Clodagh Finn: We need to tell the full story about Irish nuns
The Irish nun and martyr Sr Honoria Magaen is featured in a fresco at a luxury hotel in Italy, but is less well known at home. Picture courtesy of the San Domenico Palace Hotel, Taormina, Italy
If you ever have the good fortune to find yourself in the San Domenico Palace in Sicily, you might be surprised to find that the five-star hotel has a fresco of Sr Honoria Magaen, an Irish nun who was hunted down by Cromwellian forces in the west of Ireland.
The luxury hotel in Taormina was once a Dominican monastery, which explains why it has a collection of religious-themed art. What is less clear, however, is how an Irish woman made her way into the pantheon of notable Dominican martyrs.
She is commemorated in this far-flung place, yet there is no marker at Burrishoole in Co. Mayo, where she and a fellow lay Dominican sister, also called Sr Honoria (Burke), fled for their lives when parliamentarian soldiers plundered the priory in the 17th century.
Historian and author Dr Bronagh McShane takes up the story: “Sr Honoria Burke was the daughter of Sir Richard ‘the Iron’ Burke, the second husband of the legendary pirate queen of Connacht, Grace O’Malley. She [Honoria] would have been over 100 years old by the time of the Cromwellian campaigns. At some point, she was joined by Honoria Magaen, a woman of local origins, and the pair lived together.”
In February 1653, parliamentarian soldiers attacked the priory in Burrishoole. Both Honorias escaped, along with a young servant, and found refuge on Saint’s Island (Oileán na Naomh) on Lough Furnace. The soldiers followed them, however, and discovered their hiding place.
Dr McShane recounts the horror of what followed in , her fascinating book on religious women in early modern Ireland: “Brutally beaten and thrown naked into a boat, the elderly Burke survived for only a few hours. Magaen made her escape into nearby woods, with the young servant, where she found a hiding place in the hollow of a tree trunk.
“There she froze to death in the bitter cold of midwinter. Her body was found and returned to the priory, where the two Honorias were buried. Burke’s extreme old age makes her treatment at the hands of the soldiers even more shocking.”
Two Dominican friars witnessed the atrocities and sent a report to Rome. It is easy to see how news of the brutality made its way to Sicily, although it’s strange that only one sister was honoured.
Closer to home, the lives of these two women — among the very few names of Irish female Catholic martyrs to survive — are remembered locally, but fall very far below the radar nationally. Then again, there is an understandable reluctance to talk about religious women given the lasting damage inflicted by the casual cruelty meted out at Magdalene laundries, industrial schools and mother and baby homes in the recent past.
It might not seem like the time to talk about Irish nuns, but it has never been more important to tell the whole story of the women religious in Ireland — “the good, the bad and the banal,” as Dr McShane puts it.
She is the first to acknowledge that the scandals related to the Catholic Church must be laid out, examined and those responsible held to account. “It’s a very, very difficult history and it’s one that needs to be opened up and investigated. I admire those who work tirelessly to expose those scandals.
The women in question are those in medieval monastic orders: the Poor Clares, the Dominicans, the Augustinians and others. They faced ongoing persecution, from the suppression of the monasteries by Henry VIII in the 1530s and ’40s, to the Protestant reformation in Ireland and the onset of the Cromwellian campaign in the 1650s. Yet they not only survived, but thrived.
“We have St Brigid in the fifth century who is very well known and has her own holiday and then you have someone like Nano Nagle in the 18th century who is associated with the provision of education for girls, but in the in-between period, we don’t have many figures and they are not instantly recognisable,” Dr McShane says.
It is eye-opening, then, to meet some of these powerful women brought to light by her singular research. The early female superiors of our religious orders emerge from this long-overdue study as assertive, ambitious and incredibly tenacious. They surmounted extraordinary obstacles and made dangerous, sometimes fatal, journeys over land and sea to pursue their vocations.
We also have their names. “Cecily Dillon, abbess of the first Poor Clare convent in Ireland since the Reformation, was an astute and dedicated leader of her community for more than two decades,” writes Dr McShane.
“Under her guidance, by the 1640s, the Poor Clare order had become the most popular religious order for women in Ireland, a remarkable feat considering that the order had no pre-Reformation precedent.”
She died on board a ship held in quarantine off the coast of Spain in 1653. She and hundreds more fled after all religious were expelled under the banishment act of that year. Two other sisters died on that journey too, Sister Cecily Joseph Burke and Sister Margaret Evangelist Moore.
It feels important to name them as so many of their stories are untold. Like Sr Honoria, remembered in Italy, many Irish women went on to make an impression in their adopted countries. Agnes Shanley in Lisbon was commended by the Papal Nuncio to Portugal.
At Ypres in the Spanish Netherlands, Abbess Mary Butler of the Irish Benedictine convent overcame insurmountable financial challenges to ensure the long-term success of the order, known as the ‘Irish Dames of Ypres’.
Galway Poor Clare abbess Mary Bonaventure Browne never returned from Madrid, but she made it her mission to write the history of her order.
She wrote a particularly moving account of the seizure of the Poor Clare convent in Dublin in 1630, describing how the nuns were paraded through the streets, barefoot, which gave rise to a public outcry.
“As he [the mayor] passed the streets with these mild lambes there assembled [a] great concourse of people, who tooke compassion to see them goeing abroad barefoot, and feared much they should suffer greater harme, they [the crowd] raised such tumult as ye mayor feared to be stoned.”
There was support for these holy women whose prayers in enclosed convents were seen as some sort of spiritual protection in a world where divine anger brought forth famine, plague and wars. They were a salve, and one that endures to this day.
Dr Bronagh McShane says one of the sisters of the Poor Clares in Galway told her that she received a call for special prayers when a new bridge was being lowered over the River Corrib in Galway city. That call was made in December 2022, five centuries after Cecily Dillon established the first Poor Clare convent in Ireland.
That, in itself, is a legacy worth marking.
