the Sisters of Mercy in Chicago, until the family moved to St Paul, Minneapolis. There she was educated at St Joseph’s Academy, where the CSJs taught her French, Latin, mathematics, science and music. She entered the congregation at the age of sixteen, and took the name Seraphine. Across a distinguished career, Mother Seraphine oversaw the opening of St Agatha’s Conservatory of Music and Art in St Paul; she also opened over thirty schools, and founded a Catholic college for women, the College of St Catherine. Needing many more sisters to expand the education reach of the CSJs, she set about recruiting successfully in Ireland and Canada. At the time of her appointment as Provincial Superior in 1882, there were 162 nuns in the St Paul province; by the time of her death in 1930, this number had risen to 913.48 Though nuns and novices continued to come to the US from Ireland in the early twentieth century, American bishops wanted to create an American church that did not always look over its shoulder to Europe. A ‘second generation’ of entrants to religious life included the ‘American-­ born daughters of immigrants who had come to America from Italy … France, Portugal, Spain, Scotland and England’.49 Additionally, there were hundreds of teaching sisters who were the daughters of Irish immigrants.

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Fig. 5.2  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))

For example, the North American province of the IBVM/Loreto order had approximately 186 nuns whose parents had been born in Ireland (see Appendix E). Many of this ‘second generation’ had entered convents in the 1870s and 1880s, having firstly been educated by those Irish nuns who had arrived in America by the mid-­nineteenth century. These would swell the numbers in congregations of teaching sisters. In 1870, there were 11,424 nuns in America, and this number grew to 49,620 by 1900 (see Table 5.1). Twenty years later, this number reached 88,773.50 There was also strong and sustained demand for Irish teaching sisters in Australia. The British settlement on the Australian continent (New Holland) had begun in 1788, with the arrival of fleets bearing convicts from England. By 1794, there were 4705 British convicts in New South Wales, and 468 Irish convicts. Convict ships started to come directly from

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Table 5.1  Number of women religious in United States by decade

Year

Sisters

Rate of increase (%)

1820 1830 1840 1850 1860 1870 1880 1890 1900

270 448 902 1941 5090 11,424 21,835 32,534 49,620

N/A 66 101 116 162 124 98 49 53

Source: Joseph G.  Mannard, ‘“Our Dear Houses Are Here, There + Every Where”: the convent revolution in antebellum America’. Compiled from data in Catherine Ann Curry PBVM, ‘Statistical Study of Religious Women in the United States’ (privately printed, 1988)

Ireland from 1791, bringing an increase in the Catholic population. Though Catholics in the colony petitioned for a clergy of their own as early as 1792, this was not granted.51 By the 1820s, the Catholic population included free immigrants, and families ‘of standing’.52 The need for Catholic clergy was met by various priests until eventually New South Wales came under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the bishop of Mauritius, and the administration of the church in New South Wales was offered to the English Benedictines.53 In 1834, John Bede Polding of Downside Abbey, England, was appointed Vicar Apostolic of New Holland and Van Diemen’s Land. Before leaving for his appointment, Polding visited Ireland to try to secure women religious for the education of the poor. The Sisters of Charity agreed to prepare a young woman, Alicia De Lacy, for a new foundation in New South Wales; she and four other Sisters of Charity arrived in Sydney Harbour on 31 December 1838. They were the first Catholic nuns in Australia. In 1841–1842, Polding made a visit to Europe, during which he secured the approval of Pope Gregory XVI (and the consent of the British authorities) for the establishment of a Catholic hierarchy in Australia. There followed a period of missionary expansion, which included regular recruitment from Ireland of teaching sisters who would run free schools for the Catholic population, and also establish ‘select’ schools for the

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growing professional class. By then, ‘Irish Catholics and their descendants formed a large minority in Australia’s colonial population’.54 Their educational needs would be met by many Irish nuns, who followed the Sisters of Charity to New South Wales, and to Victoria. The Sisters of Charity began their work a year after landing in the colony, when they undertook the ‘instruction of the Female Prisoners at the Factory, and the children at the Poor School’.55 The Sisters of Mercy arrived from Ireland in 1846 and the Presentations followed in 1866. The Loreto order went from Ireland to open its first Australian foundation in 1875, and the Brigidines went in 1883. Other European congregations in which there were Irish members also made foundations in Australia: the Dominicans arrived in 1867; the year 1882 saw the arrival of the Society of the Sacred Heart, the Faithful Companions of Jesus and the Ursulines; the Sisters of St Joseph of Cluny arrived in 1903 and the Marists in 1908.56 The arrival dates of teaching sisters in both America and Australia merely indicate the starting point of their education activity. The content of that activity can be gleaned from convent and school records, and from surviving accounts of the schooling that they provided.

Getting Started: Parochial Schools The parochial school system in America relied very heavily on teaching sisters. By the 1920s, most nuns in the US were working in the parochial school system.57 The Sisters of Mercy and the Presentations became heavily involved in this area of education, having made multiple foundations and filiations within a very short period of arriving in America. They also expanded significantly into second-level schooling. The nineteenth-­ century overseas Presentation foundations that were made directly from Ireland included San Francisco (1854), Iowa (1874), New York (1874) and the Dakotas (1881), and all then expanded their education reach once they became established. For example, the first Presentation convent and school in America was established on Green Street, San Francisco, in 1854, and had approximately ninety-five Irish-born members by 1930 (see Appendix F). It was followed in California alone by Powell Street Convent, San Francisco (1855), Sacred Heart Convent, San Francisco (1869), St Joseph’s Convent, Berkeley (1879), St Joseph’s High School, Berkeley (1879), St Joseph’s Academy, Sonoma (1882), St Mary School, Gilroy (1891), St Mary Academy, San Francisco (1906), St Agnes Academy, San Francisco (1907), Convent of the Presentation, San

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Francisco (1912), St Teresa School, San Francisco (1912), St Francis School, San Francisco (1913), Presentation High School, San Francisco (1915), Our Lady of Lourdes Grammar School, LA (1919), St Anne School, San Francisco (1920), Our Lady of Loretto Grammar School, LA (1921), Bishop Conaty Memorial High School, LA (1923), Cathedral School, San Francisco (1924), St Columba School, Oakland (1925), St Patrick School, San Jose (1925), SS Peter and Paul School, San Francisco (1930), St Rita School, Sierra Madre (1936) and Epiphany School, San Francisco (1938).58 Additionally, well over a hundred convents and schools were established and/or run by Presentations in South Dakota, North Dakota, Iowa, New  York, Massachusetts, Staten Island, Rhode Island, Arizona, Washington, New Mexico and Montana. While the Presentations were in several parts of America, the Sisters of Mercy expanded so rapidly there that it is impossible to record every single Mercy foundation, branch house and school that opened in the period under review in this book. Mother Frances Warde alone founded ‘more convents, schools, hospitals and institutions of social welfare than any other religious leader in the Western World’.59 As indicated in Appendix A, she was responsible for establishing some fifty-six schools, not including many night schools for adults, and sewing schools for young women. Across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and following the arrival of other Mercy founding superiors such as Mother Austin Carroll, the Mercys were involved in elementary schooling in many states including Delaware, Vermont, Oklahoma, New  York, California, New Jersey, Florida and Chicago. Their presence in second-level education would include academies and high schools in Chicago, New  York, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, Nebraska, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Tennessee and Connecticut. The Sisters of Mercy had no requirement to observe enclosure: this made them very suited to the work of parochial schooling, as they could walk from their convents to local schools. They were also a very ‘visible’ congregation, moving freely about towns and cities in order to visit the poor, run hospitals, and teach. This visibility contributed to their popularity, and encouraged public support for their work. In Chicago, for example, their rapid expansion under Mother Agatha O’Brien made them well-known figures. Agatha O’Brien had entered the Mercy order as a lay sister in 1843, but her exceptional abilities made her suitable to be professed in the rank of choir sister at the age of twenty-four, shortly after her arrival in America.60 Within four months of her profession, she was appointed Superior of the first Mercy

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foundation in Chicago. O’Brien, together with six other Sisters of Mercy, responded to the needs of the rapidly growing population of the city, which included Irish Catholic immigrants. Some 20% of the population of Chicago was Irish-born, between 1840 and 1850. In addition to opening a dispensary, and taking charge of the Illinois General Hospital, O’Brien oversaw the running of nine parish free schools, nine fee-charging schools, adult night schools and Sunday Schools. She built the first two academies in Chicago—St Xavier’s Academy and St Agatha’s Academy—and also oversaw the opening of academies in Galena and Bourbonnais, Illinois. Expanding rapidly in America under the stewardship of women like Mother Frances Warde and Mother Agatha O’Brien, the Sisters of Mercy would quickly become the largest congregation in the world.61 The Presentations, on the other hand, realised that their rule of enclosure initially curtailed their work in the vast country into which they had arrived in 1854. Some communities of Presentations had to be dispensed from their rule of enclosure so that they could beg for money in order to survive. Others had to travel great distances on foot or by cart, and many lived in ‘convents’ around which no walls had been built. Particularly in frontier America, they could not hope for even a semblance of a cloister.62 The realities of life in frontier America made the difficulties confronted in observance of a rule of enclosure clear to Mother John Hughes, and her sister, Mother Agnes Hughes, when they brought a small colony of Presentations to what is now South Dakota, in 1880. The nuns made their way from Ireland to Wheeler, by ship, rail and cart, unaware that it was common for the Dakota Territories to have droughts in summer, and severe cold in winter. Other disasters could also wreak havoc. As recently as 1875, a plague of locusts had swept from Saskatchewan to Texas, in a swarm that was 1800 miles long and 110 miles wide, destroying crops and causing widespread starvation. Many homesteaders had abandoned their land and moved back East. When the nuns arrived in Wheeler in the autumn, they could not have anticipated that they were about to face a winter that would destroy the livelihoods of many more frontier families. Severe snowfall started in October, and continued through May. Trains could not reach the nearest town, and there was no way to leave. People slaughtered and ate their livestock. When food finally ran out, they ate the seed that had been stored for planting the following spring. Mother John recorded how the nuns survived their first winter:

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We have got no milk direct from the cow since October. … Those who can afford may kill a fat cow, cut it up in suitable pieces and hang it out of doors and use it as required, we have done so already and at present we have a large antelope in this way. … We had a great number of fowl but nearly all have frozen to death—we shall be more experienced next year.63

When the thaw came in April 1881, and heavy rain started, the sod-and-­ stone house which served as their convent began to collapse. Around them, many houses were washed away. The nuns eventually turned to the Sisters of Mercy in Yankton, for a temporary home. In June 1882, they moved to Fargo and took over a parish school, and Mother John Hughes began in earnest her project of expansion in America. She returned to Ireland in 1885 to recruit more Presentation sisters, and then accepted an invitation to make a foundation in Aberdeen, opening a school there in 1886. In 1887, the community opened an academy, or fee-charging school. By the middle of the twentieth century, the Fargo foundation started by Mother Hughes had resulted in a further ten convents, and the Aberdeen foundation had made nineteen additional convents, all of which ran free schools. Histories of many foundations made by Irish women religious show the same pattern: an initial phase in which there are many challenges, followed by a period of growth and expansion. Without a doubt, a disadvantage for the Presentations was that they were founded for the poor, and ran free schools; they only rarely opened fee-charging academies, at the request of the hierarchy, as it ran counter to their Rule. This left them relying on charity, and the support of benevolent Catholic families, in order to survive and expand. The Sisters of Mercy, on the other hand, were able to open fee-charging schools where there was a clear demand for such schools, and this gave them a much-needed income in order to run their free schools and expand in America. It also made them a very popular choice for Irish bishops who were looking for nuns to make foundations: a Mercy foundation could result in enough nuns to run a fee-charging boarding school, and free day school, and even support a hospital and take over a parish school that had no Catholic teachers. Some clergymen were quite frank about their preference for the Sisters of Mercy. Because the order were well-known as educators, it was a kind of victory for a bishop or priest to secure them for a parish. In 1860, the Rev. James Moynihan wrote to Archbishop Blanc about his need to recruit Irish Sisters of Mercy in Crescent City, New Orleans, saying: ‘It will be a rich scene to witness me sweeping the Catholic girls out of the

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corporation school’. However, he had to acknowledge that the ‘Sisters of Mercy are impossible to get’, and he instead satisfied himself with a group of Irish Dominicans, on the basis that they were ‘tiptop educators [who] can teach French, music etc.’64 In Australia, of the various congregations of women religious who left Ireland to found and run schools in Australia, the Sisters of Mercy were also the most popular with bishops, because of the way in which their convents were established. If a Mercy foundation established a new convent that was outside its diocese, the new convent was not a branch house, rather it was a new and separate house with local autonomy, and it recognised the authority of the local bishop or ordinary. This model suited bishops, many of whom tended to view convent property as theirs, even when it had been supplied by benefactors who wanted to support the nuns. Some bishops also believed that they should exert control over nuns in their diocese. When Bishop John Brady, an Irish-born and French-­ educated priest, welcomed the Sisters of Mercy to Perth in 1846, he assumed ‘the seriously-imposed Tridentine role of guardian of the cloister’.65 The Sisters of Mercy were nonplussed, not least because they had no rule of enclosure. The Superior, Mother Ursula Frayne, wrote home to Dublin to say that the bishop had the erroneous idea that ‘his visits gave us pleasure and that it was necessary that he should be a good deal with us … but he little knew how independent the Sisters of Mercy are’.66 In an unpleasant show of power, Bishop Brady at one point placed the Perth community under an interdict, censuring them for allowing a doctor to visit a nun. He was also enraged when, upon arriving at the convent in his liturgical vestments and accompanied by a solemn retinue of priests, the nuns failed to respond ‘with the appropriate protocol’.67 Generally, the Sisters of Mercy seem to have regarded Bishop Brady with benign amusement, and eventually they set about developing several free and fee-­ charging schools. The rapid growth of Mercy and Presentation convents in nineteenth-­ century Australia was in part a consequence of the appointment of Irish bishops to newly forming diocese. In 1859, James Quinn was appointed bishop of Brisbane. His younger brother, Matthew, was appointed bishop of Bathurst in 1865, and in the same year their cousin, James Murray, was appointed bishop of Maitland. Their years at the Irish College in Rome, under the rectorship of Dr Paul Cullen, and their connections to powerful Catholic families in Ireland including that of Archbishop Daniel Murray, gave them access to invaluable networks. They regularly appealed to their

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relatives who held positions of influence in Irish convents, to seek Irish nuns to support their efforts in education in Australia. For example, their brother was parish priest in Athy, and made an appeal on behalf of his brothers to one of their cousins, Mother Teresa Maher, who was the Reverend Mother at the Mercy Convent in Athy. Teresa Maher accepted many novices who entered the convent specifically ‘for the Brisbane Mission’.68 Because James Quinn had been chaplain to the Sisters of Mercy at their motherhouse on Baggott Street in Dublin, he was also well placed to ask for support there. With the help of Dr Cullen, he secured Mother Vincent Whitty, who would lead the Brisbane foundation, and the expansion that followed from it. Bishop Matthew Quinn made his appeal to Dr Thomas Croke, who had been a fellow student in Rome, and who had two sisters in the Mercy Convent in Charleville, Co. Cork. One of these women, Mother Ignatius Croke, agreed to accompany Quinn to Bathurst in 1866, bringing four nuns and two novices with her to make a Mercy foundation. In addition to teaching in the Girls’ Denominational School, they founded a high school and a select day school in Bathurst, and ran night classes for adults. Quinn made a visit home to Ireland in 1875, to recruit twenty more entrants for the Bathurst foundation, and a further thirteen followed in 1884.69 When the first bishop of Tasmania was appointed, he too was an Irishman, Daniel Murphy. His sister, who was superior of the Presentation Convent in Fermoy, Co. Cork, travelled to Tasmania to make a new foundation in Hobart. She brought three professed nuns and six young women who had volunteered for the mission. In Melbourne, the first Catholic bishop was James Goold, a member of a distinguished Cork merchant family. He too secured Irish nuns for his diocese. Although bishops were more than glad to get so many Mercy and Presentation nuns to come to Australia, they made many demands on these congregations, including requiring them to open fee-charging schools for the middle classes, even though they had been founded to educate the poor. This was a battle that nuns had fought elsewhere. Mother Frances Warde, who made the first American Mercy foundation in 1843, regretted having not asked the Mercy foundress, Mother Catherine McAuley, for clarity about the question of providing pay schools (day and boarding). While pay day schools met a local need, boarding schools seemed very elite, and outside the mission of both the Mercys and the Presentations. In 1852, permission was obtained from Rome for Mother Warde to open female ‘academies’ in America. In Australia, this thorny

