Clodagh Finn: Bridget Coll — nun, lesbian, law-changer, and militant
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On this last Saturday of Pride Month, let us remember Bridget Coll, the “tiny woman with a fierce heart” born near Fanad lighthouse in Co Donegal. She made legal history for same-sex couples in Canada, opposed Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile, and fought for social justice all of her life.
Her story reads like fiction — a thriller even — just as the many words used to describe her don’t seem to fit together: nun, lesbian, teacher, militant, law-changer, even “home-wrecker”.
We might add “unassuming” to that list because Bridget Coll spoke with a gentleness that belied her courage. And what courage. On a September day in 1983, she was among a small group of people who blocked the street outside an infamous detention centre in Santiago, Chile, where those opposed to Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship were held and tortured.
They chanted slogans and sang 'Yo te nombro Libertad' ('I name you, Freedom'), a dangerous — some might say foolhardy — act in a country where thousands were ‘disappeared’, and many thousands more tortured by Pinochet’s security forces.
Her fellow protester and life partner, Chris Morrissey, recalled that her own legs felt as heavy as lead when they were given the signal to protest. By contrast, Bridget Coll had no such hesitation: “She turned around and looked at me and said, ‘Come on, they’re starting. We’re gonna miss it.’”
When Bridget Coll’s superior at the Franciscan Missionaries of St Joseph accepted her request to go to Chile, she warned the Donegal woman that she was going to preach the Gospel, not to meddle in politics.
But Bridget already had a longstanding instinct for politics, one shaped by watching her father hop up on the back of trucks and argue for change any time an Irish election was in full swing.
She breaks into an infectious laugh recalling those days. Her laughter punctuates the hours of interviews given as part of an oral history project now accessible online at the Simon Fraser University database.
She starts at the beginning: her birth in Fanad, Donegal, in 1934 in a house her grandfather built. She was one of 12 children, coming at the start of “the second half-dozen”, as she puts it. She remembers a happy household where there was always humour, lots of playmates, and a baby to bounce on your knee.
“Religion,” she adds, “played a huge role. Everything was Catholic. The school, the church, the home. We were taught the same thing everywhere. There was a priest or nun in nearly every house. The best thing you could do with your life was to become a nun.”
Aged 14, she told her mother that she wanted to become a missionary nun, but she was persuaded to wait until she was 16 before joining the Franciscans in England. She was sent to Albany, New York, in the early 1960s where she taught religion to children, never thinking to question the teachings of the Church.
That changed in 1968 with a Papal encyclical that banned artificial birth control. Bridget Coll had seen the hardships faced by the mothers of the children she taught and began to question a Church which, she believed, imposed more hardship by condemning women to hell for taking contraception.
“For the first time in my life I began to doubt the teachings of the Church. I thought, there is something wrong here,” she said.
Other moments of doubt were to come. She went back to Donegal to celebrate her parents’ 50th wedding anniversary in 1977. It was a joyous occasion, uniting all 12 siblings who travelled from the four corners of the world to be there.
A week later, however, her mother died of a stroke. Three weeks after that, her father died of a heart attack. She was devastated, but was told by her religious community that she should be happy because her parents were now in heaven.
“But I wasn’t happy. All the holy and religious things didn’t help me. I was having nightmares,” she said.
Some months later, she met her friend, fellow Franciscan nun Chris Morrissey, who asked her how she felt. “She was the first person to ask me how I felt. It was the first time I was able to cry and grieve. That cemented our relationship. I fell in love with her then.”
Chris told her she was a lesbian and asked: “‘Do you know what that is?’ I said: ‘No’. She said: ‘I think you’re a lesbian’. I didn’t know the word — that was the first time I knew.”
Bridget was 43 years old.
In the meantime, Bridget went back to high school, did a number of courses and got increasingly interested in liberation theology, which focused on giving earthly help to the poor and the oppressed rather than saving their souls.
She asked her superiors if she could go to Chile and, in 1981, she and Chris moved into a little shack in Santiago and got very involved in the lives of the people living in the shanty towns.
“We didn’t want to tell them what they needed; they had to tell us what they needed,” she said. It was a bottom-up approach. The two women realised that alongside the need for democracy in the country, there was a need for democracy in the home.
For International Women’s Day, they helped women make banners saying as much and encouraged them to take small steps towards independence in the home. In one case, that meant a woman stood up to her husband when he said she couldn’t have tea and toast in bed.
“We were called by the husbands, wreckers of home,” she says, with another laugh.
Meantime, her faith in organised religion waned even further. The final straw came when her order wrote from England to say they were being taken by limousine to a garden party to mark the congregation’s birthday, and asked what she was doing.
On that day, Bridget Coll and fellow members of the anti-torture movement were planning a protest in Santiago, an activity as far-removed from a garden party as you could get.
After much thought and eight years in Chile, she and Chris decided to leave the Church and move back to Chris’s native Canada. They wanted to live as an out couple, but that brought with it a whole set of new barriers, not least Canadian immigration law which did not recognise same-sex couples.
Chris Morrissey took a constitutional challenge and won. Bridget recalls the sweet moment of victory in October 1992: “It was on the local news at six o’clock, then it was on the national news that evening... it was something about Gorbachev first and then these two lesbians in Vancouver.”
That city later honoured the couple by electing them grand marshals of the Vancouver Pride parade in 1999.
When Bridget was diagnosed with dementia some years later, the couple again used their situation to help others who found themselves in a similar situation.
She died in 2016. Six years later, Bridget Coll’s extraordinary life was recalled by Dr Maurice J Casey in ‘Out in the World: Ireland’s LGBTQ+ Diaspora’ at Epic, The Irish Emigration Museum.
I heard about Bridget from Anne Garvin, whose mother Úna O’Friel from Araheera was a neighbour of the Coll family in Donegal. As both Dr Casey and Anne Garvin say, this woman, so famous in Canada, deserves to be better-known and celebrated at home too.