THERE WILL always be a place for men and women religious in Irish life, even as their numbers decline at the rate of 4 per cent a year, Sr Marianne O’Connor, director general of Cori (Conference of Religious of Ireland), has said.“There will always be some people who will want to lead a life that will enable them, because of community support, because of opportunities for prayer, to develop their relationship with God,” she said.
It was a theme addressed by many speakers at the weekend conference held to mark Cori’s 50th anniversary.
Sr O’Connor said she did not think we would see again “what we saw in the last century, the large numbers of religious, the big institutions”. Historically “you will find that was a blip because at the beginning of the 18th century there were 200 nuns in Ireland. At the the end of the 19th century there were something like 20,000.
“It was kind of unreal. It also paralleled a time when we hadn’t anything much in Ireland, and particularly in education and health. There was such need.
“A lot of congregations were actually founded to address those needs at that time. Some go back further.”
She believed that “religious will still find, as they are finding now, niches that the State doesn’t address, the homeless, the addicted, the marginalised, the left out, the need for prayer, the need for space, the need for a pause in this frantic time. I think that’s where we’ll be.”
There was “still a need for us to get back to the love of our lives and to share that with other people. Everybody who has a belief in God wants in some way at their deepest being to be in touch with that God.”
Asked how the other 99 Cori congregations felt about those 18 investigated by the Ryan report, she said “we feel very sad. We feel deeply empathetic, because all those in leadership, and the vast majority of membership of those congregations at the moment,didn’t have hand act or part in anything.”
But “we certainly would have felt tainted by association. It’s not an easy time to be in religious life at the moment.”
On the apostolic visitation announced by Pope Benedict XVI in his pastoral letter to the Catholics of Ireland, she said “our fear is that it implies investigation and that implies something is wrong”.
She was not saying everything was right, but she hoped it would be “a mutual conversation between ourselves and the Congregation [in Rome]”.
She would feel “very bad” if it was anything like the current apostolic visitation where women religious in the United States are concerned.
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