Part 2

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

(Page 2 of 3)

Some contemporary Catholics were critical. Instructing girls may have been women's work but going into the royal prisons, "the antechambers of Hell," and onto the battlefields was a job for male religious, if indeed it needed to be done at all. There was something unsettling too, about the cheerful manner in which the sisters embraced danger. One of the first, Marguerite Naseau, died of the plague because she had happily taken into her own bed a homeless woman desperately ill with the disease.

Selfless individuals do not make a great religious movement. Fortunately for the Daughters of Charity, Vincent and Louise, in common with many saints, were efficient organizers. Vincent had the additional skill of knowing how to win influential support, a skill that Sister Genevieve would also possess and use, like Vincent, to good effect. The company grew in numbers and reputation, opening houses all over France, including twenty-five in Paris, and sending the first mission "abroad" to serve the poor in Poland. By the end of the eighteenth century, the Daughters of Charity had established themselves as one of the largest and most respected congregations of women in Europe.

This did not protect them from the politically correct logic of the French Revolutionaries for whom charity had connotations of aristocracy and selflessness might be privilege in disguise. The sisters were expelled from the motherhouse in Paris; other houses were closed or allowed to continue their work under the new title of La Maison de L'Humanité. When the more extreme revolutionaries introduced a program of dechristianization, those sisters who remained at work were at risk.

During the Reign of Terror, four sisters in Arras were arrested, tried, and guillotined on the same day, June 26, 1794, going to the scaffold in a tumbril, wearing the habit and the white butterfly headdress of their company.

In the nineteenth century the Daughters of Charity quickly reestablished themselves. New houses opened throughout France and overseas including the first house in China. By the time Mary O'Farrell wrote to them, the Daughters of Charity had a worldwide organization with 43,000 members. The first house in Ireland had been opened at Drogheda in 1855, but the Irish sisters were still part of the company's English province with its headquarters at Mill Hill in North London. What attracted Mary to the Daughters of Charity was that they were not nuns. Vincent de Paul called them "sisters who come and go like seculars"; in other words they lived in the world not in the cloister. Strictly speaking, the organization that Vincent and Louise started was not a religious order but a company or congregation, or in modern Catholic terminology, a society of apostolic life.

For Mary, these were not just technical or semantic distinctions. Given her antipathy to "the whole secretive way of life" of cloistered nuns, they were of fundamental importance. The Daughters of Charity may have dressed like nuns, taken vows like nuns, and have been almost universally referred to as nuns by bishops and canon lawyers no less than by the populace at large, but the fact that they served God in the world made all the difference to Mary. As an adult, she was happy to be called a nun and to call herself a nun, but at eighteen the distinction between the secular and the cloistered role was crucial to her decision to enter the religious life.

So was the nature of the work she hoped she would be doing. Like so many women who had joined the Daughters of Charity before her, Mary was physically and mentally strong and not interested in the contemplative life. To work with the poorest and most marginalized in society was a prospect that must have appealed to her idealism as well as to her dislike of the bourgeois femininity of the convent school. She knew she did not want to be a teacher and she probably assumed there was no danger of the Daughters of Charity pushing her in that direction against her will.

Over the summer months of 1941, Mary appears to have wrestled with the decision about her future without mentioning the possibility of joining the Daughters of Charity to her parents or to her brother John, who was closest to her in age and outlook. Her doubts about whether to enter the religious life seem to have been stronger than any doubts she may still have had about the Daughters of Charity. Her friend Bridie Byrne had already decided to join the Sisters of Mercy at Tullamore, and the sisters wanted to recruit Mary, too: she was one of their star pupils. But for Mary it had to be the Daughters of Charity if she was going to enter the religious life at all. At the end of the summer, when she was eighteen and a half, Mary applied and was accepted as a postulant with the Daughters of Charity in Dublin, but her doubts remained. Her family could not give her the wholehearted support she needed because they thought she was making a mistake. When she confided in her brother John, he told her she would be mad to join the Daughters of Charity. It was not her vocation the family doubted, it was the wisdom of joining that particular community. Mary's deeply religious parents considered a religious vocation the most marvellous thing that could happen to a member of the family and said so, but "not in that hard order." Popular prejudice identified the Daughters of Charity with a demanding physical life in which there was little room for spirituality. Or as a French priest put it: "N'y allez pas, mon enfant, là-bas; ce n'est que bras et jambes."

On the eve of Mary's departure for Dublin, a Jesuit priest who was a friend of the family made a similar attempt at dissuasion. "Don't join that order," he told her, "it's not for you. I'll fix it even at this late hour."

