Greg Daly
The memory of a lifetime’s work of one Irish nun won’t be forgotten, writes Greg Daly
Jennie O’Sullivan was 98 when she returned from Japan, having spent 75 years teaching English there as Sr Paschal, a member of the Infant Jesus Sisters who had educated her as a child in Drishane, Co. Cork. She died in December 2013 at the age of 102, and while nobody who knew her is likely to forget her, a distant cousin has ensured others too can learn just how special Sr Paschal was.
Drawn from more than 60 hours of interviews, half with Sr Paschal and half with people who knew her, Thanks to your Noble Shadow had its first Irish screening on Saturday, February 27, in a packed room at Dublin’s Chester Beatty Library, where an eclectic crowd – including no shortage of religious – sat in rapt attention, frequently breaking into peals of laughter, for over 90 minutes.
By the time the film ended, I doubt there was anyone in the room who didn’t feel like they knew Sr Paschal, and am sure wished they could have met her themselves.
Close ties
“Sr Paschal – Jennie O’Sullivan was her name – was a cousin of my great-grandfather,” explains Bishopstown’s James Creedon, who for 10 years has been a TV journalist in Paris. “I had met her on a couple of occasions when I was a child but didn’t really remember her all that well.
“My grandmother, on the other hand, had maintained very close ties with her down through the years,” he continues, “and when she would come home to Ireland on visits every three or four years she would occasionally stay with my grandmother, so there was a family friendship there going back to when my mother, for example, was a child.”
Surprised when he heard Sr Paschal had been sent back from Japan at such an advanced age, James went to visit her out of curiosity in the convent where she was living in Cork, and took to visiting her there when home from France. He gradually realised, he says, that Sr Paschal’s story needed to be recorded.
“Those who knew her and were close to her didn’t realise perhaps as much as someone a little bit on the outside like myself how extraordinary she was,” he ventures.
It was her 100th birthday, he says, that really brought this home to him. Aside from family and others from Ireland, he said, “there were eight of her Japanese friends who came over from Tokyo, including one who brought a personal letter from the crown princess of Japan, Princess Masako, who was a past pupil of hers – a very personal and very warm letter that was read out”.
Hers was a remarkable story: “She left Ireland at the age of 23, and was never coming home. She lived through the war in four different detention camps, and taught for 75 years in various schools at a very high level, including one of the most prestigious girls’ schools in Japan, and was held in extremely high esteem by people at the highest levels of Japanese society, but was also so alert, so modern, so easy to relate to.”
Describing Sr Paschal’s story as an important one, being told at an important time, James says she was “representative of a very interesting chapter in 20th-Century Irish history” when tens of thousands of Irish people became missionaries to serve Christ and his people around the world.
It is important to remember the achievements of people like Sr Paschal, he maintains. “I think that what’s happened to Irish society in the last 10 or 15 years is that there’s been this big cathartic revelation of the dark side of some of the Catholic Church’s influence on Irish society”, he says, wondering whether during this necessary process of exposing the sins of the Irish Church we also have lost sight of the gifts it gave Ireland and the world.
“Maybe we’ve forgotten some of the essential aspects and some of the truth that was core to how she lived her life and that’s something that I want to hold on to for the way I will live,” he says, “and it’s something that I think she taught me even if she wasn’t trying to teach me because it was just so obvious in the way she was.”
Legacy
James recognises that Sr Paschal’s legacy was vital yet intangible – “what she had given, her whole life overflowing with love, with giving, with self-sacrifice, with generosity, with kindness”, but this invites the obvious question of “what was it about the life she had lived that made her into the person she was at over 100 years of age?”
Although the film is a marvellous tribute to a luminous individual, I’m not sure it even begins to answer that question. To find out what drove Sr Paschal, one almost has to read between the lines, or pay special attention to those fleeting moments of where she speaks of Jesus as someone she has married or how she recognised that just as she had made a profound sacrifice in leaving her home – she thought for good – at the age of 23, so she realised that being asked to leave her home of 75 years at the age of 98 was itself an opportunity to show love.
There is surprisingly little about this in the film, perhaps because James is so keen on showing Sr Paschal’s warmth, humour, and capacity for giving and receiving love that he steers clear of what exactly things like prayer and sacrifice – as distinct from sacrifices – mean to her.
James argues that for people of his generation, Ireland “is largely a post-Catholic society”, and this needs to be kept in mind when he continues, “I was trying to figure out when I was doing it – what is it about the way she lived that she got right, and that maybe is worth transmitting, and that is a legacy that is important to hand on, perhaps in a way that is more accessible to people of my generation that don’t necessarily practice religion in the way that she did?”
Paradoxically, while it could be argued that the film wholly fails to answer this, it could just as easily be argued that this gives it a peculiar strength, perfectly illustrating how so many of us have lost the words to enter the worlds of our elders.
Maintaining that we’re “in a period of time now where we’re going beyond religion and are in a global society where traditions that were specific to certain cultures are finding it difficult to survive”, James says he’s “interested in what is universally true, and I think that she represented a lot of that”.
That’s surely true, as Thanks to your Noble Shadow, by simply putting the camera on her and those who loved and were loved by her, admirably reveals. And yet the question left unexamined is whether Sr Paschal could have overflowed with love the way she did had she not dedicated her life to the love of Christ.