Nano Nagle

The Life and the Legacy

Deirdre Raftery, Catriona Delaney

• Publisher: Merrion Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781788550574
• eBook ISBN: 9781788550598
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Biographies

The first biographical study of Nano Nagle, the foundress of he Presentation order of nuns, that positions her within Irish social history, and assesses her vast international legacy. Nano Nagle: The Life and the Education Legacy draws on archival materials from three continents, providing a compelling account of how one woman's extraordinary life challenged social constraints and championed social justice and equality.

Leading education historian, Deirdre Raftery, has produced not only a vital new biographical study of an exceptional Irish woman, but also a study of how thousands of Irish women joined the Presentation order of nuns and taught in their schools all over the world. Within that is the story of the Irish female diaspora in Newfoundland, India, North America, England, Australia, Africa and the Philippines.

Nano Nagle: The Life and the Education Legacy throws opens a new window on an unknown aspect of Irish social history, while also demonstrating Ireland's significant contribution to the global history of female education.

CHAPTER 1

Finding Nano: Researching an
Enigmatic Irishwoman and Her Legacy

The aim of this book is to examine the life and the education legacy of Nano Nagle (1718–84). Few women have left such a significant legacy to female education, yet Nagle remains almost invisible in scholarship on the history of education, women’s history, and in the burgeoning field of the history of women religious.1 Nagle brought the Ursuline order to Ireland; she also founded the Presentation order which expanded very rapidly, in Ireland and around the globe, in the nineteenth century. Her education legacy can be discussed with reference to hundreds of Presentation schools, thousands of Presentation Sisters who taught in these schools, and tens of thousands of pupils who attended the schools since the first one was founded in 1775.2 She is at least as important a figure in Irish education as Edmund Rice, founder of the Christian Brothers, yet it is he who has been well served by scholarship.3 Indeed, while the legacy of Presentation women to global education is on a par with that of other large female teaching orders, such as the Sisters of St Joseph and the Society of the Sacred Heart, it is far less well documented.4 Equally, Nagle has attracted considerably less attention than Irish-born Protestant women involved in poor relief and education.5 What kind of attention has she received, and why is she a shadowy figure in the history of education and women’s history? These questions prompted the research for this book, undertaken at Presentation archives in Ireland, England, Newfoundland and North America.

Many individual Presentation convents and schools around the world have published their own histories, sometimes for a celebratory event such as a school centenary or bicentenary.6 There is also a small number of books on Nano Nagle and on the Presentations, written by women religious and by clergymen, between the 1950s and 1990s.7 The broad narrative of how the Order was founded is therefore already known, and it was decided not to rehearse the chronological accounts that appear in the studies by the Rev T.J. Walsh and Sr Mary Pius O’Farrell, for instance. What has not existed is a thematic study of the schools founded by Nagle and the first generations of Presentations. Though Presentation schools became widespread in Ireland by the end of the nineteenth century, particularly in Leinster and Munster, there is no systematic study of the education they provided. Similarly, there is no study that shows how a system of Irish schools could generate the vocations to religious life, and the skills in teaching and teacher training, that would sustain the first international Presentation missions.

Our aim then, is to focus closely on Presentation education in an attempt at understanding how Irish schools became the bedrock of Nagle’s global education legacy. In choosing to write a thematic study, and not a chronological account, we move purposefully away from seeing Nano’s legacy as something that can be mapped as a linear sequence of events. However, we recognise that a thematic study presents readers with occasional repetitions, as we move back and forth between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and between Ireland and other countries. This is unavoidable, but it has the advantage that it generally allows each chapter to be read independently of any other. For more traditional chronological accounts of Nano and Presentation education, readers can turn to narrative publications that commenced with the eulogy given by the Bishop of Cloyne.

