Part 3

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

(Page 3 of 3)

Those who could not take the regime left. There was a coldness, even ruthlessness in the way the Daughters of Charity dealt with its failures. They were seminary sisters one day and gone the next. No comment was made when a sister left and no questions were asked. An empty pigeonhole was the only way the other sisters knew she had gone for good. A similar coldness characterized the community's attitude to those who left after making their vows. One of Sister Genevieve's pupils who left the Daughters of Charity after six years, wrote: "At my departure, the coldness, indifference, and awkwardness of the sisters in charge hurt so much. On the actual morning of my departure I was told to go to a certain room at the front of the house where I would find some lay clothes. A taxi would come for me and I should go when it arrived. It broke my heart, no one said goodbye. I just left, streaming with tears."

The achievement of Sister Philomena Rickard was to use the strengths and weaknesses of the old regime to inspire the seminary sisters with the practical idealism of St. Vincent de Paul and St. Louise de Marillac. She had lived the Vincentian life in the slums of Manchester and Glasgow and like a battle-hardened soldier sent home to train recruits, she knew the conditions the seminary sisters would have to face and was single-minded in preparing them for the trials ahead. Of herself, she gave little away.

For Mary, as for others, it was Sister Philomena who made sense of the months in the seminary. Any remaining doubts about their vocation and about whether the Daughters of Charity was the community in which they wished to spend the rest of their lives were dispelled by the challenge of Sister Philomena's teaching. Every morning and afternoon, the sisters sat in their rows on the narrow wooden benches as Sister Philomena instructed them on the lives of St. Vincent and St. Louise, on what it means to serve Christ in the poor, on the characteristics of simplicity, humility, and charity that the sisters should strive to maintain, on the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience that they would take after they had left the seminary, and on the importance of a life of prayer. The mainspring of her instruction, the text to which she always returned, was the record of Vincent de Paul's "conferences," the spiritual teaching and practical advice that he gave to Louise and the early sisters at face-to-face meetings. Vincent's ideal of "serving Our Lord in the person of the poor" combined with Sister Philomena's experience of trying to put that ideal into practice at last convinced Mary that she had made the right choice. Serving the poor was what God had called her to do. There would be times over the years when her dedication to the religious life wavered but her belief in Vincent de Paul's teaching never did.

Vincent de Paul was a realist. He did not pretend to the early sisters that they would find the poor attractive or grateful, or that it would be easy to love them. The prisoners would scream obscenities when the sisters brought them food and the poor would resent their charity. If the sisters wished to fulfill their duties, they had to put out of their minds any thought that they were doing the poor a favor. In a famous phrase, he told them: "The poor will only forgive us the bread we give them if it is given in love."

It is not difficult to understand why those words caught Mary's imagination as they had caught the imagination of many idealistic young seminary sisters before her. They turned the conventional idea of charity on its head; they asked the impossible of those who took up the challenge, and they seemed to contain a call to fight inequality and injustice. Here at last was an ideal that Mary could dedicate her life to, a concept of what it meant to be religious that was a million miles away from the nuns who peered out of the convent windows in Tullamore and asked the schoolgirls whether they were "company keeping."

Fondness for the company of men was one of the temptations that Sister Philomena warned the young seminary sisters against because it was one of the hazards of secularity, of working in the world while trying to keep your distance from it. The sisters would find themselves working with male colleagues in schools and hospitals and visiting men in prison. By practicing mortification of the flesh they would in time liberate themselves to work in the world without the distraction of "entanglements of the heart." Meanwhile they needed advice on how to avoid potentially dangerous situations. On "persons of the other sex," Vincent de Paul warned against "remaining alone with them at undue hours and places, seeking their company, and prolonging useless conversations with them." He urged the sisters of his day to "be like rocks against any familiarities which men may wish to take." As for the risk of falling in love, the sisters of Mary's generation were told to "withdraw immediately when you hear the hissing of the serpent."

The best defense against all the temptations of worldliness was as "intense interior life." Sister Philomena, who knew all about the problems of working in the secular world, told the seminary sisters that they could not expect to remain true to their vocation unless they developed a life of prayer. Vincent de Paul, speaking at a conference in 1648, explained: "A Daughter of Charity cannot persevere if she does not pray. She may continue for some little time but at length the world will carry her off. She will find her mode of life too hard."

Sister Genevieve acknowledged the debt she owed to the Seminary Directress and wrote that as a young sister she had worshipped Sister Philomena. For Mary, Sister Philomena, who had worked for years among the poorest of the poor, was a role model, epitomizing those qualities that convinced Mary to "take up the challenge of being in this tough army of charity."

In the early spring of 1943, when it was still too cold for the sisters to walk in the garden during recreation, Sister Philomena decided that Sister O'Farrell was ready to make her retreat of the prise d'habit, a final examination before God that would end in her taking the habit of the Daughters of Charity and being sent on her first mission in the outside world. For the time being she would remain Sister O'Farrell, the custom being that a new sister was only given a religious name when she joined her first house. Even that name could change if she moved to another house and found her religious name already in use there, a curious practice, now abandoned, that seemed to emphasize the unimportance of individual identity.

