‘Our Nuns are not a Nation’: Politicizing the Convent in Irish Literature and Film

Abstract

The sexual abuse scandals that have shaken the Catholic Church in Ireland, America and elsewhere primarily involve priests and Christian Brothers, but since the production of Patricia Burke Brogan’s play Eclipsed in 1992, the TV documentary States of Fear in 1999, and Peter Mullan’s 2002 film The Magdalene Sisters, the stories of the Magdalene Laundries and the Industrial Schools have forced us to recognize that some Irish nuns were also sadistic abusers of women and children.¹ Claims of maltreatment in orphanages and reformatories all over the world, the majority of them run by orders that originated in Ireland, have multiplied. The exposure of this shameful past has accentuated a demographic trend that began just after Vatican II, long before tales of brutality threatened to undermine the ethical foundations of the religious life. As modernizing nuns abandoned the medieval habit and the hidden discipline of the cloister to take up work in the world, and as professional careers for women outside the convent increased, the distinctive appeal of the religious life faded. In Africa, which offers fewer secular opportunities for women, convents continue to recruit, but the precipitous decline of Irish vocations has accelerated during the last decade.