The attempts to dissuade Mary failed. On the morning of November 27, 1941, she put on the black dress, black stockings, and black shoes that postulants were expected to provide for themselves, and after breakfast, she said goodbye to her parents. As she adored them both and knew that she had broken their hearts by sticking to her decision, the leave taking was sad and difficult. John accompanied her by train to Dublin. It was a foul day, raining ceaselessly. When they arrived at the Daughters of Charity house in the Navan Road, Dublin, it turned out to be a former workhouse, a large, forbidding building swept by the rain. John could control his feelings no longer. "For God's sake come home," he pleaded. But Mary shook her head and replied, "I'll give it a try."

The policy of the Daughters of Charity was to place postulants in small numbers in any one of their houses in the province so that there was an element of chance in the type of work they experienced. The house in Navan Road was a residential home and special school for mentally handicapped children. There were a few mentally handicapped adults left over from the days when the building had been used as an asylum and a number of illegitimate children who were perfectly capable of attending a normal school but who had nowhere else to live. In the long corridors the different groups occupied separate rooms, but their lives overlapped and their cries intermingled so that the task of meeting their diverse needs required exceptional stamina and patience.

The relationship between the sisters and the postulants was friendly but formal. Mary would have been addressed as "Miss Mary." Sister Gabriel McDonnell, who was a sister in the house when Mary was a postulant, said that most of the sisters were soon won over by Mary's personality though some thought that the new postulant's attractiveness might be "a handicap in the community." For Mary, the postulancy was a tough initiation into the Vincentian life but the seeming impossibility of loving the poor and suffering as Vincent de Paul had done did not deter her. At the end of the three months, she was prepared to make the commitment necessary to enter the seminary but, true to form, she still had reservations. As Sister Genevieve, she wrote in 1990: "I went into the seminary hoping that I would be sent away, as happened to others frequently, but after six months I changed course and wanted to take up the challenge of being in this tough army of charity."

Mary entered St. Catherine's Seminary at Blackrock outside Dublin on February 26, 1942. She was still only eighteen. The seminary would be a sterner test of her vocation and of her willingness to submit to the disciplines of community life because, like the training camps of elite military units, it was partly designed to make or break those who aspired to join. The seminary was housed in a Georgian mansion called Dunardagh, a square, two-storey building set in thirty-five acres of grounds close to the sea and the ferry port of Dun Laoghaire. It was a far cry from the Navan Road. The twelve to fourteen months the sisters spent in the seminary was the only time they withdrew from the world. There were no sick, poor, or mentally handicapped children or orphans here, only the "seminary sisters," as the former postulants were now called, and the "habit sisters," who trained them for the hard life that lay ahead and sorted out the genuine vocations from those whose mental or physical weaknesses disqualified them.

The day Mary arrived was as wet and dismal as the one on which her brother John had accompanied her to the Navan Road, but this time she was alone. She was met by one of the Sisters of Office and taken upstairs to the dormitory to change out of her postulant's clothes and into those of a seminary sister. White curtains separated the beds. On Mary's bed were her seminary sister's clothes, folded neatly. With the help of the Sister of Office she changed, putting on the long black robe, tucked in at the waist and held with a pin, the white fichu, or shawl, and the white coif that fitted closely over her head. She was no longer an Irish girl but a French peasant girl of the seventeenth century.

The superior of the seminary was its Directress, Sister Philomena Rickard, a large, strongly built Dubliner with big hands and a forthright manner. Like so many of those who are required to test recruits to the uttermost, she hid a kindly nature behind a tough exterior. She was supported by four Sisters of Office, "noncommissioned officers," who were responsible for seeing that the seminary sisters were in the right place at the right time, supervising work, answering questions, and giving permissions.

Two other postulants had arrived at the same time as Mary and the three "new girls" now joined the continuous cycle of training on which the seminary sisters were engaged. At different points on the cycle some sisters joined and others left having received the holy habit, and their first placement, or mission, while others left early of their own accord or were sent away. The comings and goings must have complicated Sister Philomena's job, but there were seldom more than thirty seminary sisters so she was able to keep her finger on the problems and progress of individuals.

At the end of the first week the three new girls went on a short retreat under the direction of Sister Philomena, one purpose being to determine their vocation date when they would formally be admitted as seminary sisters. The vocation date is of great importance to the Daughters of Charity because it is the date on which their response to God's call becomes a commitment and from which they calculate their membership of the company. Mary's vocation date was March 9, 1942. On that day, too, she took a further step away from girlhood. Miss Mary became Sister O'Farrell.

