Sr. Brendan Lacey OLM (1906-2013)

 

The modern motherhouse of the Sisters of Charity of Our Lady of Mercy is ‘May Forest’, located in a 25-acre sylvan enclave on James Island, just across the Ashley River from the city of Charleston, South Carolina. 

    This unique sisterhood, established by a youthful and charismatic Irish-born bishop in 1829, depended from its foundation on the goodwill and self-sacrifice of Irish-born aspirants, three of whom were among the founding group of four who came via Baltimore to Charleston at John England’s urging. 

    It was at May Forest, almost two hundred years after the order's foundation, that Sr. Brendan Lacey, the last of its Irish-born members, died in 2013 at the age of 105.

    Sr. Brendan‘s story begins in Lisbigney Lane near the village of Ballinakill, in Co. Laois (then known as Queen’s County) in 1908. As Elizabeth Lacey, she was the second-eldest in a family of seven that produced two other nuns (both members of the Order of the Good Shepherd, who trained in France and ministered in India), a sister who settled and married in England, and a sister and two brothers who remained in Ireland.

    Her father died when Elizabeth (or ‘Nin’ as she was known to family and friends) was eight, and her mother, a member of the O‘Toole family from Ballyouskill, now had the task of raising a young family of seven.

    The oldest Lacey daughter Margaret, having completed her primary education, became an assistant in Staunton's of Ballyragget, then a thriving commercial establishment (combining grocery and hardware stores, public house or tavern and agricultural produce and supplies trading operation). Margaret later married a young man from Freshford named John Clifford, and they settled in Ballyragget, operating a well-known public house and grocery in The Square.

    Elizabeth felt that she was called to a different life, and in the manner of the time 'arrangements' were put in hand. She went first to the Sisters of Mercy in Ballyragget, who divined a missionary dimension to her calling, and recommended that she consider entering the missionary college at their sister house in Callan.

    The townland of Lisbigney is within a mile or so of the Laois-Kilkenny county border, and just within the diocesan boundaries of the Catholic Diocese of Kildare and Leighlin.

    Just down the road, in the neighboring Diocese of Ossory, is the holy shrine of Ladywell, and a few miles further on is the site of the ancient monastic foundation of Rosconnell, both in the chapel district of Ballyouskill and the parish of Ballyragget.

    During the late 19th. and early 20th. centuries, this was an area rich in religious vocations. The influences were many - a vibrant faith, local and family traditions, devoted and determined parents, economic or educational necessity, connections with specific orders and institutions, the example of neighbors or local clergy.

    Another influence was the existence of ecclesiastical colleges in the region such as St. Kieran's in Kilkenny, St. Patrick's in Carlow and St. Patrick’s in Thurles, all of which prepared young men for priestly missions in the English-speaking world. 

    The missionary orders - Holy Ghost, Columban, St. Patrick's (Kiltegan) - also had many local contacts through their outreach and questing activities.

    And finally there were the ‘post-monastic’ orders such as the Franciscans and Augustinians and the many orders of priests, brothers and nuns who had foundations in the principal towns, including the Presentation Sisters in Durrow, the Brigidine Sisters and Presentation Brothers in Abbeyleix, and the Salesian Fathers, who ran a preparatory secondary (high) school for boys in Ballinakill itself. 

    But even within this network of influential institutions, the Missionary College at Callan, in Co. Kilkenny was different. An offshoot of an 1872 Sisters of Mercy foundation (which still exists, operating thriving primary (elementary) and secondary schools in the town), it provided a general preparatory course for young women who were considering religious life but who had often not yet decided on a location or an order. Established in 1884, it continued in existence until 1959, having graduated over two thousands aspirants to consecrated religious life in that time.

    The year 1922, when Elizabeth Lacey began the journey that would take her to Charleston, South Carolina, was a troubled time in Ireland. In an interesting contrast with the southern U.S. of sixty years before, a bitter Civil War was in progress.

    On the day that the Laceys – mother and daughter –  left Lisbigney for Callan, the train they took from Attanagh station stopped at Ballyragget, a few miles down the line, and would go no further - there was an obstruction, or the threat of same, somewhere between there and Kilkenny.

    The Laceys went to Staunton’s store to await developments. With no further news by the afternoon it was suggested that the fourteen-year-old Elizabeth go to the local Mercy convent to say good-bye and thank the sisters for their assistance.

    In the convent hallway, she was greeted by two visiting sisters who began a conversation with her about her background and plans. They were natives of Mayo but had become members of an American order of sisters and were now back in Ireland recruiting new members.

    Almost eighty years later, sitting in the mother house of the same order, Sr. Brendan Lacey (who took the name of the Irish saint and early Atlantic explorer when she made her religious vows) describes that fateful conversation in very informal terms.

    She had no great expectations, she explains; she was ‘waiting to get hitched’ with any religious order that would take her. The Charleston sisters did not make any extravagant promises; they told her simply ‘you'll do well with us’.

    She needed no further urging. Grasping the providential nature of the encounter, she told them she would join the Sisters of Charity of Our Lady of Mercy in South Carolina when her preparatory course was completed in two years.