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issue arose in 1857, when Mother Ursula Frayne was asked to open a Mercy day school and boarding school in Melbourne. The diocese of Melbourne had a well-established system of Catholic primary schools, but Bishop Goold needed schools for the growing middle-class population of Victoria. Once again, the nuns had to accept the argument that the daughters of the middle classes were in need of an education, as they were the future mothers of Catholic families.70 In Hobart, the Presentations were also prevailed upon by Bishop Murphy. While the free schools of the Sisters of Charity were catering to the poor, Murphy also wanted schools that would provide an academic education to the middle ranks. In an astute move, when he welcomed the Presentations to Hobart he also secured for them a papal dispensation from their constitutions, so that they could open a boarding school for young ladies, on the grounds that there was no other available provision for this class of Catholic females. Between 1851 and 1895, public funding was withdrawn from all non-­ government schools in the Australian colonies. Catholic bishops urgently sought more teaching sisters, to take over the work of running the Catholic free schools. The Mercy convent in Goulburn, New South Wales, which had been founded from Co. Mayo in 1859, was strengthened by the arrival of eighteen Irish-born postulants between 1860 and 1883. They were then in a position to take over the parochial schools in Boorowa, Cootamundra and Gundagai. Women religious also became involved in teacher training, to prepare Catholic girls to staff Catholic denominational schools. In Brisbane, Mother Vincent Whitty and Mother Bridget Conlan continued to seek out Irish aspirants and novices who had certificates from the National Board of Education. Returning from Ireland following a questing visit between 1870 and 1872, Mother Whitty brought back about thirty new members. Summer of 1871 had seen her visit the Mercy Convent in Tralee, where she impressed on the community that she needed more novices and nuns in order to expand the Mercy presence in Brisbane. Whitty wanted to ‘induce but not to persuade’ the community, who recorded how the final group of volunteers were selected: [Mother Vincent Whitty] … wound up by saying she would hang a small basket before our Blessed Lady’s statue, and that all who wished might put their names into it. The next morning she found 15 names of willing candidates for the glorious work. … The names were submitted to His Lordship, Most Rev. Dr Moriarty who limited the number to three, wisely remembering that well-ordered charity begins at home.71

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Mother Vincent asked the Tralee convent to train the young women before their departure for Brisbane. Similarly, those she recruited from the Mercy Convent in Tullamore were trained to teach and had been ‘examined by two Inspectors of National Schools and were classified as teachers’.72 Mother Conlan secured sixty new members, and brought them to Brisbane in 1880.73 At around the same time, Mother Ursula Frayne was recruiting for the Convent of Mercy on Nicholson Street, in Melbourne, and she also wanted skilled teachers. In 1878, Frayne was pleased to accept postulants from two Mercy convents, St Leo’s in Carlow, and St Brigid’s Missionary School in Callan, because of the calibre of their own schooling.74 Two more from St Leo’s followed to Melbourne in 1879 and another in 1888.75 The Dominicans also made three separate foundations in Australia, and expanded on their arrival. The first group, comprising seven religious, arrived in Adelaide in 1868. They went out at the invitation of Laurence Sheil, Bishop of Adelaide, who wanted Dominicans because they ‘aim at the very highest standards in all departments’ and adopt ‘the best methods’ in teaching.76 A second group followed in 1874, and found themselves travelling on the same ship as Mother Mary McKillop and fifteen recruits for her Sisters of St Joseph, and a group of Sisters of the Good Shepherd. Eastern Australia saw Irish Dominicans arriving into the diocese of Maitland in 1867, following the appointment of Dr James Murray as bishop in 1865. Murray knew the Dominican nuns at St Mary’s Convent, Kingstown (now Dun Laoghaire) in Co. Dublin. He had several cousins in the convent, and visited them before departing for Maitland to indicate that he would need their support. Within a year of his arrival in Maitland, he wrote to the Prioress to say that her nuns were ‘wanted very badly here’.77 His aims for Catholic schooling relied on getting sufficient religious, as indicated in January 1867: I have set my heart on having magnificent schools at Maitland in order to give a prestige to Catholic education in this district, and I am persuaded that the Sisters of St Mary’s [Kingstown] will carry out my aims to the fullest extent. The Government have passed a most iniquitous law in education which renders it Godless … but in the larger towns where we can secure a good attendance of children, our schools will not be affected by the new law. Our school in Maitland will be to all intents and purposes a Denominational school in which we can do as we please … we shall have ample means to do

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everything for the Nuns so that they may have their poor schools and their schools for respectable day-scholars and boarders.78

Murray’s resistance to ‘Godless’ state education included that he wanted the nuns to bring their own text books, and some of the textbooks of the Christian Brothers, to use in their schools.79 He succeeded in getting eight Dominican nuns, and they departed for Maitland on 8 June 1867. Following a three-month journey, the women reached Maitland, opening a school within five days of their arrival there. They were asked to take over St John’s elementary school, with 140 children; shortly after that they also opened a pension day school. In 1868, they opened a boarding school, and were supported by the arrival of another group of Wicklow Dominicans. Further groups followed, in 1871, 1875 and 1883. In addition to expanding in Maitland and in Newcastle, the Irish Dominicans opened free schools and pension schools in Sydney at the invitation of Cardinal Moran, Archbishop of Sydney. By the 1880s, though Bishop Murray had secured many Irish nuns for Maitland, he wanted more. He turned once again to Mother Michael Maher at St Brigid’s Missionary School in Callan, saying: ‘I have now seven Convents of the Sisters of Mercy and … they are all working very hard’. He nonetheless pressed for more postulants, adding: ‘All my time [is] taken up in providing teachers for all our schools from which Government aid was withdrawn in January last’.80 When he heard that Mother Michael had ‘five promising aspirants for Maitland … and hoped to secure three more’, his reply was direct: ‘We will want them all’.81 By the end of the decade, Dr Murray wrote to assure Mother Michael: ‘All your nuns out here are doing wonderfully well’. He added that the Superiors at various convent schools were ‘greatly pleased with the training you gave them’.82 The continued practice of securing Irish religious, especially those who had a good education and some teacher training, remained an important part of Mercy expansion. Even as they were seeking young women for Australia, they were also continuing to recruit for America: Mother Baptist Russell came to seek postulants at the Mercy Convent in Skibbereen, in 1879, and Mother Austin Carroll arrived there over a decade later to see if the convent could spare ‘postulants for her convent in Alabama’.83 This ongoing supply of Irish postulants, novices and professed nuns would form part of the teaching staff in the Catholic free schools, and in the expanding number of fee-charging schools.

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Provision for Parents Who Could Pay: Academies, Boarding Schools and Day Schools The earliest convent academy in America was established by the Ursulines in 1727, in New Orleans. It grew in enrolments and reputation, and became an important centre of women’s higher schooling in Louisiana, though it would be almost a century before convent schools would begin to grow in number. The number of Catholic orders of women slowly increased after the Revolution, with the repeal of laws that discriminated against Catholics. Nuns began to open elite boarding schools for girls: in 1820, there were ten convent academies in America; this number grew to ninety-one by 1850. By the end of the century there were 662 convent academies, and the number continued to grow across the turn of the century (see Table 5.2) The period between about 1830 and 1860 has been identified as the period of the ‘convent revolution’.84 It was also the period of ‘industrial take off’ in the United States. The market for fee-charging convent schooling was influenced by the impact of industrialisation and economic growth. Table 5.2 Catholic female academies in the United States, 1820–1900

Year

Academies Rate of increase (%)

1820 1830 1840 1850 1860 1870 1880 1890 1900

10 20 47 91 201 x 511 624 662

n/a 100 135 94 121 x 154 22 6

Source: Joseph G. Mannard, ‘“Our Dear Houses Are Here, There + Every Where”: the convent revolution in antebellum America’, American Catholic Studies 128, No. 2 (2017), 11. Compiled from data in The Metropolitan Catholic Almanac and Laity’s Directory (Baltimore: various publishers, 1833–1900); Edward J Goebel, A Study of Catholic Secondary Education during the Colonial Period, Up to the First Plenary Council of Baltimore, 1852 (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1937)

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Day schools attracted Catholic families who wanted their daughters to have some of the benefits of a private education, but could not quite afford elite convent boarding schools, or academies. This ‘middle class of moderate means’85 included those who made their money in local industries and trade. Exclusive academies—especially those run by European congregations with a longstanding reputation for elite education—catered to the smaller number of wealthy Catholics, including those with ‘new money’ made through gold mining, railways and property. The academies were not only supported by Catholics; they were popular with Protestant families, and this was well-known by both nuns and bishops. Middle-class Protestants even appealed to clergy and nuns to open schools in frontier towns, to give their daughters a genteel education in a safe, all-female environment. One traveller in the US noted: Protestants of various denominations including those most prominent in their hostility to the Catholic Church, send their children to be instructed by the Sisters. … As I passed through America, I found that this custom was almost universal. … Though the most violent opposition is offered to the practice in most instances, it would appear to be generally on the increase.86

However, as the number of convent academies grew, Protestant clergy and educators proclaimed them to be a threat to the American ‘social fabric’ on the western frontier.87 The American Women’s Educational Association wrote that the growth in convent academies was a sure indication that Catholics ‘mean to make the “mothers” who will make the nation’.88 Academies grew in number in the West, where families—including Protestants—wanted the kind of elite schools run by French orders that had become popular in the East, especially in Boston, New York, New Orleans and Georgetown. Particularly well-known academies included that run by the Society of the Sacred Heart in Manhattanville. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, convent academies offered a curriculum that comprised reading and writing, arithmetic, music, French, needlework and dancing. It was an offering that came under criticism by education reformers including Catherine Beecher, Mary Lyon and Emma Willard, who saw convent education as limiting for girls. Beecher, who surveyed the number of convent schools, found that they were more numerous than Protestant academies, and urged Protestants to avoid them.89 Her concern was not misplaced: so popular were the academies of the Society of the Sacred Heart, that one third of the pupils at their

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Chicago academy were Protestant, between 1858 and 1870.90 Beecher and her supporters argued that nuns—who had rejected marriage in favour of celibacy and the cloister—could not possibly prepare future generations of American women to be mothers and wives. They also criticised the emphasis on ‘female accomplishments’, arguing in favour of a more rigorous and comprehensive education for girls. The teaching at the earliest convent schools was compromised by a lack of books and materials, for which nuns had to compensate by making their own reading books and teaching aids. The Society of the Sacred Heart copied out materials to use in their boarding school in St Louis in 1821. Mother Philippine Duchesne recalled: I … translated or summarized from English books the history of America and Roman history, and I made an outline of Ancient history. All of this has furnished material for teaching the classes. … We have had to make copies of the arithmetic and geography books in use in this country, printed in English. Books are so scarce.91

The Presentations were equally creative in their schools in Newfoundland, where school inspectors in the 1830s had recognised the ‘great want of reading matter’.92 In order to teach reading, the nuns improvised by cutting up ‘advertisements and handbills, and forming them into words and syllables’.93 They also made their own reading books by copying out pieces from encyclopaedias, and illustrating them with their own drawings. Their practical approach to pedagogy had been learned in the Presentation convents in which they had been educated: the Galway Presentation convent that established the Newfoundland foundation had been noted by the Commissioners of Education in Ireland as having ‘educated and trained more teachers than any other institute in Ireland’.94 To equip their schools, they also wrote home to Ireland to request other Presentation convents to send out sheet music, lace patterns and holy pictures to give the pupils. Their industry resulted in the Presentation Convent in St John’s being singled out in 1864, in a national inspection of schools. The inspectors wrote that the school provided girls with ‘an education equal to what [girls] receive at boarding schools in England or Ireland’.95 The Sisters of Mercy also improvised in this way, in their early years in Australia and America. Mother Cecilia Maguire wrote from the Mercy Convent in Geelong, to ask the Mercy Convent in Baggott Street, Dublin,

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to send out books, saying that ‘very few books can be had here at all, and all double dear as at home’.96 Mother Frances Warde asked the Irish convents to send parchment to her for her American convents so that the Sisters could draw maps of different countries. The nuns also created ‘geographical plans of study in a series adapted to the different grades of classes’. The material for teaching geography was illustrated with watercolour sketches.97 Using willow branches and parchment, the nuns created globes; blackboards were made by nailing timber to the wall and painting the surface black. Counting frames were also made by the nuns, by stretching strings of wire between elm frames, onto which painted spools were strung.98 As the number of academies grew, so too did the range of subjects on offer by nuns. Some congregations were particularly noted for their high academic standards, including the academies of the Sisters of Mercy, the Society of the Sacred Heart and the Sisters of St Joseph. With the arrival of well-educated women from Europe, it was possible for these schools to offer continental languages. Irish nuns who had been educated by the Society of the Sacred Heart, the Ursulines, the Mercy and the Loreto order, all contributed to this kind of education. Mother Frances Warde promoted Latin in the academies of the Sisters of Mercy, because she believed it disciplined the mind, and she required that French should be taught with ‘abundant practice in conversation’, because it was ‘the language of polite society’.99 The Mount St Vernon Academy, opened by Warde in an area called Latrobe outside Pittsburgh, advertised its curriculum in the Pittsburgh Catholic in 1845. The academy offered ‘English grammar, rhetoric, and composition; history, ancient and modern; philosophy; French; Italian; astronomy; geography; mathematics; music; and Christian Doctrine.’100 This was fairly typical of an academy at that time: in 1858 the Immaculate Conception Academy, in Iowa, listed the same subjects as well as ‘Book-keeping … Chemistry … Physiology, Botany … Grecian and Oriental Painting, and practical instruction in Needle-work, both plain and Ornamental’.101 All of these subjects were scheduled into parts of the day allocated to ‘study’, ‘preparation’ and ‘recitation’. The delivery of a lesson, followed by reinforcement and written work, was the main teaching approach. There was also some time for recreation, and—most importantly— prayers and religious instruction were timetabled throughout the day. The convent academies were usually impressive buildings, either bought

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because of their size and elegance, or built by the nuns. The scale of the buildings was not only substantial because of the number of pupils and nuns to be accommodated, but because they were built to withstand the test of time, and to assert the confidence of the Catholic church. Newly opened in 1895, the Young Ladies’ College that the Sisters of Mercy established on Victoria Square, Perth, offers an example of a typical academy (see Fig.5.3). The curriculum in convent academies in America was the same as that in Ireland, Australia or even India. For example, when the first Loreto convent opened in Calcutta, the Bengal Herald advertised that the nuns would be educating ‘young ladies’ in ‘Writing, Arithmetic, Grammar, Geography, Chronology, History, Use of Globes, French etc. with every branch of Useful and Ornamental Needlework’.102 Drawing and dancing were also to be taught, and ‘the moral and religious principles’ of the pupils were ‘watched over with strictest attention’.103 Meanwhile in Mauritius, the Loreto prospectus published in Le Mauricien (1845)

Fig. 5.3  The Young Ladies’ College, Goderick Street, Victoria Square, Perth, 1895. (By kind permission of the Mercy Congregational Archives, Dublin)

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indicated that the convent boarding school offered tuition in ‘modern languages, arithmetic, writing, history, geography and art’.104 Dominican boarding schools were also known for this kind of curriculum. For example, St Mary’s Dominican Academy for Young Ladies, in New Orleans, advertised the usual range of academic subject, as well as botany, astronomy, rhetoric, chronology, and ‘all the accomplishments necessary to complete the education of a young lady’.105 In Australia, the convent ‘seminaries’ for young ladies also offered European languages, geography, painting and music. The prospectus for the Dominican Convent of St Mary and St Laurence O’Toole, in Maitland indicated that the nuns would teach ‘English, French, Italian, and German languages, History, Geography, and the use of the Globes, Writing, Arithmetic, Needlework … [and] Music’.106 Mary’s Mount, the Loreto boarding school in Ballarat, also offered calisthenics, and elementary science. The nineteenth-century convent boarding school ‘formed’ its pupils in the ethos and educational principles of the order that owned it. All of the Loreto convent schools, and those of the Society of the Sacred Heart, for example, were influenced by the Jesuit spirituality of St Ignatius, and the belief that the education of the upper classes created an ‘elite corps’ which would, in turn, lead others.107 This kind of spiritual formation served to unify schools and convents, across geographical boundaries, and served to make religious orders transnational organisations. Spiritual formation was of premier importance; however, academic and social formation were also part and parcel of convent schooling. As the Society of the Sacred Heart indicated in its Constitutions, religion was the ‘foundation and the crowning point’ of education: ‘the rest is only accessory’.108 Academies certainly aimed to create good Catholic gentlewomen, but they also provided costly tuition that would, in due course, prepare young women to enter colleges of higher education. In Chicago, at the elite St Xavier’s Academy founded by the Sisters of Mercy, the fees were $300 per annum in 1877, with additional charges for ‘extras’: piano music lessons were $60 per annum, while tuition in the harp, violin and oil painting cost $80. Fees at Sacred Heart academies in the second half of the nineteenth century were between $200 and $300, and ‘extras’ included ‘vocal training’ ($120) and drawing ($40). Instrumental music at the Sacred Heart academies was as costly as at the Mercy academies, and lessons in the harp were always the most costly ‘extra’ that a pupil might choose. These costs were not unusual for the elite academies, where parents expected high standards of tuition.

