Sarah Gilbert’s account of this religious order offers a rare insight into the women who chose to separate themselves from the world.
In the 1950s and 60s, eight young women left their families to join an enclosed order of nuns in Melbourne. Gilbert’s book explores why these young women left the wider world to enter a life that, to many outsiders, severely limited their freedom to think, speak, and interact with others.
They could leave the convent only for medical appointments and rarely received visitors, who they spoke to from behind a partition built into the parlour. They lived under the strict dictates of the Mother Superior, the rhythms of the Divine Office, and their movements were confined by the convent walls. The personal accounts of the eight nuns and ex-nuns are unusually candid, giving a rare insight into the world of the convent, and their changing relationship with both God and the world.
Gilbert recorded oral histories of the women, and her book captures the family and cultural contexts that give depth to their motivations to join the enclosed order of the Blessed Sacrament Sisters and their yearning to live close to God, to create a better world by serving humanity through prayer, sacrament and service. She listens to the women, sensitive to their highly individual and sometimes painful experiences. One, Marie Grunke, unmarried and pregnant at 21, moved to New Zealand to give birth, where, under great pressure, and in anguish, she relinquished her son, Michael, for adoption. She joined the Order, and for 25 years could not share with anyone what must have been the most significant event of her life. We learn that years later Marie reconnected with her son, who became part of her life.
The Author’s Prologue provides a thoughtful and well-researched historical and sociological background to female Catholic religious orders from the early days of Christianity to modern times, and the traditions and historical upheavals which shaped their directions over the years, giving a rich context to the very personal stories of the eight women who are the subjects of this book.
These women’s lives, though, are part of a much longer story, one that began about two thousand years ago, when [according to the Bible] Jesus gathered his disciples around him. Among these were several women, and the Gospels attest to their central role in Jesus’s story and ministry – a role that ran counter to the one assigned them by Jewish society [and Roman Law and custom] at the time … These women were the foremothers of those who would come to be known as nuns. Whether they were wives who lived apart from their husbands, ‘repentant prostitutes’, young married women or widows … they all took a vow of chastity. Chastity offered an alternative to a life of wifedom and motherhood, giving women who chose it the independence and authority to pursue a spiritual life.
Gilbert takes us through the women’s lives from the day they enter the convent in the mid to late 1950s to the first two decades of the twenty-first century when the Order was disbanded.
We learn how the reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the late 1960s upended this community, throwing open the convent’s doors on a wider world in which, by then, these women were eager to participate.
When moved to start a contemplative order in Redfern in the late 1970s, an area with a significant Aboriginal community, we learn of the close, trusting relations the nuns formed with First Nations residents; of the work they did with Father Ted Kennedy and Mum Shirl, a prominent Wiradjuri woman and social worker whose work especially focused on helping Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders through the criminal justice system when arrested.
Some of the most tender parts of this book describe the ageing of the sisters as their numbers reduce through death and choices to follow other paths. One, Jill Thomas, married, and with her husband adopted and raised two children and struggled with poverty when unable to find work. Another, Barbara Fingleton, moved in with her sister Mercia, who had also left her order of nuns. Barbara continued to attend Mass on Sundays and found contentment in life with Mercia as both were mystics who had experienced revelatory spiritual moments in their childhood.
Some of the women spoke of retaining an awareness of God’s presence in their lives as strong as when they first entered the convent as young women, but it was freer and more flowing now they were released from the rules and strictures of the established church. All communicated an enduring sense of self, of confidence in who they were and belief that God’s presence lived on for them through family, friends, communities and their love of and delight in the world of nature.
Sarah Gilbert Unconventional Women: The story of the last Blessed Sacrament Sisters in Australia Melbourne University Press 2024 PB 304pp $39.99
Suzanne Marks is an active member of the Jessie Street National Women’s Library and the Sydney University Chancellor’s Committee. Her professional life has been in equity, human rights, teaching and conflict resolution.
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Tags: Australian religious history, Blesssed Sacrament Sisters, convents, enclosed orders, Father Ted Kennedy, history, Mum Shirl, nuns, religious orders, Second Vatican Council
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