Our public anger is the incoherent expression of our private shame

By Gerard Howlin
Irish Examiner
June 11, 2014

http://www.irishexaminer.com/viewpoints/columnists/gerard-howlin/our-public-anger-is-the-incoherent-expression-of-our-private-shame-271620.html

IN Ireland there are particular circumstances feeding the recurring frenzies of first using nuns as guardians of female sexuality, and then turning on them for doing just that.

Post-famine Ireland, the development of a large Catholic class of smallholders and a smaller catholic middle class, was rooted in social insecurity and the craving for respectability. The norms of what is socially respectable have changed, but the craving remains unabated. The outburst of anger, the running of rhetoric ahead of facts, is as much a recoiling from the horror of ourselves as any love of justice — least of all for the afflicted.

The repetitive episodes of first handing over unmarried pregnant women into the ‘care’ of women religious, the employment, and then excoriation of those same women religious are part of a continuing theme. It has deep-rooted, but not extinct echoes, of a centuries old treatment of women who through their economic independence, social isolation or sexual apostasy, challenged the norm.

Seeing the differences, without understanding the similarities, between the nuns who managed mother and baby homes, and the women who were put into them, is to read history backwards. It is the means for a socially insecure, vindictive society to isolate and punish errant women. ‘Witch-hunt’ recalls a craze, but only partly that, where women, overwhelmingly ones isolated from appropriate male authority, were picked off and punished. The unmarried and the widowed were far more likely to be accused. Their lack of appendage to a man, affronted and unsettled people. It left them vulnerable to the phobias of a surrounding society and the recurring need for vengeance we are so familiar with now.

At the Parnell split in 1890-91 the Irish people, in a succession of by-elections, resolutely turned away from a nationalism compatible with pluralism. The spectre of the ‘fallen woman’ was central to that episode. Done-in then, Parnell could re-emerge when dead as a fallen hero. There was no concurrent rehabilitation for Katherine O’Shea. The state that emerged after 1922 was the continuation by another means of a social and economic settlement already decades old in nationalist Ireland.

The social infrastructure of that settlement, first begun by charismatic founders of religious orders, was calcified into the pillars of a repressive society. It was the triumph and catastrophe of the Catholic Church that it promoted and completely mastered the mores of the surrounding culture. Never, historically, having the benefit of authoritarian protection enjoyed in continental Catholic countries, by the 20th century the Irish church had fashioned a power almost unrivalled elsewhere. Our morals have since changed, but not improved, hence, the frantic urge to pin the blame elsewhere; anywhere.

The nuns lend themselves now, as then, as an alibi from obligation. Then, of course, they embraced it. Where between charity and collusion their place rests is an unresolved question. What is certain is that simplistic answers are the continuation of the original exculpation from duty, those homes were established to facilitate.

The Ryan Report detailed the appalling treatment of vulnerable children in religious-run institutions. Extraordinarily high infant mortality rates in mother and baby homes, and issues around the legality and circumstances of adoption clearly require thorough investigation. The irony is that while an inquiry will properly focus on the role of the religious, it will hardly investigate the role of families who committed the majority of women into those same places. Wider reflection on the role of the surrounding society, in prompting or compelling those families, will likely not happen in the context of any likely inquiry.

The role of female religious orders was, partly a function of the wider oppression of women. With limited opportunities for marriage, and none for any career worthy of the name, these orders were one outlet when few others existed. They also sheltered those within under an all-covering canopy of prevailing religious belief.

Shrouded in habits, wedded to a vocation based on immolation of the self, young women from their teenage years were inculcated in a life, which had few substantive differences from incarceration. They apparently entered voluntarily, many had a vocation, and they enjoyed respectability in this life with hope of salvation in the next. But it was an intensely restricted, frugal existence. Like women generally, but to a particular extent, nuns were cut off at every front. The fact is that Ireland had many more religious personnel that it ever had religious vocations.

Female orders, and male, imitated the unsubtle gradations in social class outside their walls. Some, often foreign in origin, recruited mainly from the professional middle class, and in turn serviced their requirements. A dowry, usual on entry, was an effective class filter. The Sacred Heart nuns were colloquially known as The Little Sisters of the Rich and catered to the daughters of the very well-to-do. Other orders, usually Irish in origin, and larger, took recruits lower down the social scale. Even within the orders there was social graduations. Lay nuns, distinct from choir sisters, did most of the manual work and enjoyed little of the status of their spiritual betters.

All shared a common subservience to a male, authoritarian church in an intensely patriarchal society. Unlike secular priests who enjoyed some social independence, nuns universally lived a forcefully regulated life. There may have been fulfilment for many, but at a cost. Outwardly pillars of the Church, they were little more than footstools within it.

THE collapse in the numbers of religious in the West, but not in the developing world, coincided with much wider female opportunity and a general decline in belief. Yet in Ireland particular circumstances again prevailed. In the 1970s as the traditional thought-world and institutional architecture for controlling women withered, a stratagem for legal counter revolution against the cultural tide, in the — pro-life — 8th amendment to the constitution, was launched.

With no homes to put them in and fewer nuns to take them in, two-thirds of the Irish people voted in 1983 to ensure that abortion could not be legislated for even if the health, as distinct from the life of the mother, required it. A decade later, faced with the reality of the Miss X case, the right to travel for an abortion implicitly deprived in 1983, was reinstated. Having previously put them in homes, we then put them on aeroplanes. We would do anything except take responsibility. We delegated that to nuns once. In successive referenda, we have refused to take it back since.

There are many ghosts walking the land. Perhaps the lament of Katherine O’Shea is for not only her lost love, but for all Irish women who to this day have not been able to live proudly and without insult in life and love, in sickness and in health. Neither truth nor justice can amount to the misdeeds of some adding up the exculpation of everyone. Our public anger is the incoherent expression of our private shame.