Analysis: By 1901, there was one nun per 400 members of the Irish population and many of these women left the country for missionary work overseas
By Deirdre Raftery, UCD
By the mid-19th century, there was a steady flow of Irishwomen out of Ireland to convents in the Anglophone world. As early as 1833, the Presentation Sisters sent sisters to Newfoundland. They were followed there by the Sisters of Mercy. The 1840s saw Irish Loreto nuns go to India, Mauritius, Gibraltar and Canada. Many other congregations – 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 and hospitals.
These were congregations that responded to a demand for sisters who would go to parts of the world where the Church needed English-speaking teaching sisters and nursing sisters. Many followed the Irish Catholic emigrant population to serve their educational and spiritual needs, while some congregations also promoted the faith amongst non-Catholics.
Why did they go? The disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, and the rapid growth in the number of convents, meant that young Catholic women could choose an active religious life, including the possibility of missionary work overseas. Entering a convent was, for many, an attractive option in post-Famine Ireland, especially for daughters in large families who had neither an education nor a marriage portion or dowry. It was also a respectable alternative to marriage, and economic dependency on men. And convent life meant that women could avoid the hardship that went with having large families.
Additionally, convents presented women with the possibility of a professional life, and the status that went with it. A girl with little or no money and a modest national school education, could be trained as a teacher if she entered a religious order. She might also reach a position of leadership and status in a convent school. And if she joined a congregation which had overseas convents, she might travel to parts of the world that most Irishwomen could never hope to see.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's History Show, Prof Deirdre Raftery discusses her book on Nano Nagle, the woman who founded the Presentation order of nuns
It is, then, perhaps not the least bit surprising that convents filled up in post-Famine Ireland. By 1901, there was one nun per 400 members of the Irish population, and many of these women left the country to serve in parts of the Anglophone world where English-speaking Sisters were in demand to run schools.
But before they left, they had to be prepared. Preparation for religious life included firstly becoming a postulant for a brief period of between three and six months. This gave young women time to seriously consider whether or not they had a vocation. It also gave the congregation, and the Superior, some time to see which postulants were suited to religious life.
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Those who were suited, and who wished to continue, asked to be 'received' into the congregation, and began a their preparation in as ‘novices’. The period of noviceship usually lasted two years, and was followed by ‘profession’, at which time novices took the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. Some took a fourth vow, such as a vow to educate the poor. During the noviceship, teaching congregations tried to prepare their novices to work in schools. This made them useful not only in Ireland, but overseas.
Irish bishops in the US and Australia were particularly keen to welcome a steady flow of postulants, novices and professed Sisters. Some returned to the homeland to recruit young women in a practice known as 'questing for vocations'. For example, Bishop O'Connor of Pittsburgh travelled to the Carlow convent of the Sisters of Mercy in 1843, to ask for nuns. A small group returned to the US with the bishop.
A year earlier, Dr Joseph Carew, the Irish-born Bishop of Calcutta, succeeded in getting a small group of Loreto nuns to travel to India, to open schools. Dr Michael Power, Bishop of Toronto, also went to Ireland in 1847 to secure Irish novices and nuns for his diocese.
Bishops were not the only religious who quested for vocations. Small groups of Irish-born nuns also travelled home from the US and Australia to encourage pupils in convent schools to consider a vocation to religious life, and to look for volunteers in convent communities.
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From RTÉ Archives, 1964 episode of Conversations with Missionaries featuring presenter Sile Ni Bhriain talking to Medical Missionaries of Mary, Sister Mary Lagure and Sister Mary John Bosco, about their work in Africa
The demand for Irish postulants and novices was such that some congregations established ‘aspirancies’ in Ireland. An aspirancy was a kind of boarding school, which provided free education to girls who were willing to consider religious life.
One such aspirancy was St Brigid’s Missionary School, established at the Mercy Convent in Callan, County Kilkenny in 1884. Pupils at St Brigid’s were not expected to have a dowry. In many cases, bishops provided the funds to pay for their ship passage if they decided to go to a convent in New Zealand or Australia.
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The first to depart from St Brigid’s was nineteen-year-old Maggie Morris. Following twenty months of training, she left for New South Wales in September, 1885. Her passage was financed by Dr Murray, Bishop of Maitland, and her long life as a Sister of Mercy would include being appointed to the office of Mother Superior.
Other young women went to the US, to convents in Kentucky, Nashville, San Francisco, and the Dakotas. All left Ireland knowing that they would never return. They were the fore-runners of the twentieth-century missionaries, whose work is better known. Though the records of their lives are slender, it is still possible to trace a little of their movement and mission in the archives of congregations in Ireland and overseas.
The Last Irish Missionaries is on RTÉ Player
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Prof Deirdre Raftery is Professor of the History of Education at UCD and a former Research Ireland awardee. She is the author of Irish Nuns and Education in the Anglophone World: a Transnational History (Palgrave Macmillan). A 20% discount is currently available for book or ebook purchasers by using the code 8ClQSFzpKofo3k at checkout
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
