Part 1

Sister Genevieve: A Courageous Woman's Triumph in Northern Ireland
by John Rae

1

"I did not like nuns, to put it mildly. Their whole secretive way of life revolted me."

On a January morning in 1956 a sister wearing the blue habit and distinctive white collar and cornette, or headdress, of the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul left Clonard Convent in the heart of Roman Catholic West Belfast to walk the short distance to St. Vincent's primary school in Dunlewey Street, just off the Falls Road. She was a few weeks short of her thirty-third birthday, and although she was an experienced teacher, this would be her first day at St. Vincent's. The sisters were familiar figures in the area, but there was something about this sister that attracted the attention of the watchers in the windows and doorways of the small Victorian terraced houses that lined the street. For one thing she was tall, and the "butterfly" headdress of starched white linen made her look taller still. And she was beautiful. A former pupil remembers seeing her new teacher for the first time. "I thought she was an angel. She was the most beautiful woman I think I've ever seen in my life. You look at a lot of nuns and you know why they're nuns. But she was stunning." There was something else about the new teacher that former pupils remember. The way she held herself and the grand manner in which she swept into the school yard where the girls were playing skips, tig, and kick-the-can to keep warm made them think she might be proud, not humble, as a nun ought to be.

Over the next thirty years this tall and beautiful butterfly nun would become one of the best known, most loved, and most controversial Catholics in Northern Ireland. As principal of St. Louise's Comprehensive College on the Falls Road from 1963 to 1988, she transformed out of all recognition the opportunities in education and employment for the Catholic girls from some of the poorest homes in the United Kingdom. She gave hope of a better life to people who for generations had been at the bottom of the heap. But the single-mindedness with which she pursued her goal made enemies: among the Catholic clergy whose male, middle-class status quo she threatened; among the Republicans of Sinn Fein and the IRA whose daughters and sisters she educated but whose control of West Belfast she defied; and among the other schools who resented and envied her success.

It is hardly surprising that it is difficult to find anyone who is neutral on the question of Sister Genevieve O'Farrell. As principal of St. Louise's, she inspired fierce loyalty among her pupils and staff. Those who would not or could not accommodate themselves to her vision have less happy memories. It is not unusual for strong personalities in positions of authority, particularly when the authority is exercised over the young, to divide opinion and inspire very different emotions. When a former pupil says of Sister Genevieve, "The things that made us love her, made others hate her," she is echoing what was said about autocratic Victorian headmistresses.

Adults who had dealings with Sister Genevieve found it equally difficult to be objective. When you have discounted the petty jealousies of the academic world and the gullibility of men enthralled by an attractive nun, you are still left with a sharp clash of opinion about her personality and her methods. She infuriated officials by going over their heads and won the lasting gratitude of those who benefited from her refusal to take no for an answer. This is not to suggest that the different views of Sister Genevieve in some way cancel each other out or reach a bland equilibrium. "On the one hand this, on the other hand that" was not her style, nor is it an accurate summary of her reputation. The weight of opinion is firmly on the side of admiration for her achievements.

An extraordinary mix of politicians, public figures, and former paramilitaries were united in believing that Sister Genevieve possessed a touch of greatness, even saintliness. A former member of the Protestant Ulster Volunteer Force who served sixteen years in prison for his part in the murder of Roman Catholics called Sister Genevieve "the greatest person I have ever met in my life." To her friend Mary McAleese, now the President of Ireland, she was "a marvellous person," while Dr. Rhodes Boyson, a British Minister of State in Northern Ireland, thought she was "the nearest to a saint that I have ever been privileged to meet." Brian Mawhinney, a less flamboyant politician and a Protestant Ulsterman who was undersecretary of state in Northern Ireland in the 1980s, thought so highly of her that when she retired he singled her out for an unprecedented gesture by a British minister to a Catholic nun in the Republican heartland: to the annoyance of rival schools and the Church hierarchy, who thought she had received enough attention already, and of the Republican movement who were openly critical of her pragmatic hobnobbing with the British, Mawhinney appeared unannounced at her final assembly with television cameras in tow and, as the eight hundred senior girls stood and cheered, presented her with a bouquet of flowers.

Mary O'Farrell, the future Sister Genevieve, was born on March 22, 1923, in Tullamore, County Offaly, a small town fifty miles west of Dublin. The Irish Free State had come formally into existence three months earlier on December 5, 1922; the bloody civil war that accompanied its birth was almost over. What Mary's parents thought of these great events is not known. Despite its status as the county town and its position on the Grand Canal that linked Dublin to the River Shannon, Tullamore was the sort of quietly inconspicuous place that history passes by.

