Responding to the Ryan Report
Description
ABOUT THE BOOK
The Ryan Report on abuse of children in institutions of the state which were run by religious orders caused outrage and confusion among all the people of Ireland, both members of the Catholic Church and others.
In the aftermath of the immediate shock and the widespread media coverage, it seems useful to reflect on the roots of the problems that gave rise to these horrors and to try to set out a way forward which might help to avoid such things happening in the future. Tony Flannery set about seeking views, comments and analysis which might add some breadth and depth of that reflection. He has brought together a very competent and thoughtful team to write about the report, in the hope of encouraging a constructive debate on the various issues raised.
Contributors include:
Terry Prone
Marie Keenan
Fainche Ryan
Tom O’Malley (Law NUIG)
Eamon Maher
Brendan McConvery (History of Religious Life)
John Littleton
Daire Keogh
Brian Lennon
Sean Duggan
Margaret Lee (Ex-Mercy Nun)
Sean Fagan
Tony Flannery
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tony Flannery CSSR is the author of the best-selling book From the Inside. He was born in Attymon, County Galway and has been a Redemptorist priest for twenty-six years, much of that time spent in Limerick. He has a large following as a preacher and retreat master.
Editorial Review
Class difference accepted by 1960s religious orders
There are some absorbing essays in Responding to the Ryan Report edited by Father Tony Flannery, and one of the most engagingly written is by Margaret Lee, a former Mercy nun.
Margaret, also a sociologist with a degree from the London School of Economics, looks back with painful honesty at her years as a nun in the Mercy Order. She questions now whether her vocation, at the age of 17, was truly an urge to make a sacrifice of her life, or whether she was subconsciously attracted by the privileges of a clerical life in those days, more than 40 years ago.
In the 1960s, she recalls, Irish people still showed deference - and courtesy - to the clergy. For example, nuns would not be charged when travelling on buses. A small thing but an indicator. Margaret wonders now if that contributed to kind of arrogance, and an acceptance of class differences.
“The membership of the congregation that I entered was predominantly middle class, and the children who were placed in the orphanage were seen as coming from the lower strata of society and therefore as unequal to us and less deserving” And maybe the free ride on the bus enhanced me nuns' sense of entitlement.
Yet the class differences of which Margaret speaks were embedded in the entire social system (and, in a different way, still are - class differences now based on money Success and "connections", still prevail).
The class system in the convents were amplifications of what our parents and relations upheld. Among the “respectable" classes there was a fear and a horror of rough proletarianism.
This fear was as strong among the respectable working-class as it was among the middle classes - the "decent" working-class, who kept in work, were sober, clean and God-fearing, feared contamination from the “feckless" elements. The parallel today which I see more emphatically in British society is the fear and loathing of the "underclass".
It is this underclass, in the eyes of many respectable folk, who generate the ever-rising spiral of crime and who produce broken families immured in social problems. (Gordon Brown's latest pledge is to promise a "crackdown on bad parents").
Obviously generalisations are deplorable; in truth, you find people at every level of society who are virtuous and people who behave atrociously. The Christian ideal is to see Jesus Christ in everyone.
But Margaret Lee's reflections on the values in her Mercy convent derived from the social norms in Ireland when she took the veil D 1961. She describes perfectly the attitudes that my otherwise gentle, kind and nice family would have maintained towards what they would have seen as a threatening "underclass" which, if not reformed would prove a danger to society.
- Mary Kenny, Irish Catholic
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