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The study of English literature held a high place, and the nuns taught composition, rhetoric, grammar and penmanship. Pupils read Dickens, Dante, Coleridge and Shakespeare. They also studied selections from the essays of Macaulay, together with Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe and Milton’s Paradise Lost.109 English lessons also served to inculcate Catholic values, and pupils were given writing assignments on moral topics. Similarly, the study of history included the history of the Church; while it was imbued with instruction in values, it also required girls to engage in debate on these values. In 1909, an examination in history given to Sacred Heart academy pupils asked them to ‘judge by ethical principles … the depiction and execution of Charles I; the Spanish Inquisition … [and] the suppression of the Jesuits’.110 The academies of the Society of the Sacred Heart had their own rigorous examination system, which included competitive oral examinations, and weekly marks for classroom performance. Examining was nothing new to the Ursulines, Dominicans and Presentations either: their Irish convents had been submitting girls for the Intermediate Examinations from the end of the 1870s onwards. Nuns who went overseas had, in many cases, taken competitive national examinations at school, and knew how they were administered. Nuns were also trained in methods to ensure order, and these methods were used in all of their international boarding schools. For example, a hand-held small wooden ‘clicker’ was used in Sacred Heart convents to indicate when pupils were to stand, sit or walk; other orders used subtle hand gestures that were well-known by the pupils. The Loreto nuns also had a ‘system’ for discipline, which was carefully explained by Loreto Chief Superior, Mother Teresa Ball, in letters to her global foundations: Every Instructress has a copy book: the names of her pupils are therein inserted; lessons in languages, music, painting; conduct, order, diligence, politeness, are affixed to each name: a good, bad, or indifferent mark is placed at the end of the lesson. If a pupil be absent, her omission is noted: one mark is, daily, noted for good conduct, for a pupil, by each mistress; d[itto] for each branch. At the end of three months, each mistress adds the marks, for the 1st Mistress who reads them aloud before Revd Mother in the Examination Hall, for nuns and pupils. Revd Mother confers ribands of merit.111

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By the beginning of the twentieth century, nuns at Sacred Heart academies in America were using standardised testing for graduating classes in subjects including Latin, mathematics, French and literature. The Loreto order also developed systematic examining in their academies, and a standard of female education was promoted for all Loreto schools worldwide, under the direction of the Irish Mother General, Michael Corcoran. Corcoran was also a champion of physical education, which gained popularity in girls’ boarding schools in the second half of the nineteenth century. Dance, gymnastics and team sports became commonplace in academies and select boarding schools. Once again, nuns who had been at school in elite Irish convent schools would have been familiar with how these were taught. As early as 1839, dance was part of the curriculum in the Dominican Convent, Drogheda. Mother Janet Erskine Stuart, who articulated the education philosophy of the Society of the Sacred Heart in the influential The Education of Catholic Girls, wrote that dance was ‘the perfect exercise for children and young people’.112 Swedish gymnastics became popular from the late nineteenth century, and some boarding schools bought special equipment including parallel bars and dumb bells; cricket and tennis also became popular in elite boarding schools for girls. In nineteenth-century convent schools, pupils usually wore a simple dark dress, sometimes with a sash or collar, during the week; for Sundays and holy days pupils usually had a white dress, and a veil or bonnet. At the academies that belonged to congregations with a presence in many countries, a style of dress was adopted that had common features. For example, different coloured sashes were worn by boarders in Loreto schools, and at the academies of the Society of the Sacred Heart. Philippine Duchesne wrote that the pupils in Missouri ‘dress on Sundays like our boarding pupils in Paris’.113 Whether in Ireland, France or America, a common style of dress served to unify the schools of different orders. By the early twentieth century, convent schools would adopt the wearing of uniforms; typically girls wore a gymslip and blouse, and a school crest was displayed on a blazer or hat. The style of school uniforms in girls’ convent schools was remarkably similar across continents, and went relatively unchanged until the second half of the twentieth century.114 Another important way that convent academies developed their identity, and shared parts of this across geographical boundaries, was through

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the publication and exchange of school magazines. For example, the Loreto publication in Australia was known as Eucalyptus Blossoms. Begun at Mary’s Mount, it was one of the earliest school magazines in Australia. Pupils provided the articles, and Mother Gonzaga Barry contributed an introductory letter. These letters included reflections on current affairs, such as a commentary on the federation of the Australia colonies in 1901, and descriptions of sights that she had seen while sailing back to Ireland, in 1887. The magazine, which was sent out of the country to other Loreto convents, and which published news of other Loreto schools, served to connect Mary’s Mount with the expanding world of Loreto education. It also communicated news of education innovations at Mary’s Mount, such as the introduction of the Sloyd system in 1889. The system promoted training in manual skills such as cooking, decorating and carpentry. A Sloyd room, pioneered by Mother Gonzaga Barry at Mary’s Mount, was described in Eucalyptus Blossoms: Our ‘Sloyd’ room … contains a printing press … a washing machine, a cooking range … a sewing machine, etc.; and in the near future we are to have there a class of wood-carving, and another for house painting and decoration.115

In Canada, Loreto schools published The Rainbow [later the Niagara Rainbow]. Again, the school magazine had a wider function than recording the activities of schoolgirls: it brought the wider Loreto world to Canada, while communicating outwards about the Canadian foundations. For example, an Irish pupil in Loreto Convent Dalkey submitted an article to The Rainbow, describing the various ‘high days and holy days, feasts, anniversaries, and birthdays’ that the pupils had celebrated.116 The Rainbow also reprinted articles from Eucalyptus Blossoms, if they contained news about the international Loreto schools. For example, both magazines ran a feature on ‘Loretto in Distant Lands’, describing this as an ‘inter-change of experience between Loretto [sic] girls living “under palm and pine”’. It included submissions from the Loreto convent pupils in Darjeeling and Spain. The Anglocentric nature of the pieces served to highlight what the pupils believed they had in common with other Loreto pupils. For example, a Darjeeling boarder, Ethel Robertson, described how the school was ‘preparing for an entertainment … a Handel soiree [and] an English adaptation of Racine’s Esther. … Tableaux will illustrate the Water Music’.117 Not to be outdone, a pupil from Spain described a visit to their convent

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school from ‘the Infanta Isabel, the Queen Mother, and the Princesses Christiana and Mercedes’.118 Later issues of the magazine adopted a more serious tone, and included arguments in support of college education for women. The Rainbow also reported examination successes, including those of Loreto pupils in other countries. For example, Canadian Loreto pupils reported the matriculation successes of Irish Loreto pupils in 1914, not without a gentle slight at a competing Protestant college for girls: [Loreto St Stephen’s Green] … headed the list of educational establishments that secured entrance Scholarships to the National University, taking first place, with the fine total of thirty-one distinctions, and distancing its Northern rival—Victoria College, Belfast—by no less than eight awards.119

School magazines were just one of many ways to communicate the education mission of a teaching order, and to create a sense of shared identity in different countries. This collective identity was also promoted by Superiors who made official ‘visitations’, by constant letter writing between nuns in different convents. The use of slide shows was a popular way of communicating the global reach of an order, and some nuns—such as Mother Michael Corcoran—travelled with a camera, and boxes of glass plate slides, in order to make ‘educational’ images to use in the early twentieth century (see Fig.  5.4). Corcoran also collected ephemera—including weapons, tools, musical instruments, stuffed animals and birds—to display in a school ‘museum’ at Loreto Abbey. Like other Superiors, she circulated objects around her schools: small Irish harps were sent to Australia, and an Indian sitar was shipped to Dublin. The practice of collecting culturally specific objects was imitated by Mother Gonzaga Barry in Australia, and there is evidence that many other Irish nuns who travelled outside the country in the nineteenth century similarly became collectors of an array of pedagogical objects. The collecting habits of a nun like Michael Corcoran call to mind the travel diaries of the first Irish nuns to leave the country to make foundations in America and Australia, which were discussed in Chap. 1. They hint at how some Irish women experienced leaving a small island country, to go out into the world and attempt to somehow understand what they saw, so that they could communicate it to their pupils. The challenge of trying to use archival sources to get a nuanced understanding of that kind of communication is discussed in Chap. 6.

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Fig. 5.4  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)

Notes 1. For example, in the Midwestern diocese of St Louis in 1880, there were 1,033 nuns and 260 priests. In Chicago in 1890, there were 1,063 nuns and 323 priests. In the same year, there were 1,399 nuns and 266 priests in the diocese of Cincinnati. See Eileen Mary Brewer, Nuns and the

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Education of American Catholic Women, 1860–1920 (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1987), 16–17. 2. In particular, Duchesne relied on the Irish-born Mother Anna Shannon, whose fluency in French and English was invaluable to Duchesne. The Superior considered Anna Shannon to be her right hand, in the American mission. Shannon, who would become Vice-Vicar of Louisiana, was given considerable leadership. She made a Sacred Heart foundation at St Joseph, Missouri, and was Superior and Mistress General at Grand Coteau. She was also Superior at St Michel, and made a foundation at New Orleans in 1867. Shannon’s life is discussed in 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), 12–15 passim. 3. For a study of Duchesne and her frontier convent schools, see Louise Callan, Philippine Duchesne, Frontier Missionary of the Sacred Heart, 1769–1852 (Maryland: Newman Press, 1957); chapter two, entitled ‘Building on the Frontier’, charts the years 1891–1921, during which time Anna Murphy offered herself for the American mission. 4. Mother Philippine Duchesne to Mother Madeleine Sophie Barat, 18 February 1821, cited in Callan, Philippine Duchesne, 332. 5. Mother Philippine Duchesne to Mother Madeleine Sophie Barat, 20 November 1818, cited in Callan, Philippine Duchesne, 280. 6. The convent was established at the request of Bishop Du Bourg, when a ‘rich widow’ left a house and land for the use of the Society of the Sacred Heart. See Callan, Philippine Duchesne, 341. 7. Journal of Mother Philippine Duchesne, cited in Callan, Philippine Duchesne, 596. 8. M. Delphine Hart to M. Teresa Ball, 19 January 1842, IND/4/1, Loreto Congregation Institute and Provincial Archives, Dublin (hereafter LCIPA). 9. M. Delphine Hart to M. Teresa Ball, 14 May 1844, TB/IND/4/4, LCIPA. 10. M. Delphine Hart to M. Teresa Ball, 7 December 1858, IND/4/1, LCIPA. 11. Evangeline MacDonald, Joyful Mother of Children: Mother Frances Mary Teresa Ball (Dublin: Gill and Son, 1961), 196. 12. Annals of St Leo’s [Mercy] Convent Carlow, 1842, C19, Mercy Congregational Archives, Dublin (hereafter MCAD). 13. Annals of St Leo’s [Mercy] Convent Carlow, 1848, C19, MCAD. 14. Kathleen Healy, Frances Warde: American Founder of the Sisters of Mercy (New York: The Seabury Press, 1973), 302. 15. Ibid., 399. 16. Ibid., 401.

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17. Dr Goold, Archbishop of Melbourne, travelled to Ireland in 1851 with the hope of securing women religious to open Catholic schools. He was unsuccessful at that time. See Mary Ryllis Clarke, Loreto in Australia (Sydney: New South Wales University Press, 2009), 49. 18. Mother M.  Gonzaga Barry, Diary of the voyage to Australia, 1875, Loreto Province Archive Australia, Ballarat (hereafter LPAAU). 19. Typescript, ‘Mother Gonzaga Barry, Her Life and Letters, Vol. 1’, compiled by M. Francis Tobin, 41, LCIPA. 20. Ibid. 21. Ballarat Courier [n.d., 1875], cited in Ryllis Clarke, Loreto in Australia, 54–5. 22. See Ryllis Clarke, Loreto in Australia, 56. 23. Ibid., 62–3. 24. Ibid., 94. 25. The Society of the Sacred Heart used French terms for the various offices and duties occupied by women religious, and lay sisters were coadjutrix. 26. Society of the Sacred Heart, Lettres Annuelles, Vicariate of the North East, 1900–1902, Vol. 3, Manhattanville, 12–16, Society of the Sacred Heart Archives Dublin (hereafter SSHAD). The Lettres Annuelles cited in this chapter have been translated by Catherine KilBride. 27. Society of the Sacred Heart, Lettres Annuelles, Vicariate of the North East, 1900–1902, Vol. 3, Halifax, 168–170. SSHAD. 28. Society of the Sacred Heart, Lettres Annuelles, Vicariate of the North East, 1900–1902, Vol. 3, Maryville, 291–3. SSHAD. 29. See Janet Erskine Stuart, The Society of the Sacred Heart (Roehampton: Convent of the Sacred Heart, 1923), 26–7; and Christine Trimmingham Jack, ‘The Lay Sister in Educational History and Memory’, History of Education 29, no. 3 (2000), 181–94. 30. Society of the Sacred Heart, Lettres Annuelles, Vicariate of the North East, 1900–1902, Vol. 3, Eden Hall, 40–1. SSHAD. 31. Society of the Sacred Heart, Lettres Annuelles, Vicariate of the North East, 1900–1902, Vol. 3, Missouri-Louisiana, 256–8. SSHAD. 32. Society of the Sacred Heart, Lettres Annuelles, Vicariate of the North East, 1900–1902, Vol. 3, New York Eden Hall, 75–6. SSHAD. 33. Mother Frances Warde and the Sisters of Mercy were aware of the way in which women servants were abused, and established refuges for them. Hasia Diner discusses some of the ways in which nuns provided refuges for Irish women immigrants, in Diner, Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983). 34. Margaret M. McGuinness, Called to Serve: a History of Nuns in America (New York & London: New York University Press, 2013), 68.

