Irish religious orders, in decline, are selling up prime properties, but what do they do with the money? Kathy Sheridan reports.
Religious communities in Ireland continued their inexorable decline into history this week with the news that the Franciscan Order is ending its 700-year link with Carrick-on-Suir, Co Tipperary, and that the Jesuit Church of the Sacred Heart, a Limerick city landmark since 1868, had been sold.
Only a few weeks ago, the Benedictines announced the closure of their spectacularly situated Kylemore Abbey school in Connemara. It emerged that of the 23 teaching staff there, only one is a member of the Benedictine community.
For several years, the reins of once-thriving Catholic schools have been passing steadily into the hands of lay principals as priests and nuns fade into retirement with no one to replace them. What Sr Elizabeth Maxwell calls "the house on the hill" - the convent building looming over many Irish towns - is disappearing from the landscape and with it the visible army of steely women who ran tightly disciplined schools and immaculately clean hospitals.
As recently as 1999, there were about 11,000 nuns in the country. Five years later, that figure had fallen by more than 2,000. Sr Maxwell, the elected leader of the Presentation Sisters' northern province and former secretary general of the Conference of Religious of Ireland (Cori), notes that the average age of the sisters in her province is 73 - "and that's pretty standard". At 67, she would be regarded as "a young nun".
The sales or closures rarely come out of the blue. Two years ago, the Franciscan order announced that by 2009 it would be unable to provide full-time resident friars for six Irish friaries. Its Irish membership had fallen from a high of 400 to 120 and the average age was about the mid-60s. Meanwhile, only five priests remain in the Jesuit community in Limerick, where the average age is 77.
A significant feature of Irish life is vanishing, almost unmarked. Public indifference may be rooted partly in distaste at the canny compensation deal negotiated by the orders for victims of abuse - although this involved only 18 out of 130-plus - and partly in resentment over spectacular prices achieved by some orders for prime property.
THIS WEEK THE sale of the Jesuit church in Limerick was flagged in terms of its reported sale price of about €4 million. But the bar was set five years ago by the Sisters of Charity, with the sale of 14.5 acres of land on Merrion Road for €45.7 million, which set a new record for a development site in Dublin. A year before, the same order got £8 million (€10.1m) for 3.5 acres at Mount St Anne's in Milltown and about the same for an adjoining 18 acres in 1995. Among last year's major property deals was a 208-acre site at Belcamp College, Malahide, which made €105 million for the Oblate order.
Some would say that the orders can't win. When they donate valuable property, it receives little attention. The Franciscans' decision to leave its church building in Carrick-on-Suir as a gift to the Respond Housing Association - which provides housing for elderly people - means that the friars will not benefit from their departure. The Sisters of Charity's gift of two convents and grounds to St Vincent's Hospital was overshadowed by the massive sales figures.
Sr Maxwell reels off other sizeable donations: buildings in Stanhope Green handed over by the Sisters of Charity; a "massive property" in Cork Street given by the Sisters of Mercy; another in Finglas donated by the Holy Faith order.
The Augustinians left their Ballyhaunis priory and grounds to the people; the Divine Word missionaries in Roscommon donated property for a respite care centre. Her own Presentation order handed over buildings on George's Hill, Dublin 7, for development by Focus Ireland. Their convent in Oranmore - now being developed by Respond - was sold to the county council for €300,000, "well below market value", and playing fields were donated to the schools and community.
Sr Maxwell recalls that the Sisters of Charity eventually were driven to explain that much of the proceeds from its massive south Dublin gains went into the development of a centre for the blind. But if the lack of transparency in the first place can lead to such suspicion, why aren't the orders more upfront about their intentions?
"We were never ones for proclaiming our good works - so it never occurred to us that we would have to say that we would be doing something good," she replies. Anyway, she points out, they are subject to strict audits and charity regulation.
"We are bound much more than people realise . . . We are not private owners. We cannot dispose of property without the permission of the charity commissioners and they will insist on our getting market value. It's their responsibility to oblige us to make prudent provision . . . We're not free to dispose of our funds to buy feather beds . . ."
With the ageing profile of the orders, it's not surprising that enormous sums are now committed to nursing care for elderly sisters and padres, many of them retirees from the foreign missions. The Presentation order has some 72 nursing-home beds for its sisters and they're full. At €30,000 minimum per bed, nursing costs alone run to more than €2 million a year.
