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Post by cato on Sept 24, 2018 11:29:18 GMT
One of the big differences between the the papal visit of 1979 and the most recent was the relative absence of female religious. Nuns by and large are vanishing as part of the Irish religious landscape. (The priesthood is aging and diminishing but not at the same rate. In 1962 Maynooth college had 526 students for the clergy. This month 5 men entered. The total clerical population there is around 60 I believe.)
Female religious often provoke strong reactions but few will deny they were formidable. It is one of the great ironies of history that as calls increase for women to have a role in the church a massive and often ignored vanishing of a powerful female cohort is occuring. Many Irish towns have seen the closing of the last convent . Outside of films like the Magdalene Sisters most children will never know an Irish nun in the flesh. An age is passing away.
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Post by Maolsheachlann on Sept 24, 2018 13:33:19 GMT
Indeed, it's hard not to stare when one DOES see a nun/sister these days. More often than not, they look like they are African.
I went to a secondary school run by Dominican nuns. They were already on the way out then, very few left, all old. Looking back, I suspect most were of the liberal persuasion (some always wore civvies), although I did have one lovely old sister who gave me the only solid year of catechesis I had in secondary school.
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Post by Séamus on Sept 25, 2018 2:14:28 GMT
Volumes and volumes could be written about this.
I had a rare occasion recently when I met a very young Irish sister, but the group she belongs to (alliance of the Two Hearts) is probably not a formally approved congregation.
Someone made me aware of Salvador Dali's nightmarish 1960 painting 'Ecumenical Council' which, very creepily, has a strong female element, one looking like a religious(although it's apparently St Helen) in it's symbolism.
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Post by Séamus on Sept 27, 2018 11:50:54 GMT
One of the big differences....etc... (The priesthood is aging and diminishing but not at the same rate. In 1962 Maynooth college had 526 students for the clergy. This month 5 men entered. The total clerical population there is around 60 I believe.) ...etc.... I was given a copy of the Irish Independent recently that mentioned that Maynooth,as a town, had one of the highest concentration of no-religion people in Ireland. I wonder would being a university town be an element? The consoling thing about leftist university students is they often don't stick to their left-iness either. |
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Post by Séamus on Sept 27, 2018 12:13:22 GMT
Indeed, it's hard not to stare when one DOES see a nun/sister these days. More often than not, they look like they are African. I went to a secondary school run by Dominican nuns. They were already on the way out then, very few left, all old. Looking back, I suspect most were of the liberal persuasion (some always wore civvies), although I did have one lovely old sister who gave me the only solid year of catechesis I had in secondary school. It IS bemusing to see the post Conciliar Popes making , in quick succession, official Saints out of the founders of (often) disappearing congregations, tough no one doubts the worthiness of the candidates and, certainly, their work will continue in other ways- I've witnessed college Masses where everything is named for it's founding order, retired Sisters will sit with honour in front pews and sometimes receive a swansong applause, led by educators who are on comparatively huge wages. Archbishop Fisher of Sydney is now opening the cause of Eileen O'Connor (whose parents emigrated from Connaught)- her congregation, never very large, has been already officially amalgamated and is now a branch of Mother Aikenhead's Sisters of Charity, before the positio is even read. |
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Post by Maolsheachlann on Sept 27, 2018 12:57:24 GMT
Indeed, it's hard not to stare when one DOES see a nun/sister these days. More often than not, they look like they are African. I went to a secondary school run by Dominican nuns. They were already on the way out then, very few left, all old. Looking back, I suspect most were of the liberal persuasion (some always wore civvies), although I did have one lovely old sister who gave me the only solid year of catechesis I had in secondary school. It IS bemusing to see the post Conciliar Popes making , in quick succession, official Saints out of the founders of (often) disappearing congregations, tough no one doubts the worthiness of the candidates and, certainly, their work will continue in other ways- I've witnessed college Masses where everything is named for it's founding order, retired Sisters will sit with honour in front pews and sometimes receive a swansong applause, led by educators who are on comparatively huge wages. Archbishop Fisher of Sydney is now opening the cause of Eileen O'Connor (whose parents emigrated from Connaught)- her congregation, never very large, has been already officially amalgamated and is now a branch of Mother Aikenhead's Sisters of Charity, before the positio is even read. I think I saw David Quinn write in an article recently that the average lifespan of a religious congregation is a hundred years. So the death of congregations is nothing new. But, obviously, the difference is that they are not being replaced with new ones today, at least in developed countries. |