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35. The terms ‘parochial school’ and ‘parish school’ are used interchangeably, and refer to schools under parish auspices. There were also other provisions for Catholics, such as schools that were under the authority of the diocese or different religious congregations; additionally, as will be seen in this chapter, nuns ran their own elite academies, large boarding schools, and day schools (free and fee-charging) and some taught in public schools. 36. Kim Tolley, ‘“Many years before the Mayflower”: Catholic Academies and the Development of Parish High Schools in the United States, 1727–1925’, in Nancy Beadie and Kim Tolley (eds), Chartered Schools: Two Hundred Years of Independent Academies in the United States, 1727–1925 (London: Taylor and Francis, 2002), 304. 37. Ibid., 310. 38. Timothy Walch, ‘The Catholic press and the campaign for parish schools: Chicago and Milwaukee, 1850–1885’, U.S. Catholic Historian 3, no. 4 (1984), 254. 39. Marvin Lazerson, ‘Understanding American Catholic Educational History’, History of Education Quarterly 17, no. 3 (1977), 298. 40. Ibid., 300. 41. Margaret Susan Thompson, ‘Adaptation and professionalisation: challenges for teaching sisters in a pluralistic nineteenth-century America’, Paedagogica Historica 49, no. 4 (2013), 454. 42. Lazerson, ‘Understanding American Catholic Educational History’, 303. 43. Joseph G.  Mannard, ‘“Our Dear Houses Are Here, There + Every Where”: the convent revolution in antebellum America’, American Catholic Studies 128, no. 2 (2017), 14. 44. McGuinness, Called to Serve, 74; see also Thomson, ‘Adaptation and professionalisation’, 454, and Leslie Woodcock Tentler, Seasons of Grace: a History of the Catholic Archdiocese of Detroit (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990), 230. 45. This is discussed in Raftery et al., Nano Nagle, 83–4. 46. Numbers of Irish-born RSCJs are discussed in Raftery, ‘“Je suis d’aucune Nation.”’ 47. Statistics for Sisters of St Joseph of Carondolet, St Paul Province, St Paul File 20:17, Archives of the Sisters of St Joseph of Carondolet, St Paul Province, Minneapolis (hereafter ACSJSP). 48. For accounts of the life and work of Mother Seraphine Ireland, see Patricia Condon Johnston, ‘The story of Ellen Ireland’, Minnesota History 48, no. 1 (1982), and Helen Angela Hurley, On Good Ground: the Story of the Sisters of St Joseph in St Paul (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1951). 49. Raftery et al., Nano Nagle, 189.

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50. The figure for 1920 is indicated in Eileen Mary Brewer, Nuns and the Education of American Catholic Women, 1860–1920 (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1987), 15. 51. For a survey of the emerging Catholic Church in New South Wales see Mary Rosa MacGinley, A Dynamic of Hope: Institutes of Women Religious in Australia (New South Wales: Crossing Press, 2002), 65–7. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid. 54. Between the first census of 1828 and the census of 1861, the Catholic proportion of the population in New South Wales ranged between 27.9% and 30.5%; this population was predominantly ethnic Irish. See MacGinley, A Dynamic of Hope, 67. 55. Diary of M. Baptist de Lacy, 1838–1857, SER/1674/31, Archives of the Sisters of Charity, Sydney. The ‘Factory’ refers to one of the prisons provided by the colonial government for female convicts during the transportation period. 56. This list is not inclusive of all congregations in Australia in which Irish-­ born women could be found; rather it represents those upon which archival research was undertaken for this book. Indeed, there were also Irish-born women who entered the Australian Sisters of St Joseph, and in the Australian Sisters of the Good Shepherd. For an account of all of the orders of women religious in Australia see MacGinley, A Dynamic of Hope. 57. See Mary J.  Oates, ‘The development of Catholic colleges for women, 1895–1960’, U.S. Catholic Historian 7, no. 4 (1988), 417. 58. Information supplied by PASF; the foundations and filiations in California continued into the second half of the twentieth century, though this is outside the period covered in this book. 59. Healy, Frances Warde, 518. 60. Born to John O’Brien and Elsie Costello in Carlow in 1822, Agatha was one of seventeen children. She was educated by the Presentations, before entering the Sisters of Mercy at St Leo’s Convent, Carlow. She volunteered to go with Mother Frances Warde to Pittsburgh, when the Sisters of Mercy made their first American foundation in 1843. She died at the age of thirty-­two, during a cholera outbreak in Chicago in 1854. See Cooper, Forging Identities in the Irish World, and also ‘A woman capable of making a nation’, https://sistersofmercy.ie/2022/01/a-­woman-­ capable-­of-­making-­a-­nation/ accessed 12 July 2023. 61. Brewer, Nuns and the Education of American Catholic Women, 29. 62. See Raftery et al., Nano Nagle, 192. 63. Mother M. John Hughes to Sister Bridget [Jan 1881], cited in Raftery et al., Nano Nagle, 191.

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64. Cabra Annals, cited in Maura Duggan, In Search of Truth: Journeys of Nineteenth Century Irish Dominican Women (Dublin: Linden Publishing, 2010), 158. The group left the Dominican Convent in Cabra, Dublin, on 6 October 1860 and arrived in New Orleans on 5 November. They were welcomed by the recently appointed Archbishop Odin. The founding group in New Orleans comprised Mother John Flanagan (Prioress), Mother M. Magdalen O’Farrell (Sub-Prioress), Sr Mary Ursula O’Reilly, Sr M. Hyacinth McQuillan, Sr M. Osanna Cahill, Sr M. Bridget Smith and Sr Xavier Gaynor. Within a year, a fifteen-year old American girl, Eliza McNamara, joined the community; another joined in 1862, thereby indicating a secure future for the foundation, and the nuns set about establishing a second boarding school that year. 65. MacGinley, A Dynamic of Hope, 104. 66. Ibid., 105. 67. Ibid. 68. Annals of the Mercy Convent Athy, 1861–68 inc., C6, MCAD.  The Annals record that Catherine Flannagan was the first young woman to enter for the Brisbane Mission, in 1861, and she was professed at the Mercy Convent Athy. Four more women entered for that mission in 1865, and another three in 1866. One group departed for Brisbane in 1866, and a second in 1868. Though they entered in the Mercy Convent Athy, they were professed on arrival in Brisbane. 69. MacGinley, A Dynamic of Hope, 136. 70. The sisters agreed to oblige the bishop, though they also secured space for a House of Mercy to accommodate unemployed poor women, many of whom were Irish immigrants. In addition, the nuns ran an elementary free school, which eventually combined with the parochial school in 1877, and was staffed by sisters. 71. Annals of the Mercy Convent Tralee (1871), C177, MCAD. 72. Annals of the Mercy Convent Tullamore (1871), MCAD. 73. See MacGinley, A Dynamic of Hope, 127. 74. Annals of St Leo’s [Mercy] Convent Carlow (1878), C19, MCAD. 75. Ibid., (1879; 1888). 76. See Duggan, In Search of Truth, 220. The founding group comprised Mother Teresa Moore (Prioress), Sr Catherine Murphy (Sub-Prioress), Sr De Sales Gaffney, Sr Patrick Gaffney, Sr Baptist Meade, and Sr Stephana Waldron. 77. Dr James Murray to Prioress, St Mary’s Convent, Kingstown, 20 Nov 1866, cited in Duggan, In Search of Truth, 224. 78. Dr James Murray to Rev. O’Rourke, 19 Jan 1867, IE/OP/K/DL/G1, Dominican Archives, Cabra, Ireland (hereafter DAC). 79. Ibid.

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80. Dr James Murray to Mother M.  Michael Maher, 6 April 1883, Callan Collection, MCAD. 81. Dr James Murray to Mother M. Michael Maher, 14 April 1884, Callan Collection, MCAD. 82. Dr James Murray to Mother M. Michael Maher, 9 January 1889, Callan Collection, MCAD. 83. Annals of the Mercy Convent Skibbereen (1879; 1891), MCAD. 84. The relationship between economic growth and growth in the number of American convents is examined in Mannard, ‘“Our Dear Houses Are Here, There + Every Where”’, passim. 85. See MacGinley, A Dynamic of Hope, 127. 86. Thomas R.  Butler to Bishop John Purcell, 5 July 1845. Archives, University of Notre Dame. Quoted in Mary Ewens, The Role of the Nun in Nineteenth-Century America: Variations on the International Theme (unpublished Ph.D. diss.: University of Minnesota, 1971) 142, and cited in Oates, ‘Catholic female academies on the frontier’, 134. 87. Mary J. Oates, ‘Catholic female academies on the frontier’, U.S. Catholic Historian 12, no. 4 (1994), 121. 88. American Women’s Educational Association, Second Annual Report (New York, 1854), 20; Ladies’ Society for the Promotion of Education in the West, First Annual Report (Boston, 1847), 21, 31. Quoted in Oates, ‘Catholic female academies’, 121. See also Joseph G.  Mannard, ‘“Maternity … of the Spirit”: Nuns and Domesticity in Antebellum America’, U.S. Catholic Historian 5 (1986): 313. 89. However, as Mannard has noted, Beecher and other Evangelical Protestant women recognised that communities of Catholic women religious were able to expand the female sphere. See Mannard, ‘“Our Dear Houses Are Here, There + Every Where”’, 24–5. 90. See Tolley, ‘“Many years before the Mayflower”’, 308. 91. See Callan, Philippine Duchesne, 348. 92. Journal of the House of Assembly of Newfoundland (1867), p.  639. Provincial Archives, Newfoundland (hereafter PROANFL). 93. Presentation Convent St Mary’s Annals (1853–1986), Presentation Archives Newfoundland (hereafter PANFL). 94. Appendix to the Sixteenth Report of the Commissioners of National Education in Ireland, 1849, 158. 95. ‘Report on the Inspection of Catholic Schools, 1864’ in Journal of the House of Assembly of Newfoundland (1865), p. 537. PROANFL. 96. M.  Cecilia Maguire to M.  Mary of Mercy Norris, 189 April 1860, CMA/4/4/1, MCAD. 97. Anon., Reverend Mother M. Xavier Warde, 140. 98. Ibid., 140–41.

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99. Ibid., 125. 100. Healy, Frances Warde, 169. 101. Sr Mary St Joan of Arc Coogan, History of the Immaculate Conception Academy of Davenport, Iowa (unpublished MA thesis: Catholic University, 1941), 61, cited in Brewer, Nuns and the Education of American Catholic Women, 48. 102. Annals and Chronicle of Loreto House Calcutta, 1841–1926, LSAPA. 103. Ibid. 104. Raftery, Teresa Ball and Loreto Education, 171. 105. The curriculum and teaching is described in Duggan, In Search of Truth, 168. 106. Prospectus, Dominican Convent of St Mary and St Laurence O’Toole, Maitland (1868), cited in Duggan, In Search of Truth, 236. 107. For a discussion of influences on the ‘mission’ of teaching orders see Angelyn Dries, The Missionary Movement in American Catholic History (New York: Orbis Books, 1998). 108. Society of the Sacred Heart ‘Plan of Studies of 1852’, cited in Louise Callan, The Society of the Sacred Heart in North America (London, New York and Toronto: Longmans, Green and Co., 1937), 741. 109. Brewer, Nuns and the Education of American Catholic Women, 53. 110. Ibid., 55. 111. M. Teresa Ball to M. Teresa Dease, 17 Mar. 1857, 1/3/13/4, IBVMCPA. 112. Janet Erskine Stuart, The Education of Catholic Girls (London and New  York: Longman and Green, 1911), 111. For a discussion of the introduction of physical education into convent schools, see Deirdre Raftery and Catriona Delaney, ‘“Un-Irish and un-Catholic”: sports, physical education and girls’ schooling’, Irish Studies Review 27, no. 3 (2019), 325–43. 113. Mother Philippine Duchesne to Mother Madeleine Sophie Barat, 8 October 1818, cited in Callan, Philippine Duchesne, 278. 114. For example, the uniforms worn by girls at the Infant Jesus Convent in Singapore in the 1950s and 1960s were almost identical to that worn by pupils at the Infant Jesus Convent schools in Ireland, Japan and Penang, at that time. See Elaine Myers, Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus, 150 Years in Singapore (Singapore: Infant Jesus Sisters, 2004), 50; Catherine KilBride and Deirdre Raftery, The Voyage Out: Infant Jesus Sisters in Ireland 1909–2009 (Dublin: IJS Centenary Committee, 2009), 92, 151; Dilys Yap, The Convent Light Street: a History of a Community, a School and a Way of Life (Penang: Infant Jesus Sisters, 2001), 52. 115. Eucalyptus Blossoms (1889), cited in Mary Ryllis Clarke, Loreto in Australia, (New South Wales: University of New South Wales Press, 2009), 64.

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116. The Rainbow (Jan 1922), 4–6, IBVMCPA. 117. The Rainbow (July 1923), 155, IBVMCPA. 118. Ibid., 156–7, IBVMCPA. 119. Niagara Rainbow: Loretto Abbey College Number (1913), 144, IBVMCPA.

CHAPTER 6

Conclusion: The Need for Transnational Histories of Women Religious

The involvement of women religious in education in the nineteenth century is an area that is barely understood, as it took place on a vast scale and in many parts of the world. Though they were just one group of education providers, they merit close attention for several reasons. Firstly, and importantly, they were the largest all-female network of educators in the world. They were also the largest all-female transnational network of educators, and they more than merit attention for this reason. As Kay Whitehead and Lynne Trethewey have argued, the conceptual tool of transnationalism allows scholars to explore how ideas, people and objects were rotated around the globe.1 Educational and cultural knowledge do not move beyond national boundaries on their own: as Nelleke Bakker has pointed out, cultural intermediaries are involved in the process of the ‘transnational circulation of pedagogical ideas and concepts’.2 Further, Gabriela Ossenbach and Maria del Mar del Pozo have argued that transnational history allows ‘movement, ebb and circulation’ to provide a framework for the analysis of sources.3 This volume indicates how Irish-born teaching sisters were involved in the circulation of pedagogic ideas in the nineteenth century, bringing their own subject knowledge as well as pedagogic tools and schoolbooks, to other countries. They moved around the globe themselves, and they also circulated pedagogic tools, books printed in Ireland and myriad objects including Irish harps, Irish sheet music and religious iconography that they sourced from their convents at home. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Raftery, Irish Nuns and Education in the Anglophone World, Global Histories of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46201-6_6

163

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The movement of nuns across geographical boundaries was coordinated by their Superiors and by bishops, and adaptation to new countries was eased by the fact that they had been prepared to reproduce their own experience of convent life. It was a transnational movement that was facilitated by the fact that women religious used their own ‘strong bonds’: they had extended networks that comprised family members, friends and enthusiastic philanthropists. They galvanised their contacts to give them accommodation when they were travelling, and to help them to secure properties and material goods, when making new foundations. They were also able to reach back to their Irish motherhouses, and to convents, relatives and friends in Ireland, when they needed financial support, or when they needed chaperones for travel. Their histories are illustrative of entangled history (histoire croisée), that is, ‘narratives that share strong bonds’.4 In an earlier short work, I argued that the transnational history of Irish women religious reveals the existence of webs of connectedness, of ‘strong bonds’ that sustained these women as they expanded their education reach.5 By drawing on a wide range of archival material, this book has provided far greater evidence of the strong bonds that served to connect and support Irish nuns as they went out of the country to make new foundations and teach in schools. While the work of nuns in healthcare and social service is of interest to many scholars, in this book the focus is on education. It looks at evidence for the lives and contributions of Irish-born women, and attempts to add to an understanding of both why they chose religious life, and how they experienced this life. It adds to the work of others—especially Suellen Hoy, Caitriona Clear and Mary Peckham Magray—who have written about nineteenth-century Irish nuns in the past, by looking for evidence of why they were successful in their project of education expansion. As this book has shown, there is much evidence that religious orders provided young Irish women with a route to becoming teachers, and leaders in education. Girls who could not afford much formal education, and girls who had no means to pursue teacher training, were educated and trained within the orders that they entered. Entering a convent also gave Irish girls and women the possibility of travelling abroad without needing the support and protection of a husband or father. While some of the motives women had for entering teaching orders are explored in the early chapters of this book, this theme merits close examination for many orders, drawing on archives in different countries.6 For example, it would be useful to be able to compare records of the motivations and experiences of

