Mary Kenny
“…you must stand up for your faith, be unafraid”, writes Mary Kenny
I encountered a nun in a Dublin shopping mall last week – she identified me through a mutual acquaintance of schooldays. It took me a few minutes to clock that she was a religious sister, as she was dressed in civvies – indeed, very well-dressed in an attractive pink padded jacket, which is this season’s style.
I realise that most nuns nowadays wear ordinary clothes, but still, I asked her – just out of curiosity – why a nun shouldn’t wear some symbol of her office.
“I don’t want to be spat at on the street,” she replied.
Unable to resist a debating point, I asked: “But aren’t Christians supposed to bear witness? Even at the cost of being despised?” After all, Christians in the Middle East are being killed for their faith.
No, sister wasn’t having any of it. “I bear witness to my faith by living it,” she said. Anyway, she added, she was deeply affected by Archbishop Diarmuid Martin’s Good Friday address, when he said that the Catholic Church had been so harsh and judgemental towards single mothers, gay and lesbian people, and orphans.
More debating points. Was the Catholic Church any more harsh and judgemental than society at large? The British state imprisoned more than 50,000 men for homosexual acts, and the British scientist Alan Turing – who broke the German ‘Enigma’ code – took his own life apparently because he could not live with the stigma.
By contrast, gay men like Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley and Roger Casement converted to Catholicism since it seemed more forgiving.
The conversation petered out, as a Dublin shopping mall is hardly a proper location to conduct a discourse which involves a complicated matrix of history. And if sister feels responsible for the way in which Irish nuns ran orphanages and laundries, and in many cases, failed to meet the Christian ideal or decent standards, then she is surely committing to her own sense of faith and values, which would include atonement. And it’s not my place to question that.
But I went off to the shops pondering the question of ‘bearing witness’. It’s something that Evangelical Christians are keen on: you must stand up for your faith, be unafraid.
Uniforms, and dress codes, are also moot points. Would we have the same respect for the law if judges and advocates turned up to court in jeans and t-shirts?
Nevertheless, a religious sister is surely entitled to a bit of quiet and relaxation in her public life, and the habits nuns were obliged to wear in times gone by were uncomfortable and impractical. (Even if there’s a certain nostalgia in popular entertainment – half the appeal of Call the Midwife is the nuns’ habits.)
Sometimes people just have to do as they think best.
Another dissolution of the monasteries?
The respected economist and writer David McWilliams asked on a recent radio programme – why is it that nuns’ estates grow rich? The context, obviously, was the controversy over the new National Maternity Hospital’s link with St Vincent’s and the Sisters of Charity.
One might say that Henry VIII asked a similar question. “Why are all these monasteries so rich?” The answer is surprisingly obvious. A community of celibate persons live together in an austere fashion: all their labours go back into the community. They purchase nothing for themselves, have no heirs and thus the community benefits over generations from their collective endeavours. And, as they tend the sick and run schools, families sometimes endow them with gifts.
We know what Henry VIII did next. Many a belted earl of great estates owes his own wealth to Henry’s dissolution of the monasteries.