As a passing-out ceremony, the prise d'habit was deliberately low-key. In keeping with their desire not to be thought of as a religious order, the Daughters of Charity kept the chapel service, at which the seminary sister became a habit sister, businesslike and free from the trappings associated with the clothing of a nun. There were no novices dressed as brides or proud, sad parents peering through the grille.

Mary put on her habit before the service under the eye of Sister Philomena. The heavy cloth was the exact shade of blue worn by French workers and was lined with black to protect the cloth when the sisters rolled up their sleeves. The collar and cornette of starched white linen were put on last. The collar, like a stiff white shirtfront, reached from the neck almost to the waist. The cornette, the winged headdress, was held in place by the "obedience pin," which on the occasion of the prise d'habit was put in by the Seminary Directress. This was Sister Philomena's last duty before sending the young sister out into the world.

Mary's sense of achievement on becoming a habit sister was swiftly followed by a disappointment when she was told that she was to be trained as a teacher, the one thing she did not want to do. The decision was taken not by Sister Philomena but by Sister Anne Thomson, the Sister Provincial at the headquarters of the English Province in Mill Hill. Nearly half a century later, Sister Genevieve wrote, "I joined that particular order because I did not want to teach," but at the time she was expected to accept this placement with "holy indifference" to her own wishes.

Mary's objection to teaching was that it fell far short of her ideal of serving the poorest and most marginalized in society. She described her frame of mind on leaving the seminary as "fanatically dedicated to the equality of all human beings" and she saw herself working in the slums of a great city as Sister Philomena had done, not teaching at a school like the Mercy Nuns of Tullamore. But her objection would have been of no interest to the Daughters of Charity. New habit sisters were sent where they were needed.

In the summer of 1943, Mary traveled from Dublin to Mill Hill and then north to Manchester, where her destination was St. Joseph's Technical High School for Girls. The Daughters of Charity ran the school and had a residential house on the site for the sisters. The plan was for Mary to spend a year in this house, gaining some experience of teaching while applying for entry to the ordinary degree course at the Victoria University, Manchester, in the autumn of 1944.

On arrival in Manchester, Mary was given the religious name of Sister Joseph, an odd or perhaps deliberate choice for an attractive young woman. A year later she started at the university. For someone who made such a powerful impression on those she met at other periods of her life, Mary seems to have slipped through her three years at university unnoticed. There is no record of her attendance at the university or of her taking a degree. What few recollections of Manchester she was prepared to put on paper concentrate on her life as a sister and make few references to her life as a student. She lived during this period at the Daughters of Charity house in Rumford Street close to the university. While she attended lectures in the nearby arts building, the other sisters in residence worked with poor families in Manchester's slum districts. The contrast between the maturity these sisters had to display in their daily work and the dependent, almost childlike personalities they assumed when they returned to Rumford Street struck Mary as extraordinary. They looked to their superior for a lead in everything with the result that the evening's recreation was stilted and artificial, and a young sister was not encouraged to express her opinions or indeed to say anything at all.

This was the old regime in the Daughters of Charity and Mary found it stifling. She was too strong a personality and had too keen a sense of humor to sit po-faced and silent through what passed for conversation in the community room; all her life, she enjoyed ruffling feathers and it is unlikely that the older sisters in Rumford Street were spared. Her obvious frustration with the dependency culture earned her the reputation of being, in the words of one of her friends, "pretty wild in the community," but on her own account, she was no more at home in the university. "Those of us who were lucky enough to be given a third level education," she wrote, "found ourselves almost freaks in a social setting outside."

Other sisters, including Sister Margaret Cunnane, who was a year ahead of Mary and obtained her degree in 1946, coped with the difficulties of living in two worlds but Mary evidently did not. Her reticence in Belfast about her experience as a student in Manchester was due to the fact that she failed her final exam. In the third year of her ordinary degree, she concentrated on two subjects, French and history, and it was her French papers that let her down. The Provincial Director of the Daughters of Charity, Father Joseph Sheedy, wrote to the university asking for an explanation but if he received one it is no longer in the archives. The explanation put forward by those sisters who knew her-that she failed deliberately because she did not want to be a teacher or that success in a convent school in rural Ireland had given a misleading impression of her ability-are unconvincing. It may be that she allowed herself to be distracted, that "pretty wild in the community" meant more than just speaking out of turn during recreation, but it is hard to believe the story that her tutor arranged for her to fail so that he would have the pleasure of teaching her for another year.

Whatever the true explanation, the failure was a bitter and humiliating disappointment. Many of those who knew her as Sister Genevieve in Belfast described her as "a driven woman" and there is little doubt that one of the factors that made her so single-minded was a determination to prove herself. The Daughters of Charity were not prepared to lose a potential teacher, and Father Sheedy arranged for Mary to go to Sedgley Park College of Education to take a one-year teaching qualification. Before that she could return to the seminary at Blackrock to make her vows. Despite the frustrations and disappointments she seems to have had no hesitation in doing so.