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Irish-born religious with those of nuns in other countries. This kind of comparative work would add richness to our understanding of how becoming a nun was an important life choice for tens of thousands of women, worldwide. This book also attempts an exploration of some of the reasons why Irish nuns were welcomed as teachers—especially in America and Australia—in the nineteenth century. Their popularity with bishops and priests, and with parents, was not just because they were English-speaking; it was because their own schooling had given most of them a useful education. Those who had attended convent schools were already well ‘formed’, and were able to provide both academic subjects as well as the traditional ‘female accomplishments’ that were in demand. Those who had attended national schools, including convent national schools, or attended aspirancies, were often very well placed to become teachers: some had been school monitors, and others had attained professional accreditation. The uniformity of convent schooling, worldwide, was another reason why it was easy to recruit teaching sisters from Ireland, across the nineteenth century and well into the century that followed. For instance, it was expected—even demanded—that the curriculum and the co-curricular activities in the American convent academies would imitate those in elite convents in Europe. By examining the educational backgrounds of Irish nuns who went to America, it was possible to show how they were well placed to transport this kind of curriculum to the cities and towns where they opened convent academies. Nineteenth-century convent schooling, wherever it was to be found, tended to both reflect social stratification and support it. An important area for future enquiry would be the ways in which some religious were subversive in their education of girls, especially poor girls, by promoting literacy and by developing skills that allowed girls to earn their own living. Equally, it is important to look for evidence of how religious life often limited the ambitions of teaching sisters and prevented them from bringing about social change, and for evidence of how some nuns neither sought opportunities to challenge social conventions nor wanted to do so. This book has shown that Irish women religious who had been pupils in convent schools were already attuned to the rhythms of religious life, and they had been immersed in the social world of convent schooling. This kind of formation made many of them suitable to send overseas as leaders and as ‘transnational actors’: they knew how to reproduce their own education and training, and they also knew how to transmit the

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charism of the order to which they belonged. As the overall number of nuns in Ireland grew in the mid-nineteenth century, congregations were able to send their members overseas without fear of depleting their number at home. By the end of the nineteenth century, women religious comprised 70% of the total Irish Catholic workforce of priests, brothers and nuns, and there were 368 convents in Ireland, belonging to thirty-five different orders.7 Calculating how many Irish nuns left the country to teach overseas has not been approximated by scholars, but the very clear presence of women religious in education is evident in the archival records of teaching orders of women religious. These archives provide rich sources for the history of women religious, and can be mined in multiple ways by other scholars. For the purpose of understanding the global reach of Irish-­ born nuns, it was important to ascertain which orders recruited heavily in Ireland, and which orders sent large numbers of Irish-born nuns out of the country. However, it has to be noted that there are limitations to what can be concluded. A systematic analysis of the entrance records of hundreds of convents would be necessary, in order to arrive at even a moderately accurate figure of how many Irish-born nuns worked in education around the globe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And even then, several factors would contribute to compromising the research. Firstly, entrance and profession records can contain errors—especially when scribes were not familiar with the Irish names and addresses that they were entering into registers. It is not uncommon to find Irish names and townlands either misspelled or simply unknown. Secondly, not all Irish-born nuns were sent overseas, so additional information is needed about the mobility of Irish nuns; even then, this poses problems as they sometimes moved several times. Thirdly, nuns sometimes left religious life; in some orders, their names were struck from convent records, thereby deleting accounts of their contributions. Finally, convent records have sometimes suffered damage in countries where there is high humidity, or from being moved about when communities were relocated. The complete record of all Irish-­ born women who were a part of conventual life outside Ireland is therefore impossible to calculate. Research for this book involved examining entrance and profession records, and the convent annals, for congregations in which there were significant numbers of Irishwomen who worked in education in the Anglophone world. These records show how they expanded to meet the demands of the growing parochial school system, and the changing education needs of the middle classes. While data is not available for every single

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order that accepted Irish-born aspirants, novices and nuns, it has nonetheless been possible to get some sense of their presence in the global education field in the nineteenth century. A valuable source to researchers is an index called Nuns and Sisters in Australia, 1838–1918. The data in the index was generated from records of over fifty congregations.8 However, the names of some women were repeated several times, resulting in a grossly inflated total. Removing the superfluous data indicates a total of 2456 Irish nuns approx. Well over one-third of these were Sisters of Mercy. Six orders account for almost three quarters of all Irish nuns in Australia; of those six orders, four were Irish: Mercy, Presentation, Charity and Brigidine (see Appendix G). While there is no equivalent index of Irish-born nuns in America, data was compiled for this book by extracting information from several sets of entrance records. Because of the different founding dates of convents, and the uneven information in the available records, it is possible to only give some indication of the number of Irish-born nuns who worked in American education, across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Where an order had a relatively small footprint, it is easier to calculate the number of Irish women. For example, as noted in Appendix D, there were seventy-­ three Irish-born religious in the North America province of the Loreto/ IBVM order between the year it was established (1847) and 1930.9 The first Presentation foundation in America, established in San Francisco in 1854, had approximately ninety-five Irish-born nuns by 1930.10 Similarly in Australia, if an order had a relatively small number of convents, calculating the number of Irish-born nuns is manageable. There were approximately seventy-four Irish-born members of the Brigidine congregation in New South Wales between 1872 and 1930 (see Appendix H), while there were around eighty in the Loreto/IBVM between 1875 and 1930. The presence of Irish-born women religious in education, in the Anglophone world in the nineteenth century, contributed to a transnational exchange of knowledge and ideas. The ways in which knowledge and ideas crossed national boundaries varied: some nuns brought Irish books, sheet music, instruments and even the seeds of plants growing in their Irish convents, when they travelled to places including San Francisco, Sydney, Calcutta and Singapore. Others kept diaries and drew sketches of their travels to overseas missions, and sent them home, in an attempt to give their Irish convents and schools some idea of the global mission field. A few—like Mother Michael Corcoran—exchanged boxes of lantern slides between their schools in different countries. Many Irish nuns taught their pupils in America and Australia about Irish Saints, legends and folklore,

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and rehearsed their pupils in dramas and tableaux that represented aspects of Irish history and culture. A particularly potent form of exchange were the oral accounts, given by nuns who travelled between convents or made journeys home to Ireland to quest for vocations and to expand the global reach of their education mission. And perhaps most useful to researchers are the letters that were sent back to Ireland. Some indicate whether or not nuns were settling in their new convents, or pining for home; others contain news of the schools, requests for goods, and information about what they are teaching. When a foundation was made and nuns were sent out from an Irish motherhouse, they usually stayed in touch for many years with the Irish Superior who had sent them, and they looked forward to letters and parcels from Ireland. An Australian Mercy foundation at Geelong was made by Mother M. Cecilia Maguire in 1859: her correspondence home to the Mercy Convent, Baggot Street, shows the sustained links between Geelong and Dublin, and her reliance on support in the early years. For example, she wrote back to the Baggot Street motherhouse to ask the Superior to send out material for cloaks and veils, a clock, rosary beads and a supply of books. In a letter, she told the Baggot Street community that the Geelong Telegraph Office was within view of the convent school, and when the mail arrived, the Office would raise a flag, and the nuns would send someone over to collect their post. Mother Cecilia added, ‘you cannot think the feeling of pleasure it gives to know that news from dear home has come’.11 When the mail arrived at the start of the New Year of 1864, there was nothing for the convent and Mother Cecilia recorded: ‘I felt so lonely this time without the dear letters from Baggot Street’.12 Though congregational archives supply some insight into the transnational movement of ideas and material culture via religious orders of teaching sisters, other archival collections and other sources may help to fill the gaps in knowledge of this area. Specifically, it would be important to try to get insight into how the education given by these women was received: how were Irish nuns viewed by their pupils when they arrived in other countries. The archives of the orders that were examined for this book only show one side of the picture. The records show ways in which Irishness was celebrated in convents and schools, and ways in which Irish culture and traditions were stitched into the fabric of schooling, especially when Irish-born nuns were teaching Irish immigrant communities. Resistance to this kind of cultural transfer was not evident in the archival collections examined in this volume, but that does not mean that there

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was no resistance. Equally, while convent archives offer many records of how international foundations were welcomed by locals, there is very little record of either the failures of missions or the rejection of nuns by communities. Rejection was, however, doubtless experienced. Researchers who have explored the burning of the Ursuline Convent in Massachusetts in 1834, have uncovered ample evidence of how Protestant hostility towards nuns was galvanised into a dramatic display of anti-Catholic and anti-Irish violence.13 To fully understand how Irish nuns experienced the challenges of expanding their global reach would require locating and analysing evidence of the ‘failures’, the rejections and the hostilities. Equally, it would be useful to examine the collections of orders where Irish-born nuns were few in number, to see if annals and letters indicate why they were not recruited. It would also be useful to get more insight into the ways in which women religious moved into positions of influence. Certainly, Irish bishops favoured Irish religious when promoting Catholic education in parts of America and Australia, and they often indicated who should become Superior in convents. But women themselves had views on who to recruit, who to elect to leadership roles, and who they trusted to direct the work of the community. As this study has indicated, many also had views on who they were willing to follow when they left Ireland to live out their religious lives elsewhere. This book attempts to widen understanding of some aspects of the global reach of Irish nuns. It also hopes to provoke interest in new research areas, by prompting questions, pointing readers to the location of many relevant archival sources, and suggesting what further work needs to be done to complement what can be gleaned from those sources. In this way, scholarship can continue to chart and evaluate what Hellinckx et al. called ‘The forgotten contribution of the teaching sisters’.14

Notes 1. See Lynne Trethewey and Kay Whitehead, ‘Beyond Centre and Periphery: Transnationalism in Two Teacher/Suffragettes’ Work’, History of Education 32, no. 5 (2003), 547. 2. Nelleke Bakker, ‘Westward Bound? Dutch Education and Cultural Transfer in the Mid-twentieth Century’, Paedagogica Historica 50, no. 1–2 (2014), 216. 3. See Gabriela Ossenbach and María del Mar del Pozo, ‘Postcolonial Models, Cultural Transfers and Transnational Perspectives in Latin America: A Research Agenda’, Paedagogica Historica 47, no. 5 (2011).

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4. Ibid., 582. 5. See 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). 6. Travel, networking and recruitment by Irish women religious are explored in Raftery, ‘“Je suis d’aucune Nation”’, 724–6. 7. See Mary Peckham Magray, The Transforming Power of the Nuns: women, religion, and cultural change in Ireland, 1750–1900, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 9. 8. https://www.clarelibrary.ie/eolas/coclare/genealogy/don_tran/emigration/irish_catholic_nuns_australia.htm. The original database was created by Br Rory Higgins, St Bede’s, Melbourne. 9. Data compiled from the Dictionary of Biography of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary in North America. 10. See Appendix F.  Data compiled from Presentation Women: Sisters of the Presentation, San Francisco, California 1854–2004: A Legacy of Vision, Faith and Service (2004) and PBVM entrance records, Presentation Sisters Archives, San Francisco (hereafter PSAF). 11. M.  Cecilia Maguire, Mercy Convent Geelong, to M.  Mary of Mercy Norris, Mercy Convent Baggot Street, 19 September 1860. CMA/4/4/1/17, Mercy Congregational Archives, Dublin (hereafter MCAD). 12. M.  Cecilia Maguire, Mercy Convent Geelong, to M.  Mary of Mercy Norris, Mercy Convent Baggot Street, 26 Jan 1864. CMA/4/4/1/ 21, MCAD. 13. The founding group of Ursulines in Boston included Mary, Margaret and Catherine Ryan from Limerick, their cousin Catherine Molineaux, and their niece, Catherine Quirk. The convent building at Charlestown, on the edge of Boston, was completed in 1828 and attracted wealthy New Englanders. Though it had mainly Protestant pupils, it attracted anti-­ Catholic and anti-Irish hostilities. For a study of the burning of the convent see https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/nunnery-­ as-­menace-­the-­burning-­of-­the-­charlestown-­convent-­1834-­10894 For a digital copy of the 1842 report of the event see https://digitalcommons. providence.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1001&context=spcol_misc. 14. 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, 2010).



Appendix A: Schools and Convents of Mercy Founded by Frances Warde, 1837–1883

Year

Town

Name of School

1837 1839 1839 1839 1839 1840 1842 1842 1843 1843 1844 1845 1846 1845 1845

Carlow Carlow Naas Naas Naas Wexford Westport Westport Westport Pittsburgh, PA Pittsburgh, PA Pittsburgh, PA Pittsburgh, PA Latrobe, PA Latrobe, PA

1845 1846 1846 1846 1848 1851

Latrobe, PA Chicago Chicago Chicago Loretto Providence, RI

St Leo Convent St Leo Pension School St Mary Convent St Mary Convent St Mary Free School St Michael Convent Mount St Mary Convent St Mary Free School St Mary Pension School St Mary Convent St Mary Academy (Our Lady of Mercy Academy, 1894) St Paul Cathedral School St Patrick School Mount St Vincent Convent Mount St Vincent Academy (St Xavier Academy, 1847) St Vincent School St Mary Convent St Mary School St Xavier Academy St Aloysius Convent (Cresson, 1879) St Xavier Convent (continued)

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APPENDIX A: SCHOOLS AND CONVENTS OF MERCY FOUNDED BY FRANCES…

(continued) Year

Town

Name of School

1851 1851 1851 1854 1852 1852 1853 1852 1852 1852 1854 1854 1854 1857 1857 1857 1858 1858 1858 1858

Providence, RI Providence, RI Providence, RI Providence, RI Hartford, CT’ Hartford, CT’ Hartford, CT’ New Haven, CT’ New Haven, CT’ New Haven, CT’ New Haven, CT’ Newport, RI Newport, RI Rochester, NY Rochester, NY Rochester, NY Manchester, NH Manchester, NH Manchester, NH Manchester, NH

1860 1869 1861 1861 1861 1861 1864 1864 1864 1865 1865 1865 1865 1865 1865 1871 1871 1871 1871 1872 1872 1874 1874

Manchester, NH Manchester, NH Philadelphia Philadelphia Philadelphia Philadelphia Omaha Omaha Omaha Bangor, ME Bangor, ME Bangor, ME Bangor, ME Portsmouth, NH Portsmouth, NH Yreka, CA Yreka, CA Nth Whitefield, ME Nth Whitefield, ME St Johnsbury, VT St Johnsbury, VT Burlington, VT Burlington, VT

St Xavier Academy St Peter and Paul Cathedral School (Tyler School) St Patrick School St Joseph School St Catherine Convent (Independent, 1872) St Patrick School St Catherine Academy St Mary Convent (Affiliated Hartford, 1872) St Mary Academy St Mary School St Patrick School St Mary of the Isle Convent St Mary of the Isle School St Mary Convent St Mary School Academy of the Immaculate Conception Mount St Mary Convent St Anne School (St Agnes, 1882; McDonald, 1893) Mount St Mary Academy Union Street School (Evening School for Young Ladies) Park Street School Lowell Street School (St Joseph, 1870) Convent of the Assumption Assumption School Academy of the Sisters of Mercy Night School, Parish of the Assumption St Mary Convent Mount St Mary Academy Holy Angels School St Xavier Convent St Xavier Academy St John School St John Night School St Patrick Convent St Patrick School Convent of Mercy St Joseph Academy Convent of Mercy Academy of Mercy Convent of Mercy Notre Dame des Victoires School St Patrick Convent of Mercy (Independent, 1876) St Mary Cathedral School (continued)

  APPENDIX A: SCHOOLS AND CONVENTS OF MERCY FOUNDED BY FRANCES… 173

(continued) Year

Town

Name of School

1875 1872 1872 1872 1873 1873 1873 1878 1878 1878 1873 1873 1873 1873 1873 1877 1882 1878

Burlington, VT Jersey City, NJ Jersey City, NJ Jersey City, NJ Bordentown, NJ Bordentown, NJ Bordentown, NJ Princeton, NJ Princeton, NJ Princeton, NJ Portland, ME Portland, ME Portland, ME Portland, ME Portland, ME Portland, ME Portland, ME Indian Island, Old Town, ME Indian Island, Old Town, ME Indian Island, Old Town, ME Indian Island, Old Town, ME Pleasant Point, Perry, ME Pleasant Point, Perry, ME Peter Dana Point, ME Laconia, NH Laconia, NH Laconia, NH Dover, NH Dover, NH

St Mary Night School St Patrick Convent St Patrick School Academy of Mercy St Mary Convent (North Plainfield, 1908) St Mary School St Joseph Academy St Paul Convent St Paul School Academy of Mercy (St Scholastica, 1880) St Elizabeth Convent (Independent, 1883) St Elizabeth Academy St Elizabeth Night School St Aloysius School St Dominic School Kavanagh School (Cathedral) St Joseph Academy (Deering) St Ann Convent

1878 1878 1878 1879 1879 1879 1880 1880 1880 1883 1883

St Ann School Night School for Young Men Sewing School for Young Women St Ann Convent St Ann School St Ann Convent St Joseph Convent St Joseph School Night School for Young Men and Women St Mary Convent Sacred Heart School

Source: Kathleen Healy, Frances Warde: American Founder of the Sisters of Mercy (1973)

In addition to these educational establishments, Frances Warde also founded Mercy Hospital in Pittsburgh as well as twelve homes for orphans and the elderly.