"Many of us were teachers or nurses and we gave up everything we ever earned [ to the order] . . . But in return, we were guaranteed that we would be taken care of till we die ".
But the other major outgoing, she says, is on "keeping the mission alive for younger people". Like every order, the Presentation has had to adapt or die. Nuns now live anonymously in little groups of three or four in ordinary houses on the edges of towns and cities, near their work on halting sites and marginalised estates. The work of Mercy sister Joan Bowles, as director of the Limerick Youth Service, only came to prominence last year when hundreds of young people attended her funeral.
THE PRESENTATION'S OBLIGATIONS as a charity include the promotion of faith, education, the well-being of the general community, and alleviation of poverty. So they continue to support their 10 Irish sisters in Slovakia, working with Roma children, as well as missions in Zambia, Zimbabwe, Equador, Chile and Peru (all run by trained teachers). At home, they have re-dedicated their ministry to learning innovation for marginalised children, to social inclusion, human rights and the environment and advocacy for groups such as Travellers and prisoners.
On the environment, they have led the way in the race against waste in Mountmellick. Today they are hosting a seminar on fair trade and, on March 27th, another in Croke Park on learning technology. All of this, she points out, requires "serious money", to pay organisers and experts.
Outgoings on the collaborative schools trusts (run jointly with the Mercy order) run to €500,000 a year. Their residential retreat house, with fully-staffed school and adult programmes, costs €200,000 a year in wages alone. The order's "socially-directed" investment fund, Clann Credo, for those without access to bank credit, took €5 million to set up and now stands at €11 million, with help from other orders.
The Presentations have 26 novices in India and more in other missions. In Slovakia, they have a 24-year-old graduate and linguist seeking to join them. In fact, the order is building a community house there to accommodate the other young women who, they expect, will surely follow.
World view: nuns with a new mission
As the only girl in a family of boys, Orla Treacy was aware of certain expectations. Her father Blaise - the former manager of Wicklow County Council - was a fan of the Steve Martin movie Father of the Bride, and had rather advanced plans for his daughter's big day. He practised walking up and down the "aisle" with her in the hall and, although he had sworn off cigars, made it known that he planned to smoke an entire box of them the day he walked her up the aisle in marriage.
Last October in Bray, after Orla, radiant in green silk, had been walked up the aisle by both her mother and father to take her final vows as a Loreto nun, her father wryly recalled his great plan: "She out-foxed me".
Now, at 33, Orla and two other Loreto sisters, Anne Farren, most recently a youth director in Dromore diocese, and Dolores O'Connor, after eight years working for a Dublin inner-city Aids housing project, are settling into an unfinished house in the ramshackle town of Rumbek in southern Sudan. After decades of a devastating civil war, millions of displaced Sudanese are trickling home to a place where the roads remain unpaved, the airstrip is a dirt track, there is no electricity or running water and cattle are more valuable than women.
The sisters are answering the call of their Loreto head who two years ago asked each province to begin a new mission beyond their national boundary. She called it "Courage to Move". The order is now in seven new countries - Ecuador, Zambia, Ghana, Bangladesh, Albania, the Seychelles and Sudan.
The invitations to Ireland gave a choice: secretary to the Bishop of Namibia or educate girls in Rumbek, where only 13 girls are enrolled in secondary school. The women don't quite roll their eyes. In a saying attributed to their founder, Mary Ward: "Half women are not for these times".
There are no skills in southern Sudan, and no assets. Materials and craftsmen have to be imported from Nairobi by a long and dangerous road journey. "This country has been at war for 40 years. There is this huge need to train people to be engineers, teachers, computer workers," says Dolores.
Anne is the historian, sociologist and linguist, who talks knowledgeably about oil interests, religious unrest and the Dinka language. She will be assembling a thesis on the challenges facing Europeans going into southern Sudan.
But, in a pastoralist culture where women outnumber men by two to one and have started to do men's work, the sisters' first job is to persuade the men to agree to their girls' education. They take courage from the fact that their invitation came from the five local chiefs. "And it was they who donated the land," says Orla.
They are also acutely aware of how missionaries have got it wrong in the past.
"I think we used to go in with a package," says Anne. "But we're going out to listen and learn."
Their guiding principle comes from a former missionary: "Eyes open, ears open, bowels open and mouth shut for the first year."