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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
in the midst of changing structures. The majority had entered in the 1950s and 1960s, and have now spent the greater part of their religious lives in a renewed Church. They participated in and negotiated with the modernity of religious life of the post-war secular age. Their life stories, too, have been crucial to my understanding of religious life. Many participants, fifty or sixty years on from their entry into religious life, recalled their early years with its spiritual joy and feelings of stability alongside discomfort about convent traditions which emphasised
used contemporary approaches to tackle vocation recruitment. In a piece that appeared in the British press in the 1960s, the Vocation Sisters were introduced as a ‘modern’ element of the Church. Their ministry was described as transitioning ‘would-be nuns to the life behind the veil’, and ‘selling’ vocations to the public. The article asserted that they ‘act very much like public relations officers, giving talks and film shows, advising, teaching, answering questions and helping girls to acquire a general knowledge of the life of a nun’. 3 They used modern
which the Catholic birth-control debate appears to be closed off, I want to ask whether historicising its emergence in decades after the war could provide an alternative point of entry. Did Pope Paul VI’s rejection of a highly intellectualised, theological case for change in the 1960s close the door to doctrinal change altogether, or did it close only this route to change? Oral history can provide a new way of
advanced, household devotional items became cheaper and more readily available; therefore, children coming of age from 1900 to the 1950s had a greater exposure to these household items than did their nineteenth-century counterparts. Some of the earliest memories of Christina McKenna, who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, situated her girlhood in the midst of the Catholic artefacts of the home: My life only begins to assume definition and colour for me when I turn four. I am standing on the kitchen floor, looking up at three pictures on a wall: the Sacred Heart with its
continuities that characterised their religious lives. Girls and education In her study featuring oral history interviews with Irish nuns who came of age between the 1910s and 1960s, Yvonne McKenna remarks on the centrality of religion to their childhoods: By their own admission, the women grew up surrounded by Catholicism: at home, at school, in society. Ireland was experiencing, as Aisling put it, ‘a great age of faith’ during the time she grew up. Clearly, the women’s Catholicism was important in their young lives. Catholicism ‘meant everything’ to Elaine and May, was
peak of Marianism in Ireland much later – from 1930 to the 1960s – with a late twentieth-century decline.7 Although it ebbed and flowed, Irish people’s veneration of the Virgin persisted across a century or more; this is significant for our understanding of the meanings of Irish motherhood. Through Marian belief, devotion, and apparitions, Irish Catholics constructed, worked through, and complicated prescriptions of motherhood and women’s roles. Marian devotion was already on the rise several decades before the Knock event. The French Lourdes apparition (1858) had
the 1960s and 1970s overlooked special acts of worship because such supposedly British imports and old-world survivals sat awkwardly with what Mark McKenna has called the ‘new narratives of nationhood’ that framed much Australian historical writing. 49 More recent social and political developments have also not been conducive to research on colonial special worship. The old foundation celebrations have lost appeal, 50 and indigenous communities and other marginalised groups have, with justification, derided other national
drawing on the hasidism to creatively reformulate Jewish spirituality for the Westernized Jewish masses (Persico 2014 ; Biale 2017 , 556–574) demonstrated the same tendency, it was most radically exemplified by followers of R. Yehudah Ashlag (1885–1954). Starting in the early 1940s with figures like Levi Yitshak Krakovsky (Meir 2013 ), but gathering momentum during the 1960s and 1970s with the founding of the Kabbalah Center under the leadership of R. Phillip Berg, a modified and simplified version of Ashlagian teachings was brought to the general public (Myers 2007