A good news story related to Irish Catholicism featured across mainstream news outlets this week as 21 Cameroonian women travelled to Ireland to give thanks to the Irish Holy Rosary Sisters who taught them decades ago in Our Lady of Lourdes Secondary School in Mankon Cameroon.
Graduating in 1986, the class came together from across the world to arrive at Dublin Airport. They were greeted by Sr Mary Neville, who will be 90 years old next month and worked as principal of the school from 1981 until 1985. The longtime graduates arrived from the UK, the United States, Cameroon, Norway and Switzerland.
Quoted in the Irish Times, Dr Claire Minang, a pharmacist in Houston, Texas, explained why it is was so important to them to come to Ireland and express their gratitude to the Irish religious community who shaped, formed and changed their lives:
“[The sisters] made us understand that we are enough as women in a world where it’s very masculine, and especially in Africa, where girls are even looked at less than the boys even more so. But they made us understand that we are up to, that we are important and we are enough,” Dr Minang said at the airport.
“We’re so very grateful because it made us who we are. We got the self-confidence, we knew that we could be whatever we wanted because they gave us that and that’s why today we are also taking up space in the global stage in different careers, we have doctors, lawyers, engineers, pharmacy, you name it, we got it.”
RTE, the Irish national broadcaster, also covered the story. Speaking to Nagella Nwana Nukuna, now a technical manager at DuPont, the multinational chemicals firm, Ireland learned of the appreciation the girls, now women, had for their teachers, and that the school, while strict and structured, allowed them to grow.
“They were loving sisters to us. And, as we have grown up, we could all see that that level of structure is sometimes good.”
It is heartening for many Catholics in Ireland to hear witness on mainstream media of the self-sacrificial works of the Irish religious.
Michael Kelly, Editor of the Irish Catholic tweeted “We will never see the likes of these heroic Irishwomen again. From this small island, our religious sisters brought life and living to the most vulnerable communities in the world.”
Matt Moran, author of The Legacy of Irish Missionaries Lives On, on Facebook, was grateful for some positive coverage for the work of Irish Missionaries.
“Credit and ‘thank you’ to the journalists in RTÉ News and the Irish Times who published this good news story in praise of the work of Irish nuns in Cameroon.”
David Quinn, commentator and director of the Iona Institute, was more sanguine, highlighting an uncomfortable reality: “Those who love to demonise nuns need to take a good look at this video and see the sheer happiness on display when these Cameroonian women meet the Irish nuns who taught them.”
Quinn’s comments raise an important point. In recent years, the legacy of Irish nuns, both in Ireland and abroad has been attacked almost incessantly and the use of the term “dehumanised” is increasingly appropriate. The change in attitude towards Irish religious has come about as the country changed significantly in the last 30 years, pivoting from being the most Catholic country in Europe, to arguably the most anti-Catholic.
The various abuse crises that have hit the Church globally, have hit particularly hard in Ireland, with reports into Magdalene laundries and mother and baby homes being used to create a particular caricature of nuns in Ireland that is diametrically opposed to the warm coverage of the Cameroonian visitors.
The 2021, the report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Mother and Baby Homes was released, anticipated to provide the damning evidence into the iniquity of the religious institutions that ran many of them. Like the McAleese report into the Magdalene Laundries, the facts did not align with what much of society desired – a public annihilation of all things Catholic.
However, the mother and baby homes report said something quite different and unacceptable.
“It is important to also distinguish between the mother and baby homes and the county homes … the available evidence suggested that, while the living conditions in the mother and baby homes were basic, there is no indication that they were inadequate by the standards of the time, except in Kilrush and Tuam.”
The report further elaborates “Conditions in the county homes were much worse than in any mother and baby home, with the exceptions of Kilrush and Tuam. In the mid-1920s most had no sanitation, perhaps no running water; heating, where available was by an open fire; food was cooked, badly, often in a different building, so it was cold and even more unpalatable when it reached the women. Many county homes had no place for children to play or space for the women to sit.”
