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Seeing ourselves as citizens of the world helps us to relatavise [ sic ] our own situation, since it is part of a much bigger whole. 1 Sister M. Philip (née Elizabeth) Rendall’s worldview changed sometime in the late 1960s. She began transitioning from her local, teaching-centred ministry to a global ministry ignited by her passion for justice. Born in London in 1924, she attended St Angela’s Ursuline Convent School at Forest Gate. She entered the Ursulines, aged eighteen, a few years before the Second World War began. After her novitiate training, she
decline in the ‘Global North’ (and increase in the ‘Global South’), they continue to attract media attention, though almost always as ‘other’. Since the 1950s, a profusion of books has been published in Britain and Ireland and elsewhere recounting personal experiences by nuns and about nuns. The genre of ‘nuns talking’ presents a disparate range of experiences. In Britain, Karen Armstrong’s gripping and widely cited 1960s memoir explores a complex young woman’s experience of a stifling convent regime and her eventual exodus. 3 Sister Giles’ story of parting is
the heart of Margaret’s story of religious change. She identified a ‘sexual revolution’ as the key historical development which let the ‘cork out of the bottle’ on her Catholic faith. In this sense, Margaret’s personal life story chimed with a dominant narrative of collective post-war change. The idea that a process of ‘sexual liberation’ in the 1960s destroyed Britain’s Christian culture has become a
existing knowledge, how did Catholic authorities attempt to measure, interrogate and understand this experience in the 1960s? What intellectual tools and apparatus were used to construct the Church’s image of sexuality, particularly female sexuality, and what can these tools tell us about both Catholic and secular notions of the personal at this historical moment? This chapter addresses these questions
adolescence and the eventual religious belief system taken up in adulthood. Attributing a Catholic woman’s eventual ‘orthodox’ or ‘liberal’ Catholic identity, or any other aspect of their beliefs, to their sexual education is therefore misleading. The middle of the 1960s witnessed a sudden proliferation of Catholic sexual education initiatives (a little too late for most of the interviewees). Catholic schools
sexual encounter was an increasingly rare phenomenon amongst young Catholic couples in 1960s Britain. This was, in part, a consequence of wider societal shifts in sexual culture, including a ‘democratisation’ of sexual knowledge described by the likes of Lesley Hall and Roy Porter, but also a direct response to the rapid expansion of specifically Catholic marriage preparation initiatives. 2 Although the
explicit rejection of women’s roles at home. One woman who left for America in the 1950s later recalled: ‘America 238 irish women seemed to be offering the golden opportunities … [to] become a whole person’.3 With the advent first of radio and then of television in the 1960s, secular European and American culture and values inundated Ireland. At the same time, Marianism, as Donnelly argues, declined sharply; the rosary devotion ceased in many areas.4 By the late 1960s, Vatican II shook Irish Catholic traditionalists, who also perceived that their faith was under
religious life were leading to the ‘emancipation’ of women religious. But did she consider that a good thing? Speaking to novice mistresses on a training day in the early 1960s, she underscored the difficulties that women religious faced, inside and outside the convent and in the ‘critical eyes of the world’. Disparaging female religious who were ignorant of world problems, she instead expected them to be aware of the major ‘crisis of their times’: atomic weapons, strike mentality, ‘atheistic communism’ and the break-up of family life. At the same time she regretted the
cleaving between personal Catholic religiosities and the processes of the body represented a significant contraction in the ethical territory occupied by Catholic beliefs. The Catholic Church made its bed in the 1960s – of those who continue to lie in this bed, few chose to have sex in it. Certain historians have been eager to dismiss any conclusions that faintly hint at the ‘secularisation thesis’, but
pre-conciliar life-giving relationship memories. The majority of the women interviewed for this project entered in the 1950s and 1960s, so while they experienced the shift to the relational, they were less embedded in the formalism of the past. Remembered memories have been mediated through subsequent life events, but also a canon of published theological and personal critique of religious life, and years of meetings and retreats often informed or convened by psychoanalysts and sociologists addressing the relational chaos in some communities. Few sisters and nuns