When trying to work out the pressures on Julia, one must add to this the fact that by 1936 she was the oldest of a family of eight children, of whom seven were girls. It would not be fair to call this a disaster, but it did not make life simple for the Gunnigans. The house was small, and already so full that one of the younger children was sent to be brought up by her Waldron grandparents. The farm could not support more adults. The girls had to be married off: this was not a choice, it was a basic fact of economics. But the supply of available men was strictly finite, and so were opportunities to meet them; and in these circumstances Irish men were marrying later and later. (It’s still true today in rural Ireland. The tongue-tied, solitary farmer, depressed and wordless and unable to meet women, is an Irish cliché with a sound basis in truth.)
The obligation to leave home was a particular imperative in the mid-1930s. One of the first things Eamon De Valera did after winning the election in 1932 was to stop the annuity the Free State was paying to the British Treasury. (This was part of the complex deal whereby the Free State bought out the freehold of land that had belonged to absentee landlords.) The result was economic sanctions of such severity that they amounted to economic war – and since Britain was not just Ireland’s main trading partner but essentially its only one, taking 96 per cent of its exports, the effects were devastating. A punitive duty on cattle was catastrophic, and the value of Irish agricultural exports fell by two-thirds. For people like the Gunnigans, the impact was felt directly. These years are to this day known as the ‘hungry thirties’.
So, more than ever, the children of the family ‘must travel’. But what did that, in practice, mean? For male children of a rural Irish family, the most prestigious and respected career choice was the priesthood; for female children, it was to become a nun. For the Gunnigans, a role model was close at hand in the form of Father, later Monsignor, Tim Gunnigan, my mother’s uncle. ‘He was obviously marked out to be a priest from the time he was about twelve and sent to a diocesan college and then on to Maynooth and so on,’ one of Tim’s nieces told me, before adding: ‘Even he, poor lad, had probably very little choice.’ Tim was the most admired member of the family, and would have made the convent seem both an admirable and a conceivable choice – provided always, of course, that the young woman in question was able to detect in herself the sincere glimmerings of a religious vocation.
Julia spent hours trying to unpick what was a real impulse to a vocation from what was her rational mind telling her that a vocation would be an immensely useful thing for her to have – what was real religious feeling and what was convenience. And mixed in with the desire to do what was right in the eyes of God and her conscience, and was beneficial to her family, was a voice, so quiet and unfamiliar at this time in her life that she would have had trouble hearing it, asking: But what about me? It was a sentiment she was trained not to have, and not to consider important if she did have it; but there it was, and like many such questions it did not become easier to ignore just because it was so quiet. In fact, the quietness of its insistence was part of what gave it force: But what about me?
At sixteen, Julia had no experience of the wider world. Her only long-distance trip had been an expedition to the Eucharistic Congress in Dublin in 1932. But she knew that a wider world did exist. In one sense, joining a religious order was a way of experiencing that world, especially if she joined an order with missions abroad. The price paid for this, however, was to spend her life in what amounted to a form of confinement, psychological as much as institutional. People joining religious orders didn’t see it that way consciously; but they knew that they would never be free again. This was about three decades before Vatican II, and the vow of obedience meant what it said. Julia contemplated it with elation and also with real fear.
She struggled with these questions. It was difficult to unpick what was hers – her hopes, her beliefs, her needs – and what belonged to the culture; and what needs and hopes belonged to her family rather than to her. What belonged to whom? It’s hard enough to untangle now, almost seventy years later. It must have been even harder at the time. But Julia made her decision. She told her family and the sisters at her school that she believed she had a vocation and that she wanted to be a nun. Her plan was to join the Good Shepherds as a postulant at their convent in New Ross, County Wexford. Her intention was to leave school before the end of her course of studies and join the convent immediately. This was the early summer of 1937, and Julia was sixteen years old.
* Knock is worth a visit for two groups in particular: (1) devout Catholics, and (2) connoisseurs of religious kitsch and the all-round bizarre. Last time I was there, I had just driven past a flashing neon sign for the Padre Pio Rest Home (which in my memory had illuminating on/off stigmata, though I’m told I imagined that detail) when I was nearly killed by a car full of nuns, smiling beatifically as they went the wrong way round a roundabout. My cousins tell me that nuns are notoriously dangerous drivers.
† I know that the historiography around this subject is enormous, but I pass on this as a near-contemporary memory. According to my mother, the thing that changed Ireland most was not the Easter Rising but the executions after it. People had mixed feelings about the Rising, coming as it did during World War One, and involving, as it appeared to, an element of fanaticism and wishful thinking. But then the rebels were shot, over several days, in what seemed like a cruel, disproportionate and excruciatingly protracted punishment; and Ireland changed.
2
This is another point of family history at which memories diverge. Julia was adamant that she was forced into the convent by family pressure. It was her family’s needs and expectations which drove her into the convent at sixteen. But that is not how others remember it.
