Should the nuns tell the National Maternity Hospital to go elsewhere?

The establishment never misses opportunity to demonise the nuns and to blacken their reputations, writes David Quinn

Dr Peter Boylan, one of the chief campaigners in favour of repealing the Eighth Amendment, has been on the warpath again over the relocation of the National Maternity Hospital from Holles Street to the Blackrock Campus of St Vincent’s hospital where it will be co-located.

St Vincent’s was, of course, founded by the Sisters of Charity. The Sisters are handing over the hospital and everything associated with it to a trust, but permission to give away the land to this trust has yet to be given by the Vatican.

This is what has Dr Boylan up in arms. It also provides very useful publicity for his new book, In the Shadow of the Eighth.

Peter Boylan seems to seriously believe that unless the land is fully handed over to a body that has absolutely no connection with the Catholic Church, then the relocated maternity hospital will not be allowed to perform abortions. Would that this were so. In fact, St Vincent’s hospital has already said it will carry out any procedures legal in the State, including abortion, and the Sisters of Charity have not stood in their way.

Parcel 
of 
land

The State should in fact be grateful that the nuns are making such a valuable parcel of land free to the National Maternity Hospital, and should simply say ‘thank you’. But no, this is yet another opportunity to demonise the nuns and to blacken their reputations.

It is not even accurate, as people like Labour’s Alan Kelly has said, that the Sisters of Charity still owe millions to the redress scheme set up to compensate victims of abuse in the residential institutions. In fact, they have fully paid their €5m contribution either directly or in kind.

Nefarious 
plot

In other words, the effective gift of land to the National Maternity Hospital is purely gratis, but still they find themselves condemned, and suspected of running a deep and nefarious plot to somehow stop abortions being performed at the hospital.

Perhaps the Vatican will, in the end, stop the transfer of the land, and the land will somehow, in some nominal way, remain in the ownership of the Sisters of Charity. But even if that happens, the fact that St Vincent’s has already said it will perform any procedure that is legally allowed, surely means the Sisters will have no way in practice to stop abortions taking place in the new maternity hospital, even if they wanted to.

It is yet another opportunity to demonise the nuns and to blacken their reputations”

Perhaps instead they should call the whole thing off and tell the National Maternity Hospital to go elsewhere? Imagine the uproar then, however. They would find themselves demonised more than ever.

Sometimes when we are too familiar with something we learn to treat it with contempt or else take it for granted. We have done both of those things with the female religious orders (and the men’s congregations also).

But we need to stop and consider how completely astonishing the women’s religious congregations are in both historical and world cultural-terms. There is nothing else like them, and has never been.

Nowhere else in the world at any time in history have so many groups of women, on such a systematic basis come together to found organisations run exclusively by women and then gone on to found and run huge, international networks of schools, hospitals and other charitable outreaches and have been doing so for centuries.

People are being constantly reminded of the negative side of their legacy”

There is no reason why anything like this should ever have happened. It has not happened in any other part of the world, in any other religion or culture to anything like this extent at any other point in history that we know about.

Suddenly, remarkable Irish women like Mary Aikenhead, Nano Nagle or Catherine McAuley, and their counterparts in many other parts of the Catholic world, decided to leave behind their former lives and devote themselves to helping the poor in different ways. They did this voluntarily and without any guarantee of success. They did so at a time when our part of the world was a far risker place than today with poverty and disease absolutely endemic.

They then drew other women to join them in their enterprises, and eventually the Sisters of Charity, the Presentation Sisters and the Sisters of Mercy became very large-scale operations indeed, doing enormous good work.

All of this was taking place within an organisation that some people describe as ‘misogynistic’. And yes, Catholics have often been guilty of sexist attitudes and behaviour, and some people will say that forbidding the ordination of women is inherently sexist. Nonetheless, you will struggle to think of another organisation, another religion, another culture, that has given rise to so many female-run organisations doing so much good work and doing so voluntarily.

In fact, when you think about it, feminists ought to applaud female religious congregations. Feminists say women can do anything they like when they set their minds to it and are given the necessary freedom.

Experiments

Well, these female orders have proven this time and again, and they were doing so long before anyone else. Indeed, to this day, there is still nothing else like them. You still won’t be able to come up with exclusively female-run organisations doing such extraordinary things.

The public are being constantly reminded of the negative side of the legacy of these congregations. But we could do this to any group of people. It would be extremely easy, for example, to tarnish the reputation of all doctors by shining a spotlight on the way the medical profession ran mental hospitals in sometimes the most appalling ways, the manner in which they ran coercive eugenics programmes, or the contribution some of them made to disgusting medical experiments conducted in Nazi Germany and other dictatorships.

But to do that would be unfair and unjust unless the positive side of their history was also given. In the case of the nuns, all we seem to be acquainted with now is the dark side of their legacy, and not the huge good they did, and do, or the fact that women’s congregations are a miracle in themselves, something quite without precedent in the world.