Publications on Nano Nagle: From panegyric to Positio

The earliest attempt to create a chronology of Nano Nagle’s life was undertaken by Dr William Coppinger, Bishop of Cloyne, when he delivered a eulogy on Nagle in 1794, to raise funds for a charity, the Cork Amicable Society.8 This account of Nagle’s life had some errors (later corrected), and was written in the style of an eighteenth-century panegyric. Coppinger provided an outline of the trajectory of her early life, but with little concrete detail. This may have been in part because, a decade after her death, he recalled few events from her youth. His comments were general, and favourable: he described the young Nano as a person of ‘affable disposition’ and suggested – not improbably – that her parents shaped her personality by their own ‘good example’. He noted that she was educated for a time in Paris, and that she later tried her vocation at a convent in France. Coppinger praised Nagle for turning her attention to ‘the poor Irish’, by returning from France ‘to contribute to their relief’, and his address continued with an overview of her adult life.9 The text of the eulogy, while providing a broad sketch of Nagle’s life, frustrates the researcher. It fails to provide any insight into how Nano Nagle overcame the challenges of being an ambitious woman of faith, operating within a deeply patriarchal Church, in an impoverished corner of a country suffering the severe strictures of penal legislation against Catholics. The eulogy could be dismissed as mere hagiography; however, it is a useful reminder of the complex relations between powerful churchmen and independent secular women. Although the Bishop was fulsome in his praise of what Nagle achieved, he also wrote of Nagle’s ‘misguided zeal, her shameful indiscretion, [and] her inconsiderate piety’, hinting that she needed to learn to sublimate her wilfulness in order to better serve her Church.10

The address, despite its limitations, provided subsequent biographers with a handful of details about Nagle’s life that they have all reproduced unquestioningly, reminding readers of its ex Cathedra position. For example, one such detail is a description of Nano Nagle’s experience of epiphany. Coppinger recounted how Nagle, while living in considerable comfort in Paris, saw poor people waiting to attend Mass at dawn one day, and was struck by their faith. The Bishop’s interpretation of this moment was that it was ‘pointed with a sting of Divine Grace’ and he wrote that ‘she was edified and confounded at the sight’.11 Coppinger concluded that the ‘charms of dissipation … lost much of their ascendency on this occasion’ and Nagle came ‘gradually to despise what a short time before she had deemed so desirable’.12 There is no way to corroborate this story and the significance of the incident was disputed by one of Nagle’s contemporaries, Mother Clare Callaghan, who wrote that ‘the love of the poor which animated her young sister, and that sister’s premature death, had a more profound influence on Nano’s decisions’.13 However, although Nagle was dead ten years when Coppinger penned the eulogy, she was ‘within living memory’, and the events of her life contained in his panegyric attained the status of fact in subsequent biographical studies. Arguably the most compelling of the Bishop’s recollections was that in her lifetime Nagle ‘received the most opprobrious insults’ on the streets of Cork. He wrote that she was charged with ‘deceiving the world with her throng of beggar’s brats … [and] that her schools were a seminary of prostitution’.14 These few comments, written against the grain of the otherwise pietistic account of Nagle, challenge the researcher to consider how she may have been viewed by some people in her own lifetime.

The first full biography of Nano Nagle, by the Rev William Hutch, was published in 1874 to mark the centenary of the founding of the Presentations.15 Hutch penned biographical studies of several women religious and, in the style of the time, his writing was congratulatory in tone. The biography surveyed the growth of the Presentations over a century, and contained a conspectus of schools that remains a useful research tool.16 In the 1930s, the Presentations in Cork asked Alfred O’Rahilly to write a new study of Nano Nagle and the Presentation Sisters. O’Rahilly was a good choice for many reasons: he had been educated at University College Cork (UCC), and had entered the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), although he left before ordination. O’Rahilly completed a DPhil, returning to UCC where he eventually became president of the university. He had the kind of scholarly background that suggested he would be suited to writing about a religious congregation, and his papers suggest that he commenced the task with enthusiasm.17 However, his professional commitments prevented him from making significant progress with the book, and he involved a local curate, T.J. Walsh, in the project. Following the death of his wife, O’Rahilly decided to become a Holy Ghost priest, and moved to Dublin to begin his training at Blackrock College. At about this time, he handed all of his research on Nano Nagle to Walsh, and advised the Superioress of South Presentation Convent that while he could not complete the book, he had placed the task in good hands.

