confiding in Providence, would not abandon the work of God …42
In 1695, four young women were admitted to the convent in Ypres as novices. However, only two, Dame Arthur and Dame Josepha O’Connor, were professed in December 1700. According to the annals, ‘Notwithstanding her want of subjects she had the resolution to dismiss the other two, not finding them endowed with the spirit of their state.’43 This dismissal is even more surprising when it seems that the ‘Queen of England had promised to provide for their maintenance’.44 Indeed, Mary of Modena had a strong devotion to the Irish Dames of Ypres. Other benefactors of the period included Pope Innocent XII and the King of France.45
Over the next couple of decades, the little community in Ypres gradually grew and its future was more secure by the time Lady Abbess Butler died on 22 December 1723. For the next 117 years, the position of abbess was held by Irish-born nuns: Lady Abbess Butler was succeeded by Lady Abbess Xaveria Arthur (1723–43); Lady Abbess Magdalen Mandeville (1743–60); Lady Abbess Bernard Dalton (1760–83); Lady Abbess Scholastica Lynch (1783–99); Lady Abbess Bernard Lynch (1799–1830); and Lady Abbess Benedict Byrne (1830–40).46
Lady Abbess Bernard Lynch, 8th Abbess of Ypres (1799–1830).
Benedictine Abbey of Ypres (n.d.).
Nun walking in the gardens at Benedictine Abbey of Ypres (n.d.).
Nun kneeling in Choir at Benedictine Abbey of Ypres (n.d.).
Nun walking in the grounds of Benedictine Abbey of Ypres (n.d.).
Two nuns in corridor at Benedictine Abbey of Ypres (n.d.).
The Ypres convent developed a reputation for education and ran a successful boarding school. Most of the young girls sent to board there would have been the daughters of members of the English and Irish Catholic upper ranks, who were deprived of Catholic schooling at home. In part because of its series of Irish-born abbesses, Ypres became known as a convent that attracted Irish families. For example, there is some possibility that Nano Nagle, who would later found the Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary (PBVM), was sent from Cork to be educated in Ypres in the early eighteenth century.47 The Ypres community spoke and taught through English, making the school well suited to Irish families like the Nagles. The rate at which Irish girls were sent to Ypres slowed from the start of the nineteenth century, however. At that point, with the relaxation of relevant penal laws, convents were again being established in Ireland. Orders such as the Ursulines (OSU) and the Loretos (IBVM) were opening boarding schools for the daughters of the Catholic elite in Cork and Dublin. Loss of income as a result of the decrease in Irish pupils was felt in Ypres: in 1784, Lady Abbess Lynch wrote several times to Teresa Mulally in Dublin, asking Mulally to ‘procure an encrase in pensionners’ for the Ypres school.48
In 1840, Lady Abbess Byrne was succeeded by an English-born Dame, Lady Abbess Elizabeth Jarrett (1840–88), thus bringing to an end the era of Irish Abbesses at the Benedictine Abbey in Ypres.49 For a period under Dame Jarrett’s term as Abbess, there were no Irish-born Dames living in the community. In 1854, Dame Joseph Fletcher arrived in Ypres and ‘united the community again to “old Ireland”’.50 Lady Abbess Jarrett died in September 1888 and was succeeded by Dame Scholastica Bergé (1890–1916).51 Under Lady Abbess Bergé, a ‘stream of vocations … [began] to flow again’ and ‘the daughters of Erin [found] their way once more to the Convent of the Irish Dames, the only Benedictine convent which Irishwomen can call their own’.52 In the absence of any records from the Ypres monastery, it is impossible to say exactly who these Irishwomen were; however, it is reasonable to suggest that they were young women who had been educated by teaching sisters at some of the many hundred convent schools that spread across Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century.53 With increasing vocations, a period of stability and growth followed.
Cellar plan, Benedictine Abbey of Ypres (n.d.).
All of this was shattered when, in July 1914, the First World War broke out.
Pupils dressed for pageant at the Benedictine Abbey of Ypres (n.d.). Overleaf: Benedictine Abbey of Ypres after the bombing in 1914.
From left to right: Sr Dorothy Ryan, Sr Noreen Gallagher, Sr Genevieve Harrington, Mother Máire Hickey, Sr Aidan Ryan, Sr Magdalena FitzGibbon, Sr Marie Genevieve Mukamana, Sr Karol O’Connell, Sr Mary Jiao
From left to right: Sr Noreen Gallagher, Sr Aidan Ryan, Sr Karol O’Connell, Sr Marie Genevieve Mukamana, Mother Máire Hickey, Sr Genevieve Harrington, Sr Magdalena FitzGibbon, Sr Dorothy Ryan, Sr Mary Jiao
‘… selfhood begins in the walking away
And love is proved in the letting go.’
Cecil Day-Lewis (1904–72)
CHAPTER TWO
THE
