Mary Kenny
A friend and colleague suggested to me a short time ago that I should consider writing a book about nuns – since the majority of nuns are now ageing, and in the fullness of time will depart this world.
Had I but world enough and time, I would indeed embark on this endeavour. But because of time’s pressing arrow, better for a younger person to carry out this project, which would be a service to history, and the record.
They might even consider the working title The Good Nuns; it could be a counterpart to the current narrative that nuns (and priests) were routinely bad people.
Emer Martin’s new novel The Cruelty Men has been hailed as a major storyline of Irish life, tracking a family from the Kerry Gaeltacht to their transposition to Meath. “Although it may border on cliché to depict priests and nuns as sadistic, self-serving ghouls, Martin’s text is a record of a not-too-distant time in Irish life,” wrote the Irish Times reviewer, in casual acceptance of the “sadistic, self-serving ghouls” cliché.
Where there is a narrative, there is a counter-narrative, and a book on The Good Nuns could be that challenge.
There are many adults in this country who would say that they benefitted from the education, and sometimes the care, that religious sisters extended to them.
Beaten down
The sisters still with us often feel so beaten down by the hostilities directed at them that they don’t care to defend themselves any more: but a younger writer who can access the archives as well as interview those nuns still living could provide a balanced defence.
Nuns are individual persons like the rest of us, and I daresay there have been women in convents who were hard-hearted or neurotic, or fell short of the ideal. But most of us have also known good nuns, kind and encouraging sisters, energetic women who served with a cheerful heart.
If somebody doesn’t put this story on the record, then the cliché of nuns as “sadistic, self-serving ghouls” will continue being replicated in text after text, book after book, movie after movie.
Cristiano Ronaldo
Little though I know about soccer, I’m aware that the footie champ Cristiano Ronaldo scored the “best goal ever” last week.
It’s a fascinating fact that his mother, Maria Dolores del Santos, considered having an abortion when she was pregnant with him.
“He is a child that I wanted to abort,” she said in a documentary about the footballer’s life. Then she added: “God didn’t want that to happen and I was blessed because of that and God didn’t punish me.”
She certainly has cause to be thankful for this gifted son, now one of the world’s most famous, and richest, sportsmen.
Glimpse of yesteryear
The Church of Ireland Gazette has digitalised its archive: it’s an interesting insight into values and attitudes of Irish Protestants from the mid-Victorian period onwards.
The Gazette was dismayed by the decline of manners after the 1914-18 war, and wrote, in March 1919: “Listen to the way young people now speak to their parents and to elders generally – in a way that would be improper to address a blackbeetle…there is at the present time a want of reverence for everything in heaven and earth and this expresses itself in a disregard for the feelings of others…men now moving in what is called good society treat a woman with impunity in a way that would have gained them a horse-whipping 50 years ago.”
There was a suggestion that these bad mannered males had been “spoiled by girls” – because the war caused a male shortage.
A glimpse into the world of yesteryear.