‘Father Tim and my parents were against it,’ says Peggie. ‘My mother tried to persuade her to wait for a couple of years, at least to do her Leaving Cert.’ The leaving certificate was the set of exams at the end of Irish secondary education, at which Julia had been expected to excel. Without it she would have no formal qualifications. ‘But Julia didn’t want to. At this stage my mother and father were very proud of her and very pleased that she was doing this wonderful thing that was great kudos for the family.’ Although there was no visible explicit pressure, there were expectations that Julia could gratify by ‘taking the habit’. So both accounts are probably right: my mother told the truth when she said there was pressure, and Peggie is accurate in her memory that her parents said they did not want Julia to go.
This is my mother’s story, and I do not want, in telling it, to trespass on anyone’s privacy any more than I must. But I feel I have to mention here that four of the Gunnigan sisters became nuns. This must surely reflect a considerable degree of family pressure – as well as the example of the girls’ great-uncles, the Greally brothers – even if none of it was conscious or explicit. In any case, as soon as she made her decision, Julia became the family heroine. She was made godmother to her youngest sister, Jane. Her choice was a source of enormous pride, and relief and sadness too. This particularly affected Pat. His grief on the day Julia left to join the Good Shepherds was something the children had never seen before. ‘I would have been going on for ten,’ Peggie says. ‘I remember it distinctly. They went in a hired car – I remember the hired car coming to the gate. And it was the only time in my life I’d seen my father crying. It horrified me and I couldn’t believe that my father was crying. And my mother went with her.’
The Sisters of the Good Shepherd earn a rave review in the Catholic Encyclopedia of the early twentieth century:
The aim of this institute is to provide a shelter for girls and women of dissolute habits, who wish to do penance for their iniquities and to lead a truly Christian life. Not only voluntary penitents but also those consigned by civil or parental authority are admitted. Many of these penitents desire to remain for life; they are admitted to take vows, and form the class of ‘magdalens’, under the direction of the Sisters of th
e Good Shepherd. They are an austere contemplative community, and follow the Rule of the Third Order of Mount Carmel. Prayer, penance and manual labour are their principal occupations. Many of these ‘magdalens’ frequently rise to an eminent degree of sanctity. Besides girls and women of this class, the order also admits children who have been secured from danger, before they have fallen or been stained by serious crime … Besides the three ordinary vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, the Sisters of the Good Shepherd take a fourth vow, namely, to work for the conversion and instruction of ‘penitents’ – a vow which makes this order one of the most beautiful creations of Christian charity.
I can state with absolute confidence that the Good Shepherds are no longer seen as ‘one of the most beautiful creations of Christian charity’. The order’s main work was in running the institutions that have now, thanks to Peter Mullan’s incendiary film The Magdalene Sisters, become deservedly notorious. The Magdalene asylums were essentially prisons for girls and women who had done things that were not approved of by people who had power over them. In some instances young women were sent to the asylum for crimes such as going to the cinema without permission. (That earned one woman, Mary Morris, a future campaigner against the Magdalene asylums, two years’ incarceration.) The imprisonment was all the more crushing for being enforced not by any legal authority but through the psychological terror inflicted by Church authorities. It was coercion pure and simple, without even a legal gloss. The asylums were instruments of punishment and control and misogyny disguised as charitable institutions. The incident that brought them more recently to notice took place in 1993, when a convent owned by the Sisters of Mercy sold land to a property developer who, in the course of excavations, discovered dozens of unmarked graves. These belonged to ‘penitents’ who had died in the asylum and whose death had passed without notice, remark, or redress.
Thanks to The Magdalene Sisters, the cruelty of the asylums to their inmates is now known. The story that has not been told, however, is of the cruelty and violence that took place among the nuns who ran them. The source of this was not so much malice as the inbuilt authoritarian animus of an institution dedicated to controlling every moment of the lives of its functionaries, body and soul. It was this for which Julia was entirely unprepared. She had no idea what was entailed by the order’s vows: the finality and irreversibility and completeness of the submission involved. This would have been the case in any monastic order, but in one following the Rule of St Francis of Sales it was especially marked.