The daily routine of the seminary had not changed much in three hundred years. Before the war, Irish and English postulants had crossed the channel to join the large seminary in Paris, where sisters from around the world trained to follow in the footsteps of St. Vincent and St. Louise. In the small Irish seminary at Blackrock, the spirit of the Paris seminary prevailed, and the sisters were never allowed to forget that they were in a French company. French terms were used at every turn: the superior was addressed as ma soeur, her office was her cabinet, insufficient modesty might be criticized as still too much la tête en l'air, and the successful completion of the seminary was marked by the prise d'habit. French customs had to be learned-Mary complained that they even had to adopt French table manners-and French centrally imposed uniformity accepted. The old jibe about French education-that the authorities in Paris could tell what the pupils were doing any time of the day-could have been applied to the Vincentian seminaries.

The sisters got up at four in the morning as a French peasant girl would have done. A Sister of Office rang the handbell and called out: "In God's holy name, please sisters arise," to which the watchful replied, "Blessed be God's holy name." When they had washed and dressed, the sisters vied with one another to be the first into the chapel for a period of meditation and silent prayer. After praying together for the sick and dying, the orphans and the insane, the sinners and the benefactors, the sisters spent the time until mass at seven on housework or improving reading. There were no lay staff in the seminary so the sisters had to do everything from polishing the floors and cleaning the pots and pans to cooking the meals and doing the laundry. It was no good pleading lack of skill; if Sister Philomena sent you to the kitchen, you learned to cook, instructed and supervised by a Sister of Office. Idle moments did not occur. If a sister found herself with a gap in activity she was expected to profit from it by saying her rosary. That would have been normal in the noviciates of the day, but the Daughters of Charity added a sense of urgency to capture the spirit of the first sisters who hurried through the streets of Paris to visit the poor. Breakfast after Mass was taken "on the run," standing in silence, the sisters had a mug of steaming coffee and cut themselves a thick slice of bread from the loaf on the table. As they had already been up for three and a half hours, even this plain fare must have been very welcome.

After breakfast, the main part of the day was divided between instruction in the seminary and more hard manual work at their "offices," which changed in rotation so that if this month a sister worked in the kitchen, next month she worked in the laundry. Time was set aside for spiritual reading, meditation, and prayer as well as for recreation. Much of the day was spent in silence but during recreation the sisters could talk to one another over their sewing about uncontentious matters- what a Sister of Office had said that morning or whether there would be biscuits as a treat on the next feast day. On fine days, a Sister of Office accompanied the sisters into the garden, where they said seven Hail Marys at the statue of Our Lady before sitting in the sun and opening their sewing bags to work on their trousseau, the personal garments that needed attention. The long hours of silence, the intent listening at instruction, and the hard physical work meant that by the evening the sisters were exhausted. At eight o'clock, two points for meditation on the following day were read out and the sisters examined their own consciences before retiring. Lights out in the dormitory was at nine-thirty. As Sister Genevieve, Mary was ambivalent about her experience of the seminary, proud to have endured, which was proof she thought of her vocation, but critical of the denial of individuality.

"The seminary, as the noviciate was called, made every attempt to dehumanise us. Only a divine call could explain our survival." It was not the rigid routine that Mary found dehumanizing but being treated as a child who should be seen and not heard, who could not be trusted to read a secular book or to go for a walk by herself, and who was certainly not encouraged to have ideas. "Who are you to think what should be done?" she was asked. "The community has been in existence for three hundred years and did not need your thoughts." At each stage of her life, as Mary O'Farrell the Tullamore schoolgirl, as Miss Mary the postulant, as Sister O'Farrell the seminary sister, as Sister Joseph, her first religious name, and as Sister Genevieve, she found it difficult to be obedient to an authority she did not respect, and there must have been times in the seminary when, despite her growing understanding of Sister Philomena's purpose, she found the whole rigmarole of petty regulations almost insufferable. The sisters had to ask permission to do the simplest things and to ask pardon for the most trivial mistakes such as breaking a cup or a shoelace. For only slightly more serious lapses the sister had to kiss the floor in penance and woe betide the sister who let her mind wander. "Sister, would you share with us the virtuous thoughts with which God inspired you during your prayer?" Then the sister would go forward, kneel before the Directress, and begin: "Having placed myself in the presence of God . . ."

Sister Philomena must have seemed omnipotent and omniscient to the young sisters. There was no privacy and no corner of your life she might not inspect. Letters home were left unsealed for her to read and incoming letters were slit open and read by her before being placed in each pigeonhole.

Although most sisters had difficulty accepting the traditions and disciplines of the seminary, their commitment carried them through. Some were so eager to receive the holy habit they would have done anything, including, as one sister put it, "eating breakfast standing on my head," if it was required. Others submitted to the regime but with reservations they managed to keep to themselves. Mary was one of these. For all sisters there must have been moments when the whispered encouragement, "Cheer up, this won't go on forever," broke the rule of silence and made all the difference to morale.

Copyright 2001 by John Rae