She was required to make vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience as well as an additional vow to serve the poor. The vows were simple not solemn; they were made without pomp and ceremony and were not ratified by the Church. Nevertheless, they were binding and it was a mortal sin to transgress them. All the sisters renewed their vows each year on the same day, the feast of the Annunciation, but the commitment was for life. As Sister Joseph, Mary made her vows at Mass in the seminary chapel on June 29, 1947. She was twenty-four years old. A few weeks later she returned to Manchester to start her teacher training.

Sedgley Park College was run by the Faithful Companions of Jesus, another company of Catholic sisters that had its origins in France. The course it offered to potential teachers was highly regarded but it does not seem to have overcome Mary's lack of enthusiasm for the role. At the end of the year, her "Ministry Final Mark" was B minus and the report on her teaching practice at Bury Convent speaks for itself:

Found it difficult to get into contact with the young children- a difficult class. Inclined to take the attitude that there was nothing she could do about it in three weeks. Not very anxious to come for help or very ready to take a suggestion.

Mary's first placement as a qualified teacher was at an orphanage school for boys attached to the provincial house at Mill Hill, and it was here that she was given a new religious name, presumably because the provincial house already had a Sister Joseph. Genevieve was the name of one of Louise de Marillac's earliest recruits to the company but it was also the name of a fifth-century saint who, by sheer force of personality, had rallied the citizens of Paris when they were on the point of surrendering to Attila the Hun. If Mary knew something of the saint's history, she probably welcomed the change, but a new religious name did not reconcile her to the role that the Sister Provincial had chosen for her.

Genevieve-as she will now be called-still hoped that she would be sent on a more demanding mission, one that matched Pope Pius XI's description of the Daughters of Charity as "consecrated heroines of the people," and that would enable her to test her vocation in the slums of a great city or in one of the company's missions overseas. But the Sister Provincial had other plans. In 1950, Genevieve was sent to Lanark, a market town midway between Edinburgh and Glasgow, where the Daughters of Charity ran an orphanage and provided some of the teachers for St. Mary's Catholic primary school nearby.

Genevieve spent six years in Scotland, teaching at St. Mary's and learning to love the country to which she would return whenever she could. She learned to love the children, too, and even though she may still have dreamed of serving the poor in more "heroic" circumstances, she began to recognize that the job she was doing was making its contribution to "the equality of all human beings." The recollections of those who knew her in Lanark suggest that she was now happier both as a teacher and as a member of her religious congregation. According to Sister Fidelma Archer, who had recently come to Lanark straight from the seminary, Genevieve's "great sense of humour" helped transform evening recreation into "an hour of happiness and fun." Some of the orphans thought she was fun too. "She was different," one of the girls, who was a teenager at the time, recalls, "she was a very warm person with a lovely smile; if only she had been looking after us." Anne Mulligan, a contemporary on the staff at St. Mary's, described Genevieve as "a stunningly beautiful woman," a popular and respected member of staff, much loved by her pupils "for whom she showed great love and compassion but also firmness when necessary."

But Genevieve was restless. Toward the end of 1955, she heard that a secondary school in Dundee, run jointly by the Daughters of Charity and the Marist Brothers, was looking for a teacher and she told her superior at Lanark that she would like to be considered. Once again, she was to be disappointed. The Sister Provincial at Mill Hill decided that Sister Genevieve O'Farrell should be sent to Belfast not Dundee.

If there was a time when Genevieve thought about leaving the Daughters of Charity, this was it. Among her friends, opinion is divided. Some believe she would never have contemplated leaving but others think that being sent to Belfast was the last straw for someone whose constant criticism of the Daughters of Charity was that the sisters were never treated as intelligent adults. Genevieve herself said that while she could not have refused to go to Belfast, she made up her mind that she would only stay for six months. It was the postulancy and the seminary all over again. She would give Belfast a try. In January 1956, she took the boat from Liverpool and was met at Belfast Docks by Sister Ita Polley, the principal of St. Vincent's primary school, where Genevieve would be teaching. "Had you a nice crossing?" Sister Ita asked. "As well as can be expected," Genevieve replied. The two sisters took a taxi from the docks across the city center to the Falls Road. So many buildings have been destroyed during the Troubles or as the result of redevelopment, that the old Falls district that Genevieve was seeing for the first time, with its linen mills and warren of narrow streets, has vanished. But in 1956 the narrow streets, whose names, Cawnpore and Lucknow alongside Bantry and Tralee, might have been chosen to remind the Catholic population that although this was Ireland it was still part of the British Empire, were teeming with life. If Genevieve was seeking the poorest of the poor, she would find them here because Catholic West Belfast was one of the poorest districts in Western Europe.

Sister Ita had told her pupils how they should greet the new sister. One of the first to do so as Genevieve swept into the school yard, so tall and regal on that cold winter morning, was ten-year-old Margaret Conlan, who ran across the yard and said: "Cead mile failte, Sister Genevieve, a hundred thousand welcomes."

Copyright 2001 by John Rae