 Appendix B: Early Irish-Born Religious with M Philippine Duchesne in America

Anna Shannon Judith Shannon Margaret Shannon Catherine Shannon Suzanne Aloysia MacKay Mary-Ann O’Connor Eleanor Gray Anna (Xavier) Murphy Lucille Roch (Roche) Mary-Ann Roche Bridget O’Neil (O’Neill) Elizabeth Lynch Mary Margaret Corboy

Ann Bannon (Barmen) Mary Ann Crawford Ellen O’Connell Mary Duffy Catherine Campbell Catherine McGurn (McGurl) Mary-Ann Tully Ellen MacCaffrey Bridget Barnwell Ann MacLay Julie Deegan Mary Day Bridget Coughlin

Source: Máire O’Sullivan, ‘Some of Philippine’s Irish religious’ TS, Society of the Sacred Heart Archive, Dublin

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175



Appendix C: Irish-Born Members of Loreto/IBVM in India, 1841–1930

Name at birth

Name in religion

DOB

Date of entry

Mary Hart Mary McCann Emily Mons Mary Egan Josephine Egan Mary Fox Catherine Hogan M McDonnell Mary Doyle M McCarthy Eliza Kearney Mary Hogan M McDonough Jane Butler Mary Shanley Mary Healy Eliza Kelly Isabel Hart Mary Doyle Mary Egan Eliza Geraghty Mary Doyle

M Delphine M Martina M Teresa M Benigna M Alexia Veronica M Joseph M Xaveria Gabriel M Paula M Austin M Mary M Xaveria M Josephine M Aloysia M Ignatia M de Chantal M Stanislaus M Genevieve M Augustina Alphonsa Frances

1817 1812 1820 1816 1813 1801 1812 1818 1829 n/a 1823 1820 n/a 1827 n/a n/a n/a 1824 1823 n/a 1821 n/a

1836 1836 1838 1839 1839 1827 1829 1840 1841 1841 1841 1841 1841 1841 1841 1842 1842 1842 1843 1843 1843 1843 (continued)

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177

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APPENDIX C: IRISH-BORN MEMBERS OF LORETO/IBVM IN INDIA, 1841–1930

(continued) Name at birth

Name in religion

DOB

Date of entry

Mary Clarke Brigid Molloy Catherine Cooney Mary Ireland Harriet Joyce Elizabeth Cullen Mary Fallon Mary Ryan Josephine Healy Mary Stanford Helena O’Coleman Mary Sweetman Jane McCartney Mary Murphy Margaret Raleigh Mary O’Reilly Mary Taylor C St Lawrence Elizabeth Culkin Brigid Casey M St Lawrence Josephine St Lawrence Mary Flynn Catherine Walsh Mary Brennan Agnes Wall Mary O’Brien Mary Byrne Mary O’Shaughnessy Julia O’Reilly Bedelia O’Loughlin Mary Cussen Ellen Mulcahy Mary Power Mary Egan Mary Sheehy Margaret Newman Marianne McCarthy Margaret Costello Elizabeth Therry Mary Jane Egan Matilda Lysaght

M Patricia Johanna Agnes M Borgia M Gonzaga M Raphael M Ursula Angela M de Sales M Patricia M Aloysia M Aloysia Agnes M Stanislaus M Aloysia Martha M Xaveria M Ignatia M Borgia Johanna M Josephine M Regis Catherine Francis Brigid M Andrea M Philomena M Philomena M Berchmans M Gertrude M Teresa M Gonzaga Borgia M Cecilia M Agatha Alphonsa M Antonia M Gonzaga M Mechtilde M Claver M of Dolours M Xavier

n/a 1820 n/a n/a 1830 n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a 1835 1834 1836 1832 1837 n/a 1814 1831 n/a n/a n/a 1830 n/a 1830 1846 1838 1831 1845 n/a 1844 1844 1842 n/a 1840 1845 n/a 1842 1843 1843 1839 1847 1845

1843 1843 1844 1844 1844 1845 1845 1847 1848 1850 1851 1852 1852 1853 1853 1853 1853 1853 1853 1853 1855 1855 1857 1860 1860 1860 1860 1862 1862 1862 1862 1862 1863 1863 1864 1864 1865 1865 1865 1865 1865 1865 (continued)

  APPENDIX C: IRISH-BORN MEMBERS OF LORETO/IBVM IN INDIA, 1841–1930 

179

(continued) Name at birth

Name in religion

DOB

Date of entry

Brigid O’Brien Rose O’Brien Margaret Hickey Ellen Costello Mary Crean Margaret Enright Brigid Myers Brigid Ahern Agnes McCarthy Catherine Wall Annie Roche M Corcoran Catherine Wallace Annie Brophy Catherine Duan Sarah Hickey Martha Donnelly Margaret McElroy Mary McCarthy Kate Vaughan Daisy Hastings Mary Purcell Catherine Fitzmaurice Josephine Irwin Sarah Hannon Agnes Schwartz Elizabeth McErlean Norah Connell Annie Meany Margaret Collins Margaret Breen Mary Stone Annie Breen Isabel McIntosh Agnes Everitt Margaret Murphy Ellen Cooney Elizabeth Everitt Brigid Devereux Maria Byrne

M Anne M Austin M Antonia M Philomena M Xavier M Margaret M Martha M Xavier M Pancratius M de Sales M Angela M Raphael M Gabriel M Patrick M Gonzalez M Magdalen Veronica Catherine Dominica Elizabeth M Alphonsa Vincent M Camilla M Borgia M Scholastica M Johanna M Johanna M Ignatia M Scholastica M Bernadette M Delphine Monica M Felix M Agatha M Michael Mary M Aquinas M Antonia M Consiglio M Aloysia Chanel

1850 n/a 1849 1847 1853 1847 1850 1846 1852 1840 1851 1847 1852 1854 1856 n/a n/a n/a n/a 1858 1856 1849 1860 1858 1855 1860 1860 1855 1859 1864 1862 1836 1864 1869 1865 1861 1866 1869 1871 1875

1867 1867 1868 1868 1869 1869 1869 1869 1872 1872 1872 1872 1872 1874 1875 1876 1876 1876 1876 1876 1876 1876 1876 1876 1877 1878 1879 1879 1880 1881 1881 1882 1883 1888 1888 1889 1891 1891 1892 1894 (continued)

180 

APPENDIX C: IRISH-BORN MEMBERS OF LORETO/IBVM IN INDIA, 1841–1930

(continued) Name at birth

Name in religion

DOB

Date of entry

Annie Smith Hilda Canning Lily Nolan Cecilia Kenny Frances Flannery Ellen Kehoe Teresa Maguire Frances Rorke Bride Reville Mary Kelly Brigid Hanrahan

M Regis M Pacifica M Bernardine M Borgia M Canice M Ita M Lelia M Joseph Ita M Baptist M Paulinus M Patricia

1875 1875 1875 1879 1881 1882 1884 1882 1879 1872 1842

1894 1894 1897 1898 1899 1902 1902 1902 1900 1895 1863

Total: 118 Irish-born IBVM Source: Loreto Congregation Institute and Province Archive, Ireland



Appendix D: Irish-Born Members of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary in North America, 1847–1930

Name at birth

Name in religion

Date of birth

Date of entry

Margaret Boylan Catherine Brophy Hannah Buckley Bridget Burke Mary Carroll Catherine Clancy Johanna Collins Margaret Costello Honora Creighton Sara Creighton Winefred Cummins Elizabeth Davis Ellen Davis Ellen Dease Anna Dempsey Catherine Devine Hannah Donovan Bridget Dore Bridget Drew Julia Dwyer Mary Dwyer Mary Fleming

Dorothy Borgia Amata Michael Euphrasia Philomena Margaret Bride Paul Monica Ita Consilio Norberta Teresa Bede Elizabeth Gonzaga Perpetua Febronie Regina Biblana Gertrude

Not known Not known 1866 1826 1843 Not known 1841 1852 1840 Not known Not known 1874 1876 1820 1886 1828 1822 1848 1854 1850 1848 1821

1873 1856 1886 1856 1869 Not known 1860 1875 1857 Not known 1845 1898 1898 1845 1915 1856 1851 1870 1881 1873 1872 1845 (continued)

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Raftery, Irish Nuns and Education in the Anglophone World, Global Histories of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46201-6

181

182 

APPENDIX D: IRISH-BORN MEMBERS OF THE INSTITUTE OF THE BLESSED…

(continued) Name at birth

Name in religion

Date of birth

Date of entry

Annie Forrestal Anna Gallivan Frances Gibney Bridget Hanahoe Mary Hannon Ellen Hayes Alice Hobin Anne Hutchinson ? Hutchinson Catherine Kavanagh Sarah Kerney Mary Lalor Catherine Liddy Elizabeth Magann Frances Magann Lucy Magann Rose Martin Catherine McGrath Rose McGuire Mary McHale Margaret McHenery Bridget McInerney Mary McNally Ellen Meehan Margaret Meehan Mary Meehan Mary Monaghan Mary Morrissey Mary Mulligan Anne Murray Mary Neisson Bridget Noolan Annie O’Beirne Bridget O’Beirne Mary O’Connor Grace O’Dea Bridget O’Prey Mary O’Sullivan Catherine Oullahan Anastasia Phelan Mary Anne Phelan

Macaria Gonzaga Dosithea Mildred Felicitas Lucy Vincent Ignatia Valentine Priscilla Martha Berchmans Stanislaus Eucharia Mount Carmel Demetria Bertha Placida Ambrose Immaculata Juliana Liguori Flavia Macrina Marianna M of Calvary Zita Adele Coletta Joachim Marion Bede Paulina Annunciata Dolors Delphina Dionysia Evangelista Purification Barbara Bonaventure

1862 1843 1842 1862 1846 1835 1846 1818 Not known 1839 1838 Not known 1843 1836 1844 Not known 1855 1853 1888 1881 Not known 1844 1850 Not known 1862 1845 1843 1848 1850 1829 1859 1841 1852 1827 1813 1840 1896 1846 1830 1845 1817

1881 Not known 1856 1881 1868 1856 1868 1843 1847 1868 1857 1847 1860 1863 1867 1872 1874 1883 1919 1901 1870 1861 1874 1884 1881 1882 1870 1873 1878 1848 1878 1859 1877 1853 1851 1869 1926 1865 1848 1865 1845 (continued)

  APPENDIX D: IRISH-BORN MEMBERS OF THE INSTITUTE OF THE BLESSED… 

(continued) Name at birth

Name in religion

Date of birth

Date of entry

Mary Purcell Anne Quigley Bridget Quinlivan Margaret Quirk Maria Shea Cecilia Sherlock Anne Shreenan Frances Simpson Maggie Walsh Ellen Woods

Cera Jane Alice Prisca Magdalen Dympna Martina Pacomia Olivia Margaret Mary

Not known 1822 Not known 1876 Not known 1887 1840 1863 Not known 1849

1874 1858 1873 1874 1853 1904 1864 1884 1867 1871

Source: Mary Aloysius Kerr IBVM, Dictionary of Biography of the IBVM in North America (1984)

183



Appendix E: Second-Generation Irish Members of Loreto/IBVM in North America, 1847–1930

Name at birth

Name in religion

DOB

Date of entry

Mary Allen Madeleine Baldwin Mary Bannon Johanna Barrett Mary Louise Barry Margaret Blake Mary Boland Mary Brandon Mary Agnes Breen Margaret Brown Mary Brown Teresa Brown Jane Burke Catherine Cassin Mary Clifford Emma Colman Georgina Comerford Annie Conlin Catherine Conlin Ellen Connolly Hannah Connor

Corona Matilda Bernardine Francesca Dorothea Pulcheria Gonzales Philomena Lucilla Dosithea Eugenia Claudia Berchmans Marina Dolores Theophane Angelica Rodriguez Palladia Electa Carmelita

1870 1851 1881 1861 1867 1854 1868 1844 1871 1855 1855 1859 1840 1856 1868 1888 1852 1861 1866 1865 1876

1892 1873 1902 1886 1890 1870 1895 1860 1896 1878 1872 1882 1856 1875 1893 1915 1870 1888 1887 1891 1895 (continued)

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Raftery, Irish Nuns and Education in the Anglophone World, Global Histories of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46201-6

185

186 

APPENDIX E: SECOND-GENERATION IRISH MEMBERS OF LORETO/IBVM…

(continued) Name at birth

Name in religion

DOB

Date of entry

Mary Connor Mary Corcoran Emily Corrigan Mary Coyne Ellen Creighton Louisa Creighton Marie Cullinan Maud Cummings Elizabeth Curtin Brigid Cushing Mary Ann Cushing Nora Cushing Mary Delaney Teresa Devine Mary Devlin Devlin Anna Doherty Catherine Downey Elizabeth Downey Annie Doyle Catherine Doyle Ellen Doyle Mary Driscoll Mary Drohan Annie Duffy Joanna Duggan Mary Anne Duggan Agnes Dwann Florence Dwann Louise Dwann Johanna Dwyer Margaret Dwyer Sarah Dwyer Dwyer Elizabeth Egan Teresa Finnegan Elizabeth Foster Mary Jane Foster Margaret Franklin Ellen Gallagher

Linda Francis Teresa Genevieve Zepharina Anne Xavier Angelina Ethelreda Crescentia Peter Gertrude Cornelius Felix Leocretia Isabella Borromeo Clothilde Ignatia Bertile Adelaide de Sales Raphael of the Cross Isadore Winifred Elfrida Anastasia Rosaria Celestine Emily Benigna Seraphina Vincent Lucina Teresa Othelia Rosa Bernadette Annette

1869 1858 1835 1859 1853 1855

1894 1882 1852 1878 1876

1858 1874 1837 1844 1878 1871 1868

1878 1892 1857 1866 1906 1892 1887 1873 1895 1871 1885 1907 1871 1858 1864 1900 1880 1866 1875 1898 1891 1895 1876 1867 1864

1878 1855 1860 1885 1855 1835 1840 1878 1861 1845 1856 1877 1867 1873 1857 1848 1843 1853 1872 1858 1850 1860

1877 1889 1877 1874 1875 1893 (continued)

  APPENDIX E: SECOND-GENERATION IRISH MEMBERS OF LORETO/IBVM… 

187

(continued) Name at birth

Name in religion

DOB

Date of entry

Rose Gallagher Ellen Gibson Catherine Gillis Isabel Gillogly Bridget Glynn Mary Glynn Catherine Gorman Honorah Gorman Margaret Griffin Mary Agnes Halloran Mary Hanahoe Catherine Harrington Margaret Hartnett Lucy Hawkins Catherine Hennigan Mary Anne Hobin Annie Ivers Mary Keaveney Bridget Keenan Henrietta Keenan Katherine Kelly Catherine Kensella Anna Keogh Anne Keogh Agnes Kilgour Elizabeth Kilgour Annie Lacey Johanna Lacey Catherine Leonard Teresa Leonard Margaret Long Mary Long Teresa Long Olive Macklin Elizabeth Madigan Mary Maguire Catherine Mahoney Margaret Mahoney Rose Mahoney Margaret Mary Malone Catherine Maxwell