To lay people, it may seem as if monks and nuns follow the same sorts of rules and lead identical lives. This is not the case. The crucial determining factor for any monastic order is which ‘Rule’ it follows; the Rule being a set of instructions that not only shapes the broad direction of the community, in terms of mission work or prayer or teaching or the like, but also gives detailed and explicit prescriptions for how every day is to be spent, what the members of the order wear, at what hour they get up in the morning and go to bed at night, when and how they pray, what they eat, when they speak, when or if they are allowed leisure or exercise or conversation. The seventeenth-century rule of St Francis of Sales exchanged some of the external strictures and ‘mortifications’ of the order of St Augustine, such as getting up to pray in the middle of the night, in favour of an increased emphasis on internal mortification. In other words, it was meant to be physically easier but psychologically more rigorous. The sisters took vows that were renewed every year for five years and then confirmed in perpetuity. They wore a complicated habit, a garment of outstanding symbolic importance; as I’ve said, for a nun the equivalent process to being ordained was ‘taking the habit’. Nuns were not allowed to own any property of any sort: rooms, beds, rosaries, crosses, and pictures were regularly changed to prevent the development of any sense of individual ownership. Obedience was stressed even more than elsewhere in monastic orders, and as each convent was both cloistered from the outside world and subject only to its own authority – there was no Superior General for the order, and convents were self-governing – the authority of the mother superior was absolute. There was no possibility of appeal or complaint for any reason, ever. The day began at 5 a.m. and ended at 10 p.m. and was divided into fifteen-minute instalments, every one of which was filled with an allotted physical or spiritual task. The sisters were allowed two ‘recreations’ a day of an hour each, the only time they were allowed to choose their own topics of thought or, up to a point, conversation: they were permitted to speak ‘with cordiality and simplicity only of agreeable and piously cheerful topics’. As the Catholic Encyclopedia proudly says, these rules ‘overlook nothing which could mortify the spirit’.
I don’t know anything about any of this from my mother. She never spoke about her time as a Good Shepherd. I did not even know she had been in the Good Shepherd convent in New Ross until after her death. As for the impact all this had on Julia, there is almost no direct evidence for it, apart from her actions and two documents, the only contemporary evidence of what was on her mind that year. The first is a letter written not long after she had entered the convent. The occasion was her sister Bernie’s twelfth birthday. Julia herself was not yet seventeen.
Good Shepherd Convent
New Ross
24th October 1937
My dearest Bernie,
Another year has passed and again I wish you many happy returns of the day and every blessing and happiness during the year you are beginning. I hope that you will enjoy your birthday very much and that you will get very nice things for it.
Thanks very much for your nice letter – I was delighted to hear from you – you are a splendid hand at giving news God bless you! I always enjoy your letters. I had a letter from Mary [their sister] on Tuesday and she told me that she got you a lovely new red coat and that you are well able to swank it – well I bet Daddie will have fun when you go home so. [Bernie was at boarding school.] I got a box of sweets from Mary too – wasn’t she great? God bless her.
How are you getting on at school yourself? Now get good marks again this year like you did last year and keep on at the hard work and get your Inter.-Cert and then who knows but you might come to St Anne’s when you are old enough if it be God’s Will. [In other words, Julia was hoping that Bernie would enter the convent too.]
Yes, I am very happy here and very thankful to God for bringing me here. Bernie dear if you did come you would never be sorry, but anyhow we will have to wait until you are old enough first.
Do you know what I have just noticed – that next Monday is All Saints’ Day – well now aren’t you lucky, that means that you will be going home on Friday for the week-end and you will be home for nearly three days. If you aren’t having the time of your lives of it ’tis no day. And you will be able to show off your new coat too. My dear but won’t you feel posh. Aren’t they having the Mission at home this fortnight and you will be home for the finishing of it too. Tell Mammie that I asked her to let you go on Sunday night as a birthday present and I bet you will be let go.
When you go home too, will you tell Peggie & Dillie that I am expecting to hear from them or I won’t remember any more birthdays and tell Peggie that she is to write the letter herself and not get Mammie to do it for her. Tell Daddie that I said ‘Up Kerry’ & that I did not mean a bit of it and better luck Mayo next year. Tell them thanks for their letter and all the news and I will write soon. Write soon again and make your letter longer next time and if you please don’t mind telling me that you suppose I am fat – you know well I am and I know it myself too.
I will again wish you a very happy birthday and many happy returns. God bless you all.
Ever lovingly yours
Julia
One has to realise a few things about this letter before one tries to take it at face value. A postulant was allowed to write only a single letter home a week, at a pre-allocated time (usually Sunday). The letter was read by the Postulant Mistress. A postulant was not allowed to ment
ion anything that happened in the convent; she was explicitly forbidden to discuss her own feelings. So this letter was never going to be a howl of pain. None the less, it is not the work of a young woman who has any idea what she is doing. Julia has vowed the rest of her life away and seems not to recognise it. The charm and sweetness of the letter, and also the implied hint of trouble to come, lie in the fact that it is entirely devoted to things from which its author is now cut off. The Good Shepherds were an enclosed order, and the only contact Julia would have with her family from now on would be through letter and the occasional, extraordinarily infrequent visit. Letters in both directions were opened and read – there was an explicit ban on privacy in the order’s emphasis on ‘common life’ – so if Julia was unhappy she could not show it here. But it does look as if she were still in the honeymoon period of her time with the Good Shepherds. She would hardly have dangled the idea of Bernie’s entering the convent herself one day if she had been utterly miserable. And the fact that she is able to solicit a favour on Bernie’s behalf (‘Tell Mammie that I asked her to let you go on Sunday night as a birthday present and I bet you will be let go’) is a sign that her domestic stock is high.
Family Romance Page 5