“Love Applied To Suffering”: Nuns in Contemporary Irish American Fiction

Abstract

“Love Applied To Suffering”: Nuns in Contemporary Irish American Fiction Sinéad Moynihan (bio) In a New Yorker article anticipating the visit of Pope Francis to Ireland in August 2018, James Carroll reflected on the recent report produced by a Pennsylvania Grand Jury that identified one thousand children (and speculated that there were thousands more) who were abused by three hundred priests over a seventy-year period across six dioceses. Comparing the United States with Ireland, he claimed that “the Irish wound is deeper still.” Citing the revelation that nearly eight hundred infants had died at and had been secretly buried in the grounds of the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, Co. Galway, Carroll concludes: “there had been monsters not only among the priests but among the sisters” (emphasis added).1 Carroll inadvertently identifies, here, one of the most significant differences in Irish compared with US (particularly, but not exclusively, Irish [End Page 185] American) cultural depictions of the clergy in relation to the abuse scandals that have been revealed over the past twenty years. US literature and culture has dramatized many predatory priests—several of them with Irish names— in narratives that deal predominantly (Spotlight [dir. Tom McCarthy, 2015]) or only tangentially (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri [dir. Martin Mc-Donagh, 2017]) with clerical abuse.2 However, nuns are largely represented not just as innocent of the crimes perpetrated by their male counterparts in the clergy but as themselves beleaguered targets of the Catholic Church’s heavy-handed authoritarianism and/or as heroic defenders of the victims of sexual abuse. In John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt, A Parable (2004), set in 1964, a righteous school principal, Sister Aloysius Beauvier, succeeds in having a priest she believes to be a child molester moved to another parish. While the play ends with Sister Aloysius expressing serious “doubts” over her own actions, her concern for the welfare of the child, Donald Muller, is never in question.3 Moreover, the play is dedicated to “the many orders of Catholic nuns who have devoted their lives to serving others in hospitals, schools and retirement homes.”4 Meanwhile, in the much-discussed Netflix documentary series The Keepers (dir. Ryan White, 2017), former students of the Baltimore teacher, Sister Catherine Cesnik, speculate that the nun was murdered in 1969 because she had evidence that a fellow teacher at Archbishop Keough high school, Father Joseph Maskell, had been abusing teenage girls. These examples exist in stark contrast to representations of nuns in Irish culture, in which the “evil” or “sadistic” nun was immortalized at least as far back as 1992 when Patricia Burke Brogan’s play Eclipsed débuted at the Punchbag Theatre in Galway. In February 1996, RTÉ screened the (now infamous) Dear Daughter documentary (dir. Louis Lentin) built upon testimony from Christine Buckley and other victims of abuse at the Goldenbridge Industrial School in Dublin. Since then, we have seen cinematic and literary representations such as The Magdalene Sisters (dir. Peter Mullan, 2002)5, Sinners (dir. Aisling Walsh, 2002), Benjamin Black’s (John Banville’s) Christine Falls (2006), Martin Sixsmith’s The Lost Child of Philomena Lee (2009), adapted as Philomena (dir. Stephen Frears, 2013), all of which portray Irish nuns as complicit—and sometimes active participants—in the physical, sexual, and psychological abuse of women and children. This contribution to the forum will consider two recent novels by Irish American women writers, Alice McDermott’s The Ninth Hour (2017) and Courtney Sullivan’s Saints for All Occasions (2017), which present their readers with nuns who take liberal, if not radical, views on a range of Catholic doctrinal issues such as suicide, contraception, marital infidelity, and homosexuality. While they engage, to an extent, with clerical abuse (and [End Page 186] Sullivan does this more directly than McDermott), both novels ultimately uphold Mary Gordon’s claim that “[a]t least since the priesthood was first shaken by the sexual-abuse scandal two decades ago…America’s nuns have been the de facto leaders of the country’s liberal Catholics, especially those more interested in social justice than in holding the Vatican’s line on sexual politics.”6 The question I want to consider...