This is the history of the Sisters from Ireland
who came to the United States to become women religious in the Congregation of the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Scranton, Pennsylvania. The story begins for the IHMs in 1872, one year after the creation of the Catholic Diocese of Scranton, Pennsylvania in 1871. Actually, however, it has a context that parallels the history of Ireland itself and dates back to 1695 when the English conquered all of Ireland and inflicted the Penal Laws on the Irish people.
These laws stripped Catholics of most of their property and gave them a second-class status so that a Protestant could use the courts to simply take anything, like a house or a horse from a Catholic. John Fialka, in his book entitled Sisters: Catholic Nuns and the Making of America describes the results of the Penal Laws in these words:
Catholics were not allowed to hold public office, to bear arms or to enter a profession. Priests were hunted, threatened with castration, jailed and sometimes executed...
Ireland, to the European observer, was a place of mean streets and mud shanties; a land where a majority eked out a living tilling tiny rented plots and where wealth was counted in potatoes, or, for the more fortunate, pigs. (1)
It seems that the goal of the drafters of the Penal Laws was to force all Catholics to become Protestants. Fialka states further:
A Catholic who attempted to privately educate his children faced confiscation of his remaining property, but he could send them to state-sponsored schools, where the curriculum was designed to make them
Protestants. Upon becoming a Protestant, the eldest son in a family gained the right to take over its management. Thus he could dispose of his father’s property against his will. The end result was an even deeper poverty as Catholics shunned schools and took their religion into an underground...(2)
It is not surprising then that a survey taken in 1861 found that only 29 percent of Catholics in Ireland could read or write, as compared with 59 percent of Protestants.
Ireland’s history is one of struggle for independence from Great Britain’s domination. It was not always a Protestant versus Catholic struggle, for there were members of both religious groups who were together in opposing the British government either as Nationalists, as Unionists, or those desiring the maximum, an Irish Free State.
Ireland, even in the 1920s, was far from a peaceful place. The independent Irish Republic, declared in 1916 by the Easter Rising, was overcome by the British army, but rose up again in 1919 as the Sinn Fein set up its own Irish parliament in Dublin.
This was the time of the origin of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) attempting to forward the cause of Ireland’s independence from the British, and to save Ireland from the British terror forces known as the Black and Tans. The IRAs response to the burning of their villages, farms and factories by the British troops was to call for railroad and dock strikes among the Irish working class, as well as to stage ambush-style murders.
One newspaper described the situation in Ireland in these words:
Step by step, the economic life of the country is being destroyed. Between September 1919 and September 1920, 90 villages and country towns were shot up, and in many cases completely wrecked.
Between June 1920 and October 1920, 30 creameries were destroyed. Over large areas brickyards have been set on fire by the forces of the crown. The destruction of the hay makes the winterfeeding of cattle impossible. Even rich rural areas are threatened with starvation. (3) |
