Clodagh Finn: Recalling a glorious nun who was scathing of church
Of Of Power Wrote Margaret Nun Cusack, Kenmare, The About Anna Abuse
She was opinionated, strong-willed, polarising and self-assured. She was a businesswoman with a gift for raising money. She was a fierce advocate for social justice and regularly criticised 19th-century landlords.
Margaret Anna Cusack was also scathing about the abuse of power in the Catholic church. She didn’t mince her words. In 1887, she wrote this: “Roman Catholic ecclesiastics have impressed the people with the very convenient idea that they are not to be blamed, no matter what wrong they may do; so the ‘devil’ is made the convenient scapegoat …
“Facts cannot be hidden as they were in earlier ages … An open, honest admission of the evils in the church would go far to lessen them. It would at least save the church the awful crime of even appearing to approve evil by not condemning it.”
It might have been written yesterday.
What is perhaps most surprising is that it comes from the pen of a woman who was herself a member of the church. She will be recalled tomorrow as one of the co-founders of the sisters of St Clare as the order prepares to leave Kenmare in Co Kerry after more than 160 years.
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A mass at 12 o’clock on Sunday at the Holy Cross Church in the town will be celebrated to mark their historic departure.
In February, the sisters said they no longer had the numbers to maintain a presence. “As a congregation, we are sorry to be bidding you farewell and we very much hope that the legacy we leave, after sixteen decades among you, will be something you continue to value as a parish and community,” they said in a letter to parishioners.
Since then, local people have been recalling a religious community that arrived in Kerry in 1861 when the town was still on its knees after the Famine. A church and school were built and later the nuns set up a lace-making industry to give women a skill — and all-important employment.
Kenmare Lace went on to become an international success story, winning prizes and attracting the attention of connoisseurs from London to New York. Queen Victoria bought five pieces while an American millionaire, a Mrs Winacles, placed several orders, paying £300 — a huge sum at the time — for a bed cover in 1886.
Meantime, it wasn’t long before Sr Mary Francis Clare, as Margaret Cusack was known, started to cause waves with her strong views on landlordism and the Catholic church hierarchy.
“She was an energetic, determined, and strong-willed woman with a business acumen probably not suited to convent life, especially in the enclosed order of the Poor Clares,” says Olive Morrin, of Special Collections & Archives at Maynooth University which holds many of Margaret Cusack’s publications.
First a few words of explanation: Margaret Anna Cusack’s path into religious life was a bit different from the start. She was born into a wealthy protestant family in Dublin in May 1829, was privately educated, and planned to marry. After her fiancé died suddenly — poignantly while she was visiting her family to announce the engagement — she became an Anglican sister in the UK.
She left shortly afterward, frustrated at not being allowed to join fellow sisters leaving to nurse soldiers during the Crimean War. She moved back to Ireland and converted to Catholicism in 1858. Though she would go on to clash with many of its superiors, she said that while a Catholic convent was no haven of bliss, it was an earthly paradise compared to the Anglican variety.
Meanwhile, in Kerry, she raised some £15,000 when the threat of famine reappeared in 1871. She also wrote prolifically, establishing her own press and writing more than 30 books on religion, politics, and history.
Her work championing women in history predates, almost by a century, recent work in the field. She was one of the few to stand up for Gormlaith, Princess of Leinster and one-time wife of Brian Boru, who was blamed for causing untold mischief, including the Battle of Clontarf.
In her , Margaret Cusack, who by then was known as the Nun of Kenmare, was alone in praising Gormlaith as a “lady of rather remarkable character” who showed “wonderful zeal and efforts in collecting forces”.
Margaret, though, was lukewarm on the subject of education for women, as she feared allowing women into higher education might threaten marriage and family life.
After 20 years in Kenmare, she had assembled a number of powerful enemies, particularly the local landlord and his agent. But she was not without her supporters either. When she received an anonymous death threat for condemning absentee landlords in (1880), a protest meeting was held to support her.
Her days in Kenmare were coming to an end, though. She left in 1881, supposedly to go back to the Poor Clares' mother house in Newry. She stopped off at Knock on the way — questioning the veracity of some of the apparitions two years previously — and went about setting up a convent and school.
The ins and outs of how she was released from the Poor Clares, raised finance, started but didn’t finish the building work, and ran into direct conflict with the Archbishop of Tuam John MacEvilly would need a Netflix series to fully explain it.
The Nun of Kenmare later got permission from Pope Leo X111 — whom she met in person — to set up her own convent, the still-active Sisters of St Joseph of Peace, in America.
She caused controversy and chaos there too. In one rebuke from a Fr Shanley, she was labelled a “Poo-Bah-political-economist-hagiographer-Young Girl’s adviser-pamphleteer, mistress of Novices, historian, beggar and nun.”
For her side of the story, told in astonishing detail, you can download a free ebook of . It makes for fascinating reading.
Her indomitable spirit shines through its pages with lines such as these: “The practice of the Inquisition still holds in the Roman church, as I have found again and again, and as this book will show. You are condemned unheard.”
In the end, she left the Catholic church and returned to England and Anglicanism. She died there, aged 70, in 1899.
Looking back, most commentators agree that her motives were good. Very many others in the church, though not quite as colourful, also did good work, but it is almost impossible to say that at a time when revelations of abuse within the institution are ongoing.
The organised church’s utter failure to fully admit, and offer redress for, the systemic horrors that were, in many cases, facilitated under its watch does a disservice to the centuries of good work done by some of its members.
As the nuns leave Kenmare tomorrow, I hope we can be gracious enough to focus on the positive.