Walsh was inspired to write the biographical study of Nagle not only because O’Rahilly needed his support, but because he had family links with the Motherhouse, South Presentation Convent, Cork. His mother had been a pupil there, and had learned about Nano Nagle from ‘a dear old Sister Agatha, quite blind, who ceaselessly told the story of Nano’s halcyon days in Paris’.18 Walsh was a worthy successor to O’Rahilly in many respects. His study of Nagle drew on extant manuscript material, and he was painstaking in researching how the Presentation Rule and Constitutions were developed. The book was published in anticipation of the Cause for the canonisation of Nagle, and it provides an overview of how the Presentations began to spread throughout the world.19 Walsh, however, was not the only researcher on the book: it is clear from extant papers that research was done by Sr Catherine Condon.20 It was she who contacted all of the international foundations, gathered data, and prepared the genealogical research and some valuable tables and charts. One of the most impressive of Condon’s creations was a five-page folding insert, containing a visualisation showing every Presentation foundation in the world, and the relation of each to the other. But because individual nuns were not singled out for attention and praise, Sr Catherine Condon was not acknowledged as a co-researcher on the book; rather, Walsh extended a general word of thanks to all the Sisters who had supported him. Condon suffered the fate of many women who were the ‘helpmeet’ of clergymen and male scholars at that time: she remained invisible.21 Research on Nagle continued in the twentieth century under Sr Pius O’Farrell, a Presentation Sister with extensive knowledge of Presentation records.22 The impetus to gather materials and provide accounts of Nagle’s life arose from the continued efforts towards the Cause for her canonisation, which was presented to the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints, in 1994.23 Sr Pius O’Farrell published some of the papers used in the Positio, providing researchers with a useful collection.24 Nonetheless, the fact remains that there is only a handful of letters in Nagle’s own hand, and very slender evidence about her life.

Nano’s Legacy

For the purpose of this book, it was decided to focus on the most obvious – yet surprisingly uncharted – element of her legacy: the schools which she founded in her lifetime in Cork, and the network of foundations around Ireland which grew from that very first foundation in Cove Lane. These in turn gave rise to international foundations. To explore hundreds of international convents would have been impossible in a single volume, and indeed at this point in Presentation history it is no longer possible to ascertain the founding/closing date of every single house that has ever existed. It was decided to examine the histories of the Irish foundations and the way they contributed to education, and then signal how the nineteenth-century international foundations commenced in response to a growing mission imperative within the Order. In this way, the book could show the different ways in which Nano Nagle’s legacy became evident, in the century after her death.

The book commences with a biographical study of Nagle, drawing on extant sources and on the historiography of Ireland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The impact of penal legislation on families such as the Nagles, the relevance of the ‘Irish enlightenment’, and the changing face of Cork in Nano’s youth, are explored. The study of Ireland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is a rich area in scholarship, to which our study makes a small contribution by placing a lens over one family, and the times in which they lived. The scholarship of Michael Brown, David Dickson, Jane Ohlmeyer, Ian McBride, Thomas O’Connor and Mary Ann Lyons was immensely useful, as we c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Advance Praise for Nano Nagle
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Maps
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Sources and Referencing System
• PBVM References for Irish Collections
• Glossary
• Abbreviations
• 1. Finding Nano: Researching an Enigmatic Irishwoman and Her Legacy
• 2. Nano Nagle: Her Life and Times
• 3. Founding and Funding: The Establishment of a Network of Irish Convents
• 4. The Presentations in Newfoundland: The First Foundation Outside Ireland
• 5. Presentation Education: Pupils and Pedagogy in the Nineteenth Century
• 6. Schools for the Starving: Presentation Education Before and After the Great Famine
• 7. The Presentation Sisters and Education in England
• 8. The Presentation Sisters and Second-Level Education in Ireland, 1800–1958
• 9. ‘Service to the kingdom’: Expansion in Britain
• 10. The Global Reach of Presentation Education
• Endnotes
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• Plates