Mary's father, William O'Farrell, was farm manager and gardener to the Sisters of Mercy, whose Sacred Heart Convent with its extensive grounds and fine gardens stood on the edge of the town. Her mother, Catherine, a small, firm woman, was said to stand in the shadows when visitors came to the door but was the unquestioned ruler of the domestic scene when the door was closed. Mary was their fifth and last child and only daughter. With four older brothers she might have been expected to feel that she had to assert herself to be noticed, but she grew up to be a shy child, content to let others do the talking.

The family went to Mass every day so that when Mary started school she was always able to tick the day's box on the sheet that hung on the notice board, the nuns' way of checking on their pupils' religious observance. But her parents' piety was not oppressive. They allowed her to go to the cinema on Sunday afternoons when she was a teenager, something of which the nuns strongly disapproved; on Monday morning the cinemagoers were made to stand against the wall to receive a warning from the principal on the dangers of this form of entertainment. If her parents hoped she would become a nun, they kept the thought to themselves. Of her four brothers, Peter, Patrick, Dominic, and John, Patrick became an Augustinian priest and Dominic joined the Christian Brothers, a teaching congregation of laymen, but no pressure was put on Mary to enter the religious life.

Mary's two oldest friends in late childhood and adolescence, May McFadden and Bridie Byrne, have clear memories of the three girls growing up together in Tullamore. Memories of a Catholic girlhood have a habit of exposing dark episodes but these girls do not seem to have suffered anything more traumatic than a ban on leaving the house for being late back from a dance or a "nice telling off" from the nuns for being caught smoking. The heartaches and confusions of adolescence must have been there but they were contained by the rhythms and routines of a Catholic community in a small Irish town in the 1930s.

The convent school they all attended was run by the Mercy nuns, with a mixed religious and lay staff. There was a modest termly fee, which was waived in Mary's case not because her father worked for the nuns but because she had won one of the two scholarships. Mary was one of those unusual people whose high intelligence did not inspire envy or irritation, partly no doubt because her approach to schoolwork was happy-go-lucky and she made her talents available to the other girls in her class. When there was difficult mathematics homework, Mary would sit on the bank of the Canal on the way home and work out the right answers so that the other girls could gather round and copy her solutions into their own exercise books.

The adolescent Mary, recalled by Bridie and May, is a bright, cheerful girl, clever enough to sail through school without too much trouble, still rather shy and reticent, popular with her peers, and loyal to her friends. As with some other individuals who become dominant leaders as adults, there was also a quality that, without conscious effort, drew others to her. May McFadden tried to express what this quality was. "She was always the central figure. She was like a saint in the middle ages, she listened to it all, you didn't feel she was criticizing, she had a great way with her, we trusted her completely." In the photographs of the girls taken when they were about seventeen, Mary always appears at the center of the group, an attractive young woman though a little round-shouldered, as though anxious to disguise her height.

The girls' entry to the sixth form to study for their Leaving Certificate coincided with the outbreak of the Second World War. Ireland was neutral. Though the girls can hardly have been unaware of what was going on in the outside world, they had other things on their minds. "We admired and criticized boys," Bridie wrote, "but Mary never had a boy friend." When Bridie found a boyfriend, Mary did not approve and dismissed him as a snob. May had a boyfriend, too, but agrees that Mary never did. She thinks this was because Mary was self-conscious about being tall and anxious not to upset her parents, who were protective of their only daughter. When the school principal, Sister Dympna, wishing to impart some advice on relationships, took each girl aside and asked, "Are you company keeping?" Mary's answer was "No."

If the three girls were divided on the subject of boys, they were united in their dislike of nuns. When the Mercy nuns or nuns from other congregations spoke to the girls about the joy of receiving the gift of vocation, Mary and her friends were not impressed. "The more cynical among us thought it was fun and a chance to escape from class," Mary wrote many years later, "the more outrageous responded to dares from friends to feign interest." The cynicism of adolescence was reinforced by a positive rejection of the nuns' world. "I did not like nuns, to put it mildly," Mary wrote. "Their whole secretive way of life revolted me, and I did not consider them normal women or in fact women at all."

Bridie's recollection of their attitude at the time is very similar. "We never spoke of being nuns, the life had no attraction for us. I am sure God was calling us but we didn't want to hear. The convent seemed to us a cold, formidable building, and we always stupidly thought the nuns were looking out of the windows watching us. I assure you we didn't say nice things about them . . . whenever we saw nuns out walking, we hid until they were out of sight."

Yet within a year of leaving school, Mary and Bridie had entered religious communities to which they would be committed for the rest of their lives. May was the odd one out; she trained as a teacher, married, and raised a family. Despite the cynicism, eight of the sixteen girls in Mary's Leaving Certificate class became nuns and some of the others considered it seriously before deciding against.

