Education, Identity and Women Religious, 1800-1950. Convents, classrooms and colleges by Deirdre Raftery , Ellizabeth M Smyth (review)

Abstract

DR Brendan Byrne SJ teaches at the Jesuit Theological College, Jesuit College of Spirituality, Parkville, Melbourne, Australia. This is an adapted version of his words when launching Lost In Translation earlier this year. Education, Identity and Women Religious, 1800–1950. Convents, classrooms and colleges, Deirdre Raftery and Ellizabeth M Smyth (eds). (Routledge: Abingdon, 2016), 221 pages. This book is a collection of articles by a number of women writers. All of the contributors have a background in education and/or history and are involved in university teaching or have researched and published on specialist topics relevant to the varied work of religious women over the 150 years the study covers. In their introduction, the editors, Deirdre Raftery and Elizabeth M Smyth, point out that the significant work done by women religious all over the world has, until recently, been side-lined. There is a number of reasons for this but the editors stress that the influence of a hierarchical, male-dominated church has rendered these women voiceless for centuries. Many contributors enlarge on this in their articles. While the focus of the book is the work of religious in education, it covers a broad spectrum. The work of some religious at home in Ireland is addressed but many of the articles deal with missionary work in education overseas, including Canada, New Zealand and Australia. Phil Kilroy is a Research Associate in Trinity College, Dublin and a member of the Society of the Sacred Heart. Among other writings, she has published Protestant Dissent and Controversy in Ireland 1660–1714. In the article under review, ‘Coming to an edge in history: writing the history of women religious and the critique of feminism’, she points to the negative image of women in early Christianity, including their portrayel by the apostle Paul. She points, also, to the fact that the Virgin Mary was elevated to such an extent that she was removed from the human condition and placed in polarity with Mary Magdalen who, without any evidence, became ‘the clerical projection of women as evil, weak and sinful’. (9) The author takes us through the history of women religious in the early centuries of the church, through Celtic Christianity, Christianity in AngloStudies • volume 107 • number 426 244 Summer 2018: Book Reviews Saxon England and the history of women religious in medieval, late medieval and early modern communities. She writes of Mary Ward, who founded a radically new community, the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, in the seventeenth century. After its foundation, Mary Ward preached before the altar, gave her blessing and members of the community taught theology in their schools and did not observe cloister. The intrusions on clerical territory led to denial of papal approval for the community and Mary Ward was imprisoned in a Poor Clare convent. Phil Kilroy also writes of the Mexican scholar-nun Juana de la Cruz (late seventeenth century), who was renowned for her scholarship and learning and wrote theological treatises. She was examined and condemned by the Inquisition and continued to be relentlessly pursued. Eventually she broke under the pressure and disowned her own work and died a broken woman. Following the upheaval of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and Napoleon’s relationship with Rome), Pius IX convened the first Vatican Council in 1869. The Council set down measures to maintain discipline in the church, including turning its attention to works of education and nursing, i.e. to schools and hospitals, the work-places of women religious. This brought them further under clerical supervision and ‘the rules and regulations laid down became more stringent than ever before and in minute, invasive detail’. (21) This situation prevailed until Pope John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council. Following the Second Vatican Council, the institutional church recognised the inherent challenge of feminism and demonised the word and its content and ‘most women religious agreed with this opinion’. (23) The author notes that, in time, many women religious became familiar with the insights of feminism and came in tune with the culture of their time, including its focus on issues such as justice, poverty, human rights, sex and gender. She concludes that religious women today...