A fairer look at the Our Lady of Charity congregation

Jacinta Prunty, The Monasteries, Magdalen Asylums and Reformatory Schools of Our Lady of Charity in Ireland. 1853-1973.
The Columba Press, Dublin, 2017

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On a visit once to the beautiful church of St Teresa in Dublin’s Clarendon Street, my eyes were drawn to a plaque there that honours the first thirteen Sisters of Mercy who died in the mid nineteenth century and are buried in the crypt. Many died young in the service of the poor of Dublin during very tough times when cholera was among the many challenges the sisters faced.

I sometimes think of that plaque, and that self-sacrificing service, when I read criticisms of the historical legacy of Irish religious sisters that too often lack fairness or acknowledgement of the enormous contribution that the sisters made.

The strongest criticism has been reserved for the orders that ran the “Magdalen asylums” – or Magdalen laundries, as they came to be known – but without any serious attempt being made to explain the reasons for the original establishment of such bodies. It is important to acknowledge the public disquiet about these institutions from our past as well as the suffering of many women who resided there; and, indeed, the historical abuses in residential childcare institutions that were extensively documented in the Ryan Report.

In his Chairperson’s introduction to the 2013 report on the Magdalen laundries, Senator Martin McAleese stated that many of the women who met with his Committee experienced the Laundries as “lonely and frightening places” (Par. 3) or found themselves quite alone in what was, by today’s standards, a harsh and physically demanding work environment. He added that “the psychological impact on these girls was undoubtedly traumatic and lasting” (Par. 10). In his nuanced report, McAleese also pointed out, however, that the majority of women who entered these institutions spent less than one year there and that the atmosphere in the Laundries “softened” in the period after Vatican Two (Par. 18).

A gap in public discussion relates to how the sisters themselves saw their aims and their work. This fair-minded history of one of the orders involved – The Sisters of Our Lady of Charity or OLC – thus meets a real need. Its author, Dr Jacinta Prunty, is head of the Department of History at Maynooth University.

The decades-long or even centuries-long apostolate of a religious order cannot be reduced to a few soundbites. Painstaking historical research is needed for proper understanding of an order’s contribution over time. Prunty’s important book draws on extensive documentary research and covers the period from 1853, when the OLC congregation arrived in Ireland, to 1973, or the post  Vatican Two era.

While the McAleese report rightly warned against any labelling of Magdalen Laundry former residents as ex-prostitutes, the context for the foundation of the OLC congregation in France nevertheless was the huge challenge of prostitution, which led to many initiatives to reach out to women caught up in, or at risk of being drawn into, prostitution.

In nineteenth century Dublin, prostitution was rife in the “Monto” district of the city – an area including what is now Sean McDermott Street, where the OLC sisters arrived in the 1880s. The area was in close proximity to a railway station, the port and a British army barracks. Grinding poverty and homelessness were major contributory causes of prostitution. While terms like “Magdalen asylums” have a negative resonance today, the original term used by the sisters in France, where the OLC community started, was “refuge,” a term with positive connotations, implying safety, respite and care for vulnerable women.  “Asylum”, the term more commonly used in Britain and Ireland, also originally implied safety and shelter.

As well as being a respected historian, Jacinta Prunty is also a Holy Faith sister and thus possesses a deeper understanding of the religious inspiration of the sisters than many current commentators.

It is useful to recall, as Prunty does in this book, that the original vision of the OLC community, founded by St John Eudes in France in the seventeenth century, was that the sisters and women residents should share, as far as possible, a monastic rule of life. Prostitutes were often social outcasts so that original vision responded to a real need and saw the OLC monastery as “a refuge for repentant women under the care of a religious order created expressly for the purpose, the whole enterprise to be driven by a spirituality that centred on the compassionate heart of Jesus” (p. 59).

Like the McAleese committee, which she assisted, Prunty makes the point that the large majority of women stayed short-term in the OLC services, but she also notes that there was a steady increment of a small number of more long-term residents. Women did not live in the laundries but in separate residences and the laundries were necessary to pay for a service that received little State or private funding.

Dr Prunty’s book is a valuable contribution to knowledge about the OLC services but also highlights information deficiencies relating to those services. For example, in the High Park institution in Drumcondra, nothing is known of the background story of 89% of the women admitted between 1922 and 1971 (p.42) – partly because the sisters had a “no questions asked” policy about the background of women who sought shelter with them.

By the mid-twentieth century, the penitential, institutional vision of the OLC congregation had become very out-dated. The lack of wages had not seemed problematic previously for women who were being provided with bed and board but was seen as totally unacceptable by the 1960s. There was a great need to develop new approaches and to prepare women better, notably through good vocational training, for life afterwards.

Those accustomed to presentations of Archbishop John Charles McQuaid as the pantomime villain of Ireland’s Catholic past may be surprised to read here that, in this area, he was a determined moderniser, who pushed the sisters strongly to adapt their services, for example, through hostel provision, better governance arrangements and improved education for the sisters themselves in social work, psychology and childcare. The sisters had an admirable tradition of decentralised governance, but this tradition did not facilitate the introduction of reform across the congregation.

In the 1950s and 1960s, there were nevertheless positive reform initiatives, such as the development of hostels and of greater links with the local community. Indeed,  an OLC reformatory school for girls, St Anne’s  in Kilmacud, was the subject of a not uncritical but generally positive report in 1966 by a well-known feminist journalist, Mary Maher, at a time when her paper, the Irish Times, was publishing strong critiques of institutional childcare in Ireland in which the  religious orders were deeply involved.

In my own research on the religious orders in healthcare, I was much impressed by their pioneering contributions in areas as diverse as – to give just a few examples – the hospice movement, acute hospital investment, spinal injuries treatment and rehabilitation, early intervention in intellectual disability services, and the reach-out today to refugees, drug addicts and prostitutes. In the health and social services generally, the religious orders arguably gave somewhat limited priority to documenting their own endeavours, still less to blowing their own trumpets. Their focus was on living their vocation and on service delivery. Today, the need for published reflection on service provision, and for historical research like that of Dr Prunty, is widely recognised, even if responding to those in need will always take priority over theorising about the services provided. 

This book is aimed at the OLC sisters and at the Good Shepherd sisters with whom they re-united in 2014, at those with a policy interest in this area and at a general readership. It deserves a large audience. Books like this may not have an immediate impact during a period when anti-Catholic emotions are very powerful in Ireland. One hopes, however, that they will have a stronger influence over time when the tides of history change and the need for a fair re-balancing of the historical record is better appreciated.