The county homes were run by the government.
The report, while critical, was essentially an exoneration of the Irish nuns on the most part. Upon its initial release, the Irish Times like other outlets, without being able to read the 2,685 page report had to run with the headline finding: the nuns were not the problem.
However, as the dust settled, the facts of the report were pushed to the background to retain a level of outrage at the nuns – either refusing to accept the validity of the report or to redirect attention on the religious elements. The caricature and demonisation of the nuns could not be allowed to wither on the vine.
Such was the inflammatory response, led by misleading accusations of 800 bodies being buried in a septic tank mass grave, that even the celebration of St Brigid was hijacked in 2022 with a dehumanised actual caricature of a nun, in a red habit, wielding a cross, poised like some sort of goblin, as part of the Herstory Light Show, and projected directly on to St Brigid’s Cathedral, in County Kildare.
The transfer of ownership of St Vincent’s Hospital from the Religious Sisters of Charity to a non-religious entity as part of plans to move the National Maternity Hospital to a new site under the management of St Vincent’s was a particular flashpoint, with a concerted attack on religious sisters as secular groups feared that a religious ethos would be used to oppose abortion services being available in the national hospital for delivering babies.
Such was the opprobrium directed at the nuns, that Irish Senator Ronan Mullen, was obliged to remark: “The National Maternity Hospital controversy has been a cover story for some very modern bigotry and intolerance and hardly anyone has called it out.”
The hospital was established by Mother Mary Aikenhead, founder of the Catholic order Religious Sisters of Charity, at the Earl of Meath’s former home at 56 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin, in 1834, and for nearly 200 years, healthcare was delivered to Irish women by the religious sisters, much of that in the absence of any state funding or support, and indeed, in the absence of any state at all.
So why do women from Cameroon celebrate Irish nuns while the Irish themselves do the opposite?
For a long time Ireland was a poor country, conditions were harsh – and the harshness certainly contributed to the social mores that evolved with economic improvements. All one has to do is translate the past to current situation in many developing countries. Girls that become pregnant in Sierra Leone (and other countries) in today’s world are not allowed continue in school, for example.
Residential institutions – mainly run by the religious – are commonplace because the many women and children have nowhere else to go. Many well-meaning volunteers from Ireland spend summers in these places helping out. They are overcrowded, the facilities are poor; often they get no state support but are dependent on assistance from overseas or from former residents. They could be better but making things better is not an easy thing to do. Social and political change takes time.
Those graduates travelling to Ireland understand that the Irish nuns made a difference to their lives when no one else was willing to do so. They can still see the sacrifice that was made to provide them with an education and the benefits it brought to their lives. Thanks to the Irish nuns, they are now globetrotters.
But will those nuns be vilified in the future? Just as Ireland turned its back on Mary Aikenhead, removing all religious imagery from St Vincent’s hospital, once secularised, wealthy and facing up to the failings of its past, will Cameroon turn on the religious when they look for a scapegoat?
Will they forget that their society was not necessarily cold or uncaring but a product of a complex intermingling of circumstances primarily underpinned by the state of the economy – there is limited welfare state, only a limited functioning tax system, not a lot of wealth to be drawn down and governance is challenged beyond the administrative level.
Many people live subsistence lives. Many rural families face the same pressure of unproductive land and ever-decreasing smallholdings that affected Ireland in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
The story is a complex one as it was in Ireland, yet the trope of the Catholic bogeyman remains, even after a rigorous independent report into the mother and baby makes clear that such a simple denigrating of the religious is not only misguided but false.
As Orwell observed, “we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality”.
In Ireland, we celebrate the warm and fuzzy story of Cameroonian women visiting Ireland to thank these elderly Irish women for giving them an education. In Ireland, we dehumanise the same elderly Irish women for doing the same thing for Ireland.
(CNS Photo)
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