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Post by cato on Oct 3, 2018 13:41:30 GMT
Indeed, it's hard not to stare when one DOES see a nun/sister these days. More often than not, they look like they are African. I went to a secondary school run by Dominican nuns. They were already on the way out then, very few left, all old. Looking back, I suspect most were of the liberal persuasion (some always wore civvies), although I did have one lovely old sister who gave me the only solid year of catechesis I had in secondary school. It IS bemusing to see the post Conciliar Popes making , in quick succession, official Saints out of the founders of (often) disappearing congregations, tough no one doubts the worthiness of the candidates and, certainly, their work will continue in other ways- I've witnessed college Masses where everything is named for it's founding order, retired Sisters will sit with honour in front pews and sometimes receive a swansong applause, led by educators who are on comparatively huge wages. Archbishop Fisher of Sydney is now opening the cause of Eileen O'Connor (whose parents emigrated from Connaught)- her congregation, never very large, has been already officially amalgamated and is now a branch of Mother Aikenhead's Sisters of Charity, before the positio is even read. Religious orders tend to have a better chance at getting members canonised as they have a Roman head quarters , ample resources and full time staff who can promote a cult among the faithful. A lay person or a married couple generally doesn't normally have these advantages in the canonisation process. |
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Post by Séamus on Oct 17, 2018 6:43:41 GMT
One of the big differences between the the papal visit of 1979 and the most recent was the relative absence of female religious. Nuns by and large are vanishing as part of the Irish religious landscape...etc.... away. Happy Feastday (in the extraordinary form) of St Margaret Mary Alacoque, primary female patron of the (currently small congregation) Sisters Adorers of the Royal Heart of Jesus Christ Sovereign Priest. Although they're present in Preston, not Ireland, they have had one vocation from Cork and sisters have also visited the church of their brother-Society in Limerick, something the Limerick Leader once did a report on. |
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Post by rogerbuck on Oct 17, 2018 11:48:31 GMT
Very glad to hear you invoke that great Saint of today, Seamus - and ICKSP. I will add that it's no secret I think that ICKSP has shown real interest in bringing this order of nuns to Ireland. Something to pray for ...
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Post by Tomas on Dec 12, 2018 14:04:08 GMT
A traditional congregation of nuns in southern France has been treated oddly by the Roman Curia recently and have been imposed/assigned by force a foreign superior along with recommendations to change their way of living in accordance to their rule. Why on earth does such things happen? It could hardly be right when almost every nun in the large community felt obliged in tears to give up the most loved calling in life and humbly resign in face of such remarkable manoeuvres. www.soutienpsm.com/signer-la-petition-anglaiswww.soutienpsm.com/severedifficulties |
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Post by cato on Dec 12, 2018 16:44:38 GMT
A traditional congregation of nuns in southern France has been treated oddly by the Roman Curia recently and have been imposed/assigned by force a foreign superior along with recommendations to change their way of living in accordance to their rule. Why on earth does such things happen? It could hardly be right when almost every nun in the large community felt obliged in tears to give up the most loved calling in life and humbly resign in face of such remarkable manoeuvres. www.soutienpsm.com/signer-la-petition-anglaiswww.soutienpsm.com/severedifficultiesThis has happened at least once before during the Pontificate of Mercy. The order concerned also happened to be overly catholic whoops Rigid! |
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Post by Tomas on Dec 12, 2018 21:13:59 GMT
A traditional congregation of nuns in southern France has been treated oddly by the Roman Curia recently and have been imposed/assigned by force a foreign superior along with recommendations to change their way of living in accordance to their rule. Why on earth does such things happen? It could hardly be right when almost every nun in the large community felt obliged in tears to give up the most loved calling in life and humbly resign in face of such remarkable manoeuvres. www.soutienpsm.com/signer-la-petition-anglaiswww.soutienpsm.com/severedifficultiesThis has happened at least once before during the Pontificate of Mercy. The order concerned also happened to be overly catholic whoops Rigid! Strangely enough… yet I´m at a loss for Church history to put things like this in a more coherent framework. Aside from unusual moves from the Pope at the moment we live in there is also nothing new under the sun, so perhaps even the unhappy waywardness towards Politics can be also explained and not in the sense explained away but properly "historically". |
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Post by cato on Dec 12, 2018 22:01:53 GMT
From memory Pope Pius xii silenced several of the French theologie nouvelle writers like Congar , Chenu and De Lubac in the 1940s for criticising Thomism. Nowadays they would be seen as very orthodox. De Lubac was made a cardinal by Pope John Paul ii.