Ignatia Blandina Eulalia Ethelreda Dominica Martha Maurus Bernardine Ursula Mechtilde Francis de Sales Euphrysone Johanna Patricia Stanislaus Blandina Loretto Sophia Theodore Anthony Benedict Petronilla Ambrose Clare Regis Geraldine Benigna Melanie Alphonsa Irma Helene Irene Leona Joseph Benedicta Emiliana Gerard Ildephonse Lidwina Xavier Emmanuel

1877 1860 1848 1864 1860 1870 1858 1843 1844 1872 1865 1865 1857 1876 1833 1854 1863 1847 1847 1866 1866 1853 1842 1842 1874 1870 1866 1865 1832 1880 1880 1868 1872 1882 1838 1866 1871 1859 1864 1883 1894

1901 1876 1872 1895 1890 1894 1894 1859 1873 1893 1889 1883 1877 1911 1852 1870 1880 1871 1862 1899 1904 1868 1864 1877 1902 1897 1890 1886 1854 1902 1915 1889 1896 1902 1861 1882 1895 1879 1889 1901 1916 (continued)

188 

APPENDIX E: SECOND-GENERATION IRISH MEMBERS OF LORETO/IBVM…

(continued) Name at birth

Name in religion

DOB

Date of entry

Sarah Mays Mary McAstocker Bridget McAuliffe Ellen McAuliffe Mary Ellen McBrady Margaret McEveney Winifred McGettrick Anne McGuinness Bridget McHale Loretto McIntyre Annie McKenna Mary McKenna Mary McKenna Catherine McKeown Elizabeth McKeown Martha McLaughlin Mary Ellen McLaughlin Catherine McLynn Catherine McMahon Mary McNamara Mary McNellis Mary Anne McPhalen Catherine McTague Elizabeth McTague Agnes Mitchell Mary Mulligan Catherine Murphy Johanna Murphy Julia Murphy Teresa Murphy Lucy Nolan Anne O’Brien Bridget O’Brien Catherine O’Brien Elizabeth O’Brien Hannah O’Brien Margaret O’Brien Maria O’Brien Sarah O’Brien Agnes O’Connor Alice O’Connor Catherine O’Connor

Madeline Martina Amadea Laurentia Batilde Colette Maura Loretto Edna Magdalen Attracta Agnes Bertille Emerentia Monica Zita Aloysius Benedicta Helen Joseph Bernarda Hermes Columba Scholastica Xavier Editha Mary Emilie Caroline St Gabriel St Michael Estelle Clare Redempta Juliana Alexia Prudentia Lutgarde Prudentia Paula Angela Catherine St Patrick

1847 1893 1858 1868 1853 1882 1903 1846 1867 1915 1856 1847 1870 1865 1860 1878 1843 1854 1849 1819 1907 Not known 1851 1847 1871 1859 1859 Not known 1857 1864 1872 Not known 1894 1852 1869 1867 1860 1854 1855 1865 1879 1875

1871 1919 1888 1893 1875 1905 1924 1867 1897 1932 1873 1863 1898 1897 1896 1900 1861 1871 1874 1849 1929 1898 1870 1863 1891 1875 1880 1897 1878 1884 1892 1858 1892 1875 Not known Not known 1879 1883 1875 1895 1900 1906 (continued)

  APPENDIX E: SECOND-GENERATION IRISH MEMBERS OF LORETO/IBVM… 

(continued) Name at birth

Name in religion

DOB

Date of entry

Cecilia O’Connor Hannah O’Connor Julia O’Connor Margaret O’Connor Mary Anne O’Connor Jane O’Hagan Catherine O’Hara Frances O’Leary Celestine O’Meara Kathleen O’Meara Eleanor O’Neail Isabella O’Neail Margaret O’Neill Mary O’Neill Margaret Patton Margaret Peirce Mary Phelan Margaret Piggott Margaret Power Teresa Prendiville Margaret Quinlivan Teresa Redden Margaret Riordan Mary Rutledge Helen Ryan Mary Scanlon Catherine Shanahan Agnes Shannon Anastasia Shannon Loretto Shields Mary Smith Nora Stephens Margaret Sullivan Catherine Sweeney Frances Sweetman Hannah Twohey Ellen Twomey Mary Twomey Mary Wade Annie Wallace Cecilia Walsh Catherine White

Vincent Aldagonde Evangelista Magdalena Magdalen Alexandrine Dolores Beatrice Victorina Celestine Justina M Sacred Heart Agatha Lawrence Thais Ernestine Felicitas Basilia Assissi Edmund Athanasia Seraphia Pauline Ursula Lillian Rose Julia Emmanuella Catalda Immaculate Heart Odelia Lorenza Alice Theodosia Francesca Eucharia Canisia Leontia Syncleta Ursula Henriette Colombiere

1880 1870 1859 1851 1846 1866 1872 1849 1890 1883 1847 1845 1842 1864 1863 1872 1852 1849 1871 1874 1860 1859 1871 1888 1902 1833 1855 Not known 1865 1863 1843 1889 1865 1866 1838 1858 1864 1859 1863 1866 1863 1857

1900 1888 1876 1876 1865 1884 1902 1866 1912 1914 1864 1864 1866 1897 1890 1898 1889 1887 1899 1896 1881 1881 1889 1907 1927 1852 1877 1892 1887 1884 1869 1907 1892 1884 1880 1880 1887 1880 1880 1902 1882 1890

Source: Mary Aloysius Kerr IBVM, Dictionary of Biography of the IBVM in North America (1984)

189



Appendix F: Irish-Born Members of the PBVM Sisters, San Francisco, 1854–1930

Name at birth

Name in religion

Date of birth

Date of entry

Barry Ellen Barry Brigid Barry Mary Barry Ellen Birmingham Mary Ann Birmingham [?] Browne Ellen Clifford Ellen Collins Brigid Comerford Elizabeth Cooper Mary Cooper Teresa Cooper Julia Cooper Anna Maria Cormac Ellen Costelloe Mary Creedon Frances Cronin Catherine Crowley Ellen Culhane Mary Culhane

M Agnes M Albius M Celestine M Malachy M Attracta M Monninna M Clare M Berchmans M Dolores M Teresa M Evangelist M Gertrude M Gertrude M Patrick M Joseph M Mary M de Pazzi M Joseph M Martha M Brigid M Teresa

1844 1887 1884 1880 1884 1881 Not known Not known 1874 1821 1853 1866 Not known 1854 Not known 1867 1892 1802 1842 1862 1878

1867 1904 1904 1906 1908 1908 Not known 1871 1900 1841 1869 1882 1867 1869 1867 1889 1917 1834 1868 1891 1893 (continued)

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Raftery, Irish Nuns and Education in the Anglophone World, Global Histories of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46201-6

191

192 

APPENDIX F: IRISH-BORN MEMBERS OF THE PBVM SISTERS, SAN FRANCISCO…

(continued) Name at birth

Name in religion

Date of birth

Date of entry

Louisa Daly Brigid Dowling Nanoe Dowling Catherine Doyle Ellen Duggan Margaret Dwyer Flanagan Margaret Flood Julia Flood Catherine Flood Georgina Flood Annie Flood Nora Galligan Catherine Gleeson Margaret Gleeson Teresa Gormally Frances Gorman Brigid Grace Hannah Guiney Josephine Hagerty Frances Hagerty Cecilia Hayden Susan Healy Mary Hickey Frances Joyce Ellen Kane Johanna Kellehar Mary Ellen Kelly Catherine Kirby Mary Ann Kirby Brigid Lardner Madeline Leahy Margaret Lennon Elizabeth Looney Margaret MacDermott Anastasia Maher Hannah Mahony Ellen Masterson Mary Brigid McCarthy Catherine McCoy Gertrude McMenamin Mary Ann McNally

M Xavier M Agnes M Dominica M Brendan M Patrick M Ann M Josephine M Columban M Concepcion M Ita M Laurence M Mgt Mary M Brigid M Concepcion M Stanislaus M Enda M Ita M Veronica M Stanislaus M Calisanctius M Josephine M Francis Xavier M Regis M Francis de Sales M Vincent M Dolores M Vincent M Philomena M Augustine M de Sales M Mary Alacoque M Reginald M de Pazzi M Patrick M Ignatius M de Sales M Baptist M Zita M Mechtilde M Ursula M Raphael M Laserian

1815 1852 1850 1882 1852 1885 Not known 1858 Not known Not known 1888 Not known 1891 1856 1860 1923 1896 1827 1864 1851 1849 1870 1840 1852 1855 Not known 1843 1853 1866 1869 1841 1872 1872 1879 1836 1839 1852 1856 1871 1869 1873 1877

1842 1870 1867 1900 1877 1912 Not known 1882 1871 1881 1900 1871 1912 1875 1877 1951 1912 1857 1882 1870 1870 1888 1869 1873 1878 1876 1861 1867 1884 1887 1864 1891 1889 1898 1874 1857 1879 1878 1890 1892 1892 1902 (continued)

  APPENDIX F: IRISH-BORN MEMBERS OF THE PBVM SISTERS, SAN FRANCISCO… 

193

(continued) Name at birth

Name in religion

Date of birth

Date of entry

Brigid McNulty Brigid McSherry Winifred Molloy Bridgit Moore Helena Murphy Jane Murphy Eileen Murphy Jennie O’Brien Johanna O’Brien Catherine O’Callaghan Ellen O’Carroll O’Flaherty Catherine O’Leary Bride O’Neill Brigid O’Shea Bridget O’Sullivan Mary Owens Mary Phelan Rosanna Phelan Mary Prendiville Catherine Quill Julia Quill Anastasia Quirke Mary Rahilly Catherine Rice Brigid Ryan Elizabeth Ryan Catherine Shea Catherine Stean Agnes Tuite Catherine Walsh Anna Walton

M Ann M Loretto M Veronica M Francis M Ambrose M Augustine M Evangelist M Conception M Eugenius M Ursula M Regius M Xavier M Louis M Dominic M Canice M Fidelis M Bonaventure M Augustine M de Pazzi M Patricia M Aquin M Scholastica M Carthagh M Alphonsus Liguori M de Pazzi M Cataldus M Peter M Berchmans M Peter Magdalene Martha M de Lourdes

1832 1870 Not known 1843 1873 1891 Not known Not known 1884 1819 1856 Not known 1867 1870 1884 1902 1869 1837 1857 1878 1867 1874 1881 1872 1846 1882 1893 1827 1845 1840 1844 Not known

1857 1903 1873 1880 1895 1916 1871 Not known 1902 1837 1877 Not known 1889 1888 1900 1924 1891 1858 1878 1900 1889 1891 1901 1894 1867 1900 1912 1859 1867 1867 1879 1881

Source: Presentation Women: Sisters of the Presentation, San Francisco, California 1854–2004: A Legacy of Vision, Faith and Service (2004) and PBVM entrance records, PSAF



Appendix G: Irish Nuns in Australia, 1838–1918

Orders (n = 6) in Australia that had the largest numbers of Irish women religious: a Sisters of Mercy Sisters of St Joseph (‘Mary McKillop nuns’) a Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary a Sisters of Charity Sisters of the Good Shepherd a Congregation of St Brigid (Brigidines) Total Total: Number of Irish nuns across all orders in Australia

897 357 206 134 115 100 1810 2456

Source: Extrapolated by Catherine KilBride from Index of Irish Nuns and Sisters in Australia, 1838–1918

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Raftery, Irish Nuns and Education in the Anglophone World, Global Histories of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46201-6

195



Appendix H: Irish Brigidines in NSW Australia (1872–1930)

Name

Name in religion

DOB

Date of entrance

Frances Banahan Elizabeth Bergin Maria Bergin Margaret Boland Katie Bolger Ellen Brennan Mary Breslan Elizabeth Browne Norah Burke Margaret Byrne Brigid Campion Mary Conroy Margaret Conway Margaret Cooke Norah Cooke Margaret Crowe Ellen Davin Angela Dee Margaret Desmond Agnes Doherty Brigid Doyle

Gertrude Catherine Marian Bede Canice Augustine Aloysius Benedict Anne Josephine Baptista Brendan Liguori Canice Peter Claver Vincent Dara Declan Brigid Joseph Raphael

1856 1848 1905 1906 1898 1864 1900 1898 1903 1889 1895 1910 1893 1882 1875 n/a 1899 1900 1862 1859 1871

1873 1872 1927 1927 1915 1888 1921 1915 n/a 1908 1914 1929 1913 1904 1894 1891 1918 1921 1884 1901 1893 (continued)

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Raftery, Irish Nuns and Education in the Anglophone World, Global Histories of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46201-6

197

198 

APPENDIX H: IRISH BRIGIDINES IN NSW AUSTRALIA (1872–1930)

(continued) Name

Name in religion

DOB

Date of entrance

Maureen Doyle Elizabeth Dunne Mary Dunne Ellen Dunphy Mary Egan Kate Fitzpatrick Brigid Flahavan Margaret Freeman Susan Harnett Mary Harty Elizabeth Hayden Brigid Hendrick Norah Humphries Josephine Kelly Mary Kelly Mary Kenny Josephine Kerr Mary Kincaid Deborah Kissane Norah Lambert Caroline Leonard Kathleen Lyster Angela Madden Eileen McGrath Mary Maguire Norah Maguire Mary Maher Christina McDonald Catherine Miller Brigid Mooney Mary Morrin Julia Nolan Anna O’Beirne Eileen O’Brien ? O’Flynn Norah O’Flynn Mary O’Gorman Margaret O’Leary Margaret O’Sullivan Ann Phelan

Kevin Fintan Enda Ignatius Columba Ignatius Joseph Zita Oliver Dominic Stanislaus Perpetua Francis Conleth Brigid Xavier Lasarian Laurence Vincent Terresa Magdalene Lasarian Baptist Anthony Bernardine Dympna de Sales Finbar Alacoque Patrick Borgia Stanislaus Michael Ailbe Patrick Teesa Brendan Benignus Joseph Regis Patrick

1910 1871 1909 1898 1897 1835 1866 1880 1869 1894 1856 1905 n/a 1910 1873 1874 1870 1901 1882 n/a 1896 1911 1896 1888 1908 1907 1851 1899 1856 1857 1876 1870 1872 n/a 1872 1870 1879 n/a 1908 1863

1929 1888 1929 1915 1915 1854 1885 n/a n/a 1915 1877 1927 1888 1929 1893 1894 1887 1921 1902 1891 1915 1929 1917 1908 1927 1927 1877 1926 1877 1895 1891 1893 1893 n/a 1891 1891 1899 1877 1926 1881 (continued)

  APPENDIX H: IRISH BRIGIDINES IN NSW AUSTRALIA (1872–1930) 

(continued) Name

Name in religion

DOB

Date of entrance

Brigid Phelan Brigid Phelan Mary Phelan Mary Ryan Mary Ryan Brigid Shanahan Annie Sheehan Mary Synan Mary Synan Elizabeth Timmons Mary Treacy Annie Tuohy Helena Younge

Otteran Columba Gonzaga Agnes Dolores Aloysius Kyran John Michael Peter Finbarr Clement Albeus

1910 1869 1898 1874 1910 1867 1908 1837 1866 1894 1900 1904 1893

1929 1889 1915 1903 1929 1884 1926 1854 1889 1915 1921 1927 1917

Source: Brigidine Archives NSW, Australia (2014)

199

Glossary

Abbess  The head of an abbey, independent monastery or convent. Apostolate  The active works undertaken by a community of sisters. Apostolic  Religious institutes whose apostolate includes prayer and active service. Aspirant  A young girl who has expressed a desire to enter a religious community while continuing her second-level education. Charism  The specific characteristic of a religious order’s principal mission. Choir Sister  Pronounces vows and recites the Divine Office. Cloister  A covered walkway within the grounds of a convent or monastery. Also, the act of permanent physical withdrawal from the world within convent walls. Coif  A close-fitting cap worn under the veil. Community  A group of people living together for religious purposes. Congregation  A religious institute in which the members take simple vows. Constitutions  Written rules of life to suit the particular charism of the institute. Convent  A community of sisters devoted to the vowed life; also the building in which these sisters live.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Raftery, Irish Nuns and Education in the Anglophone World, Global Histories of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46201-6

201

202 

GLOSSARY

Diocesan  A community of sisters who are under the jurisdiction of the bishop of the diocese in which they are located. Dispensation  Releasing of a sister from her vows. Divine Office  The official public prayer cycle of the Catholic church and the foundation of prayer in monastic orders. It is divided into a 24-hour schedule of prayers and hymns. Enclosed  Any religious institute with strict vows and rules separating it from the outside world, also known as ‘cloistered’. Entrance  The date on which a woman enters the convent with the intention of determining whether she has a religious vocation. Extern  A member of a cloistered order who lives within the convent but outside the enclosure. She takes care of the external affairs of the convent, serves as portress and does the shopping. Guimpe  A white linen starched rounded cloth which covers the chest. Habit  A religious habit is a distinctive set of garments worn by members of a religious order. It was often common attire for women at the time of the foundation of the order. Institute  A community of individuals who have taken public vows to consecrate themselves to God. It includes communities of nuns (traditionally known as orders) and communities of sisters (formerly known as congregations). Laity  All non-ordained Catholics who have taken no religious vows. Lay Sister  Pronounces vows but does not recite the Divine Office in choir. Her duties usually include cooking, laundry and housekeeping. Mission  Assignment given annually to each member of the congregation. The term can also refer to the specific work or service which a congregation is called to perform. Missionary  A religious who leaves her own country in order to evangelise overseas through involvement in education, health and social work. Novice  A prospective member of a religious institute. Canon Law requires the novitiate period to be one year and a day, following the postulant stage. However, most novitiate periods are two years. Novitiate  Both the building, which must be separated from the professed religious, and the period of time spent there. Nun  A female member of a religious institute who has taken vows. Order  A network of communities bound by a common rule of life in which the members take vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. Postulant  The term for a person in the initial period of formation before novitiate.

