Courtney McGrailRachel Beard talks to Sr Carmel Ryan about choosing to serve the Church
Rachel Beard
Forty years ago, Sr Carmel Ryan made a life-changing decision when she set aside a career in nursing to join the Daughters of Charity.
“I don’t regret it,” Sr Carmel says of her choice. “It’s only now and again, usually when I’m asked about it, that I think about it, but no, I don’t. I’m sure I would’ve enjoyed it, but somehow it wasn’t meant to be.”
In her last year of school, Sr Carmel was all set to go into nursing but changed her mind at the last minute.
“All I had to do for the nursing to get it was to complete an interview,” she says. “Everything else was sorted. I was going to go nursing with the intellectually disabled, and then that was put on hold. I never actually got to do that because I was asked to go teach when I entered. So it would have been my last year in school that the idea flickered on.”
Once she had the idea to join the Daughters of Charity, the idea wouldn’t go away. “It kind of niggled away at me until I felt I had to do something about it,” Sr Carmel says. “And I spoke to people and I ended up entering quite quickly after leaving the school.”
Although Sr Carmel was familiar with other charities, she always felt most drawn to the Daughters of Charity.
Impressed
“I think one of the reasons was that I was impressed with how they treated all the students in school,” she says. “Everybody was treated the same. It was a boarding school. There was never an emphasis on money or wealth or anything like that.”
Sr Carmel attributes much of her devotion to the faith to the environment she grew up in.
“I suppose with the family I grew up with, it was very important,” she says. “And we would have the usually family prayer and Eucharist and Sunday and all of that. It wasn’t even spoken about. It was just part of the fabric of life. It was that at the start of the fabric. It was important without ever being said it was important, without ever making a fuss about it.”
As soon as she joined the Daughters of Charity, Sr Carmel was placed in education.
“I have been involved in education all my life,” she says. “I taught at secondary school level. Religious education and history were my two main subjects for the best part of 20 years teaching them.”
Sr Carmel spent three years working with the Travelling community in the Archdiocese of Dublin, an experience she values.
“That was interesting work and challenging work,” she says. “Because even though my main occupation was visiting schools and children’s education and the provision of the Sacraments for those who were not attending primary schools, there was lots of other things as well you can became involved with besides.”
In the last 10 years, Sr Carmel has worked as a chaplain, something she says has been one of the highlights of her work with the Daughters of Charity.
“I think I enjoyed the chaplaincy very much,” she says. “Not to say that that was the easiest by any matter or means, but I think I enjoyed it the most because it was the biggest challenge. It was even a greater challenge than working with the travelling people, because the area was a deprived area. There wouldn’t have been a lot of value put on education by a lot of the youngsters or their families.”
For Sr Carmel, working as a chaplain was less about educating and more about sharing with students about the importance of education.
“They came from very difficult home circumstances, many of them, so the challenge was to keep them interested in education but I wasn’t involved in the academics of it,” she says. “It was the social and the spiritual. It was the human side of it. What we call it was an education of the whole person, and that’s the part that I was involved in.”
Sr Carmel describes her work as chaplain as the “most enjoyable, most challenging” and “most worthwhile” job she had with the Daughters of Charity.
“Because sometimes there was a small success story,” she says. “The success might be that somebody stayed in education rather than leaving it. I wasn’t measuring it in points for lead or anything like that.”
After 40 years working in Ireland for the Daughters of Charity, Sr Carmel has noticed a lot of changes in the way the organisation operates.
“The reality is, in Ireland, we’ve become a smaller group,” she says. “We probably have become more focussed. As we’ve aged, we’ve focussed more on some aspects of society that we can become involved in and make a difference in, being involved at the parish level, the parish we’re living in. We’ve become more of a presence for people, rather than doing things.”
Sr Carmel has high hopes that the Daughters of Charity will grow in the future. “Hopefully there will be an increase in the number of vocations that are coming to us,” she says. “That will be very, very welcome. Because we’re an international community, and Ireland has become more international or intercultural, I see it as a role for us in that society.”
However, she recognises that change doesn’t always have to be a bad thing. “We’re finding new ways of being Daughters of Charity,” Sr Carmel says. “And by that I mean just new ways of working, new ways of being present with people in whatever difficulties they have, and that will continue hopefully for a long time to come.”