Because God's call to the religious life is difficult to understand, it is tempting to explain it in terms that owe nothing to the supernatural: as a desire to escape from the world; as misplaced idealism; as a realistic career choice for girls when few careers other than teaching and nursing were open to them; or just as conformity to the expectations of others.

In the Ireland of Mary's youth, women in religious orders were the largest single group in the small field of professional women, outnumbering laywomen teachers, nurses, and midwives. As an alternative to marriage, the religious orders offered an outlet for the energies of thousands of Catholic women. The age of vocation suggests that it was a genuine alternative not a second best, most women entering the religious life between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two. Not that the prospect of marriage was all that attractive. There was no shortage of unmarried men, but what many of them wanted was not a wife in the true sense but a skivvy to do the chores. It might be argued that as religious vocation was a phenomenon of late adolescence rather than mature adulthood, the girls who became nuns were making decisions they would later regret. But the same could be said of marriage, and in Ireland it was easier to leave a religious order than to obtain a divorce.

The trouble with Mary O'Farrell was that she did not want either alternative. For the time being at least, marriage was not on her mind and she was certain she did not want to join a religious order. Nursing and teaching did not appeal to her. She was an intelligent, strong-willed, young woman who in a later generation might have forged a successful career for herself in business or the professions but in provincial Ireland in 1941 the choice was limited.

Not that Mary or any of the other talented women who joined religious orders in what has been described as "the golden age of religious life," between the French Revolution and the mid-twentieth century, would have seen it as a matter of choice. God called them to enter the religious life and they obeyed, joyfully in some cases, in others with initial reluctance, but always willing to sacrifice whatever prospects they may have had. Of Mary's near contemporaries, Bride Geoffrey-Smith, who as Sister Bridget was headmistress of St. Mary's School, Ascot, turned down a place at Cambridge in favor of her vocation to become a nun. In the previous generation, Agnes Berkeley, Sister Xavier, happily abandoned an aristocratic lifestyle because she was convinced she had been called to join the Daughters of Charity and to serve the poor in China, which she did for fifty years until her death in 1944. However much our secular, twenty-first-century perspective seeks a down-to-earth explanation, the fact remains that some very able women committed themselves to God's service not as a career choice or for want of something better but in response to what they believed was divine guidance.

Mary, too, believed that her decision to enter the religious life was a step she would not have taken without supernatural intervention. She was certain that God had called her, even though at first she did not recognize His voice. She remembered the moment in detail. The girls in her class were discussing in their usual sceptical fashion the different congregations of nuns when Anna Daly, whose brother, a Down's syndrome child, was being cared for by the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, turned to Mary, perhaps in response to a comment Mary had made, and said: "Those French sisters really do serve the poor."

That was it. Anna Daly's words did not seem important at the time but Mary soon became convinced that they expressed God's call to her. Far from being ecstatic as the nuns had assured her she would be, she was baffled and then resentful.

"The call came to me through that simple incident and I loathed it . . . I felt I was being pushed into unknown territory for which I had no natural taste." Despite her feelings, she wrote to the Daughters of Charity and studied the literature they sent.

The Daughters of Charity, Servants of the Sick Poor, was a company of "sisters" founded in Paris in 1633 by Vincent de Paul, "Monsieur Vincent," a French priest, and "the virtuous widow" Louise de Marillac. Their innovation was to found a religious organization of women who would serve their vocation on the streets, in the hospitals, and in the homes of the poor, not in a convent. Instead of the medieval ideal of the female religious as the bride of Christ, a consecrated virgin whose life was suitably reclusive and devotional, Vincent and Louise saw the possibility of using the practical and pastoral skills of women to alleviate suffering in the world outside. Because the sisters would be exposed to that world, they would have to be more virtuous than cloistered religious, and because their lives would be hard and dangerous, their training would have to develop physical as well as spiritual resources, the exterior strength to undertake exhausting work as well as the interior strength of a life of prayer. "As for those two girls," Louise de Marillac wrote about two country girls who wanted to join the company, "try them out very thoroughly in body and mind because you realize that a girl with a weakness in either is not suitable to us." The qualities of the ideal candidate are suggested by the reference written on behalf of the future St. Catherine Laboure, a farm girl who applied to join in 1830: "very devout, of good character, with a strong constitution, a love of work, and a most cheerful disposition."

It was not a life for the fainthearted. Seventeenth-century France was a violent society almost continuously at war with itself or with its neighbors. The early Daughters of Charity were robust country girls who ran the gauntlet of the slums, the prisons, and the battlefields to find in the faces of the poor and suffering the image of their Savior. They cared for those at the margins of society, the orphans and the insane, and because their founders believed that charity should be accompanied by instruction, started Petites Ecoles for the daughters of the poor.

Copyright 2001 by John Rae