 GLOSSARY 

203

Profession  The ceremony at which a man or woman takes vows to enter a religious institute. Reception  Ceremony following the period of candidacy or postulancy at which a person is formally received into the congregation. Rule  The way of life prescribed to members of a religious institute. Sister  A woman entering into a religious institute who takes simple vows. Also used as a term of address for nuns. Superior  A person elected to lead the congregation or appointed to lead a local community. Veil  A hair covering of varying lengths, always extending over the neck.

Bibliography

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Websites ‘A

woman capable of making a nation’, https://sistersofmercy. ie/2022/01/a-­woman-­capable-­of-­making-­a-­nation/ https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/nunnery-­as-­menace-­the-­burning-­ of-­the-­charlestown-­convent-­1834-­10894 For a digital copy of the 1842 report of the event see https://digitalcommons.providence.edu/cgi/viewcontent. cgi?article=1001&context=spcol_misc

Index1

A Aikenhead, Mother Mary, 4, 7–9, 26n16, 46 Aspirancy, 39–45, 56n29, 57n50, 131, 165 Aspirant, viii, 14, 16, 18, 20, 22, 23, 33–54, 63, 78, 83, 104, 131, 141, 143, 167 Association for Discountenancing Vice, 106 Aukland, Lord, 122 B Backhaus, Rev. Dr Henry, 64 Ball, John, 7, 34 Ball, Mabel Clare Bennett, 7 Ball, Mother Regis (Cecilia), 7, 35, 36, 51 Ball, Mother Teresa, 3, 4, 7, 8, 12, 13, 22, 26n16, 34–36, 38, 46, 48,

49, 53, 63, 64, 67–69, 71, 74–76, 98, 101, 102, 114n31, 123, 125, 150 Bar Convent, York (St Mary’s Convent), 4, 7, 12, 34, 46, 68, 69, 101 Barat, St Madeleine Sophie, 33–35, 39, 121 Barry, Mother M. Gonzaga, 68–70, 78, 79, 81, 82, 97, 120, 125–128, 152, 153 Beale, Mother Genevieve, 3, 25n6 Benedictine (Order of St Benedict), 2, 4, 6, 26n15 Benedictine Abbey, Ypres, 9 Bennett, Francis, 7 Boarding school, 4, 6–8, 13, 19–21, 24, 28n47, 36, 39, 40, 53, 56n29, 69, 94, 100, 102, 104, 107, 114n43, 119, 123, 124, 127–129, 138, 140, 141, 143–154

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Raftery, Irish Nuns and Education in the Anglophone World, Global Histories of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46201-6

217

218 

INDEX

Bodkin, Agnes, 36 Bodkin, Gertrude, 28n35, 36 Bodkin, Helen, 28n35, 36 Bodkin, Madeleine, 28n35, 36 Bodkin, Minna, 36 Bridgeman, Mother M. Francis, 70 Brigidine Convent National School, Tullow, 111 Brigidines (Congregation of St Brigid), ix, 3, 61, 78, 80, 81, 100, 135, 167 Bringeon, Mother St Claire, 21 Byrne, Mother M. John, 91 C Canon Law, 39, 53 Carew, Bishop (Dr) Patrick Joseph, 63, 64, 68, 95, 96, 122, 123 Carmelite (Order of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel), 2, 34 Carroll, Mother M. Helena, 104 Chapter, 46, 52 Children of Mary, 22, 23, 30n87 Collegio Urbano, 64 Collier, Rev. Dr William, 64 Comerford, Mother M. Teresa, 40, 51, 56n35, 56n36, 71, 77, 87n36 Commissioners of National Education, Ireland, 107, 108 Connor, Bishop (Dr) Michael, 16, 64, 70, 73, 125 Convent academy, 144, 145, 147, 148, 151, 165 Convent of Mercy, Kinsale, 14 Convent of the Holy Sepulchre (New Hall), 101 Corballis, Eliza, 12 Corballis, Margaret, 12, 13 Corballis, Richard, 12, 13, 28n40 Corcoran, Mother M. Michael, 83, 84, 151, 153, 154, 167

Coyney, Mother, 34 Cullen, Cardinal (Dr) Paul, vi, 14, 16, 41, 64, 71, 115n47, 123, 124, 139, 140 Cullen, Mary, 102, 105 Cullen, Mother M. Josephine, 72, 124 D de Charbonnel, Bishop (Dr) Armand, 67, 94 Dease, Mother M. Teresa, 35, 68, 71–74, 91, 96, 97 Divine Office, 2, 79 Dominican Convent, Cabra, 9, 14, 102, 159n64 Downside Abbey (Benedictine), 134 Dowry, 12, 16, 18, 24, 40, 41, 50–53, 59n88, 91, 100, 129 Duchesne, Mother Philippine, 39, 70, 121, 122, 146, 151, 155n2, 155n3, 175 F Faithful Companions of Jesus (FCJ), ix, 3, 61, 98–100, 104, 135 Flanders, 5 Fleming, Bishop (Dr) Michael, 65–67, 93–95 Frayn, Mother M. Ursula, 17, 139, 141, 142 G Gallagher, Bishop Nicholas, 20 George’s Hill Presentation Convent, 8 Gervais, Mère Gaëtan, 17 Girls Reading Book for the Use of Schools (1864), 108 Goold, Archbishop, 125 Gordon y Prendergast, Christina, 98

 INDEX 

H Habit, the, 2, 13, 38, 42, 44, 46, 47, 79, 80, 125, 153 Haly, Fr Robert, 64, 70 Harte, Mother M. Delphine, 96, 120, 122, 123 Hartmann, Bishop (Dr) Anastasius, 96 Healy, Mother Mary Agnes, 71, 112n2 Hennessy, Mother Vincent, 92, 99, 112n3 Histoire croisée, 164 Hughes, Bishop (Dr) Henry, 64 Hutchinson, Mother M. Ignatius, 72 I Imitation of Christ, 6 Immigrants, Irish, xi, 39, 58n58, 64, 65, 93, 131, 132, 156n33, 159n70, 168 Infant Jesus Sisters (Dames de St Maur), v, ix, 3, 10, 17, 20, 27n31, 27n32, 61, 62, 75, 85n2 Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, vii, 3, 4, 7, 8, 25n8, 34, 46, 69, 181–183 J James II, King, 5 Javouhey, Mother Rosalie, 19 Jesuits (Society of Jesus), 11, 22, 28n39, 36, 64, 93, 98, 122, 123, 128, 149, 150 Joynt, Mother M. Gonzaga, 74, 75, 79, 87n48 L Lackersteen, John, 98 Ladies of the Convent Committee, Calcutta, 96, 122

219

Lalor, Mother M. Berchmans, 74, 75 Laurel Hill Convent (FCJ), 98 Loreto Abbey, Rathfarnham, 12, 13, 16, 22, 25n8, 30n83, 34, 35, 38, 47, 48, 63, 64, 68, 69, 98, 102, 122, 125, 153 Loreto Convent, Gorey, 70, 125 Loreto order, 3, 34, 35, 46, 48, 53, 68, 70, 76, 122, 132, 133, 135, 147, 151 M MacKillop, Mother Mary, 44, 57n51 Magawly, Teresa, 98, 114n31, 114n32 Maguire, Mother M. Cecilia, 146, 168 Maher, Mother M. Michael, 41, 143 Maher, Mother M. Teresa, 14, 112n2, 140 Manual for Needlework for Use in National Schools (1869), 108 Marists (Sisters of Mary), ix, 3, 79, 82, 100, 135 McAuley, Catherine, 4–5, 8, 9, 14, 26n16, 28n51, 58n61, 70, 123, 140 McDonough, Sister Xaveria, 123 Mercy Convent, Baggot Street, 146, 168 Mercy Convent, Callan, 41, 57n39, 142 Mercy Convent National School, Carlow, 110, 111 Monitors/monitorial system, x, 108–111, 124, 165 Moran, Bishop Patrick, 41, 57n39 Mount Anville Convent (RSCJ), 15, 103, 105 Mount St Mary’s Academy, 125 Moylan, Bishop (Dr) Francis, 8 Mullanphy, John, 97 Mulquin, Mother M. Paul, 104, 111

220 

INDEX

Murphy, Mother M. Xavier, 12, 75, 101, 120 Murray, Archbishop (Dr) Daniel, 7, 8, 12, 22, 30n83, 34, 35, 54n8, 54n10, 67–69, 94, 139 Murray, Archbishop (Dr) James, 41, 42, 73, 77, 139, 142, 143 N Nagle, David, 5 Nagle, Garrett, 5 Nagle, Joseph, 5, 6 Nagle, Nano, vii, 4–9, 26n16, 27n19, 35, 46, 55n12 Nain, Père Charles, 20 National Board of Education, Ireland, 107, 141 Novice, v, viii, 2, 4, 16–18, 22, 24, 33–54, 69, 71, 73, 74, 80, 83, 102–104, 121, 128, 131–133, 140, 141, 143, 167 Novitiate/noviceship, v, 3, 5, 7–9, 20–22, 28n35, 30n78, 33, 34, 38–40, 43, 45–52, 54, 62, 69, 89n73, 122 O O’Brien, Anna Maria Ball, 7, 8, 35, 54n10 O’Brien, Maria, 51, 53 O’Connor, Mother Mary Agnes, 71, 112n2 O’Farrell, Mother Teresa, 71, 112n2 Oscott College, 4 P Parlour boarders, 14, 15 Parochial school, x, 127, 130–132, 135–143, 157n35, 159n70, 166 Penal laws, 3 Perry, Mother M. Teresa, 71, 112n2

Poor schools, 6, 8, 44, 63, 106, 107, 127, 135, 143 Postulant, 5, 18–20, 22, 23, 33–54, 75, 79, 86n19, 100, 106, 121, 122, 141–143 Power, Bishop (Dr) Michael, 64, 67, 93, 94 Power, Mother John, 66, 67 Poyntz, Elizabeth, 5 Presentation Convent, Clondalkin, 12, 109 Presentation Convent, Doneraile, 12, 15, 95 Presentation Convent, Galway, 66 Presentation Convent, Kilcock, 40 Presentation Convent, Kilkenny, 40, 112n3 Presentation Convent, Midleton, 40, 111 Presentation Convent, Youghal, 101, 111 Presentation Directory, 109, 131 Presentation Parlour, 15 Presentations (Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary), v, 6 Profession, viii, 7, 9, 15, 38, 47, 52–54, 70, 109, 136, 166 Propaganda Fide, 40, 62, 64 Purcell, Archbishop, 93 R Rahoon Female Convent National School, 109 The Reading Book for Use of Female Schools (1850), 108 Religious of Jesus and Mary (RJM), 3 Report on Convent Schools (1864), 111 Roehampton Convent (Society of the Sacred Heart), 36, 101 Russell, Mother M. Baptist, 71, 112n2, 143

 INDEX 

S School Sisters of Notre Dame, 45 Sea journeys, and nuns, 63, 76, 77, 80 Shannon, Mother Anna, 38, 39, 56n30, 70, 155n2 Sisters of Charity, v, vii, ix, 3, 7, 8, 17, 18, 43–46, 61, 82, 101, 134, 135, 141 Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word, 18, 43 Sisters of Mercy, v, ix, 3, 8, 11, 14, 16–18, 41, 44–46, 51, 58n61, 61, 64, 70–72, 80, 82, 93, 97, 99, 101, 106, 107, 110, 111, 112n2, 120, 123–125, 128, 132, 135–140, 146–149, 156n33, 158n60, 167 Sisters of St Joseph of Carondolet, 18, 19, 43, 45, 58n59, 132, 133, 157n47 Sisters of St Joseph of Cluny (SJC), ix, 3, 15, 17, 19–22, 29n57, 100, 135 Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart, 43 Sisters of St Louis, ix, 3, 61, 104 Sisters of the Good Shepherd (GSS), 45, 61, 82, 142, 158n56 Sisters of the Holy Faith (HFS), 3 Society for Promoting English Protestant Schools in Ireland (Charter Schools), 4 Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor of Ireland (Kildare Place Society), 106, 109, 110 Society of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (RSCJ), vii, ix, 3, 9–11, 13, 15, 22, 27n30, 27–28n33, 29n56, 30n87, 33, 36–38, 55n18, 58n65, 61, 70, 97, 100, 101, 103, 120–122, 128, 129, 132, 135, 145–147, 149–151, 155n6, 156n25, 157n46 Somers, Mother M. Bendicta, 69, 70 South Presentation Convent, Cork, 11, 101

221

St Agatha’s Female Academy, 124 Stanley Letter, the, 106 St Brigid’s Missionary School, Callan, 10, 41–43, 45, 63, 131, 142, 143 St Ignatius Girls’ School, Melbourne, 104 St Joseph’s Convent, Newmarket, 44 St Leonard’s Convent, 101 St Leo’s Convent of Mercy, Carlow, 124, 158n60 Stonyhurst (Jesuit College), 4 St Xavier Female Academy, 124 T Typhus epidemic (1847), 94 U Ursuline Convent, Cork, 6, 7, 16, 27n21, 50, 106 Ursuline Convent, Massachusetts, 169 Ursulines (Order of St Ursula), 3–7, 11, 27n21, 34, 43, 44, 46, 47, 49, 51, 100–102, 104, 121, 135, 144, 147, 150, 170n13 V Varin, Fr Joseph, 34 W Waldron, Mother M. Patricia, 71 Walsh, Archbishop (Dr) William, 13, 22, 23, 97 Warde, Mother Frances (Francis Xavier), 14, 16, 28n51, 70, 71, 91, 106, 112n2, 120, 123–125, 136, 137, 140, 147, 156n33, 158n60, 171–173 Warde, Mother M. Joseph, 16, 17, 29n52