Padre Pio was also silenced for awhile by I think Pope John xxiii because of ill founded gossip.
Many , (but not enough!) liberal theologians have been silenced too of course. The main difference is they usually ignore the papal commands and present themselves publically in the media as persecuted martyrs.
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Post by Séamus on Dec 13, 2018 6:07:17 GMT
A traditional congregation of nuns in southern France has been treated oddly by the Roman Curia recently and have been imposed/assigned by force a foreign superior along with recommendations to change their way of living in accordance to their rule. Why on earth does such things happen? It could hardly be right when almost every nun in the large community felt obliged in tears to give up the most loved calling in life and humbly resign in face of such remarkable manoeuvres. www.soutienpsm.com/signer-la-petition-anglaiswww.soutienpsm.com/severedifficultiesThis has happened at least once before during the Pontificate of Mercy. The order concerned also happened to be overly catholic whoops Rigid! I'm not sure if you're referring to the Franciscans of the Immaculate, but they had four communities in Perth archdiocese before Rome's visitation(or whatever it was),all have left Australia now and,about a year before they left, their priests ceased saying the traditional Mass. (There was a change in archbishop also, which may have made a slight difference- he predecessor would almost certainly pushed hard to change the decision, wherever the merits of that) Two of the houses they had occupied were disused Mercy convents one, maybe both, dating back to the 1800s. As far as I know farm-surrounded Tooyay convent is heritage-listed, making it something of a white elephant. One group of sisters were resident in a huge, privately owned, but very catholic, Italian nursing home and village which Cabrini's Sacred Heart Sisters had been resident before. The administrators always feel a need to have religious there in-between nursing staff and chaplaincy without being entirely either, two Vietnamese sisters are there now. The other community of sisters sang the Latin Mass once a month, it must have been a different (Franciscan?) LiberUsualis- the propers were quite unusual. They were stopped doing this as soon as Rome intervened in the order's direction. |
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Post by Séamus on Dec 16, 2018 7:23:33 GMT
Indeed, it's hard not to stare when one DOES see a nun/sister these days. More often than not, they look like they are African. I went to a secondary school run by Dominican nuns. They were already on the way out then, very few left, all old. Looking back, I suspect most were of the liberal persuasion (some always wore civvies), although I did have one lovely old sister who gave me the only solid year of catechesis I had in secondary school. I happened across a century-old book 'the Life of Venerable Mother Javouhey' translated from French by a Irish publisher; the fly-page is signed by a Sr Maria Theodosia June 1918. Anne Marie Javouhey wasn't to be beatified for another 30+ years. The introduction was written (unusually?) by an English Benedictine Bishop who was hoping the Mother Anne Marie and Sisters of St Joseph of Cluny would become more widely appreciated in Britain, "the Ven. mother Anne Marie Javouhey was one of those distinguished women who were raised up to save the faith of France in the devastation and religious anarchy which followed the Great revolution...Javouhey lived as a child in the Terror, the Consulate, and the Empire,began her efforts in secrecy, in humble cottages, among the children and the neighbours, and after trials of every kind succeeded in establishing an Institute of religious women whose influence was widely-spread" I just checked to see if they were present in Ireland, seeing it was published by Gill&Sons, and discovered that they ran the Chapelizod mt. Sackville convent-school, which was of interest because my father has often mentioned it as the first school he attended(they must have taken boys for the first two years), and he still recalls walking through Phoenix Park in the mornings to get there. His two sisters, of course, stayed at the school for much longer. Both deceased now. The most unusual of the more trivial facts that I've come across in the book: she met Pius VII in the not terribly well-known town of Chalon-sur-Saône, where His Holiness spent the Triduum on his return from Napoléon's coronation as Emperor. (A few decades later a photo-opportunity would have been possible- the town is now chiefly known as the birthplace of the inventor of photography, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce and,indeed, of the first actual photo.) |
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