    In Callan she was heartened by the presence of others who were similarly bound: Annie Harte (still a member of the mother-house community) and Nellie Hogan, both from Tipperary.

    A little over two years later she was ready for her new mission - she remembers the Atlantic crossing vividly (on the liner ‘Celtic’) and the trip from New York down the coast to Charleston Wharf on a ship of Clyde Mallory Lines.

    She and her companions met at the quay by sisters from the mother house of the order, then a short distance across the historic city. The Legare (pronounced ‘legree’) Street convent alongside the Catholic cathedral had one hundred sisters in residence, over a quarter of them Irish, and many with origins and names familiar to Sr. Brendan. In particular she remembers Srs. Imelda and Regina Bergin from Castlecomer, who had come out to the United States some years earlier.

    In the novitiate of about a dozen novices, a good proportion were Irish-born – in fact, four had come to Charleston from Ireland the year before. In addition, the discipline was a little more relaxed than in Callan, so the settling in to a new location and a new climate was not as difficult as it might have been.

    The work of the Sisters was mainly in health care and education. Education was the priority in the early years of the order, when nursing was not yet established as a profession, and the idea of women ministering to men was not generally accepted, particularly in the southern United States. But the experiences of the sisters in the yellow fever epidemic of the 1850s and the Civil War a decade later prepared the way for a new missionary undertaking.

     (It is interesting to note that the U.S. government was so appreciative of the sisters’ role in nursing the injured of both sides in the Civil War that they gave them $20000. One of the most prominent if the nursing sisters was Kilkenny-born Sr. de Sales – nee Agnes – Brennan, who had set up a hospital at White Sulphur Springs).

    The first hospital building operated by the sisters in Charleston was completed in 1882 with money from the sale of a house donated to the order by a Miss McHugh for use as a school (Sr. Xavier Dunne, the then superior, had persuaded the donor that a hospital was needed more). The two-storey wooden-framed building on Calhoun Street had fifteen beds and, history relates, a horse-drawn ambulance wagon. Five sister-nurses and two surgeons were in attendance, although the sisters also taught piano and painted china for a little additional income to help meet expenses.    

    Within ten years, St. Francis Xavier Infirmary was operating at capacity and a new building was added, with two wards, an operating theatre and twenty private rooms with baths. Since many of those treated in the new facilities were military patients returning from the Spanish American War (one of the wards was known as 'The Marine Ward').

    Charleston was now approaching 50,000 in population, and was growing as a busy port city. St. Francis Xavier was determined to grow with it. 

    In 1900 a nursing school was established, and twelve years later the second substantial addition was commissioned - an 18-bed ward with a second operating theatre, a dining area and a chapel. 

    As Sr. Brendan Lacey disembarked at Charleston Port less than a decade later, plans were being made by the order for a complete re-organisation of their health-care facilities on the Calhoun Street site. 

    Two years later, in 1926, the new St. Francis Xavier Infirmary opened. It had 48 beds on three floors, with all the modern support facilities of the period. The oldest hospital building became the home of the nursing school, with administrative offices and some residential facilities for nurses and sisters.

    It was here that Sr. Brendan Lacey trained as a nurse in the years 1928-31, having completed her novitiate. “It was a straightforward nursing course,” she says; “it provided no advancement intellectually. But later I was able to do summer courses in St. Louis and then in the early 1950s I did a two-year nursing degree course at Mount St. Joseph Hospital in Ohio.”

    Sr. Brendan's Charleston assignment was to last for almost thirty years. During that time she saw the hospital expand dramatically as Charleston's population grew towards the 100,000 mark. In 1942 a new addition more than doubled the number of beds to 104, and in 1951 St. Francis Xavier Infirmary officially became St. Francis Xavier Hospital.

    In 1960, Sr. Brendan was assigned to the Divine Saviour Hospital in York, a community in the north-east of the state of South Carolina. This facility had been established by the Sisters of Charity of Our Lady of Mercy in 1938 and had a general hospital with fifty beds and a nursing home of the same size. The community of ten sisters included some who had retired.

    After only a year in York, Sr. Brendan answered a call for a sister to take charge of the City Orphanage back in Charleston. The orphanage had been an early mission of the sisters and was located in a building near the convent in the vicinity of the Cathedral, where the schools established by the order were also sited.

    As matron of the orphanage, Sr. Brendan was responsible for the care of up to 30 young people of all backgrounds. She filled the position for three years, returning to York in 1964.

    York was where she was to spend the rest of her nursing career. “I was happy there, and I got involved in the life of the parish. A new church was being built and was opened in 1966. Later they planned to add a parish hall, and I helped with the spaghetti dinners they organised to raise funds. I also sold tickets for raffles — I would even go out on the streets and ask complete strangers to buy some."

    By the time the new hall was completed in 1994, Sr. Brendan had retired and the hospital was no longer in the charge of the Sisters of Charity of Our Lady of Mercy (now also known informally by their abbreviated initials OLM). But the York parish hall is called Brendan Hall to reflect her great contribution to its funding. She dismisses the honor. “There were so many people who had contributed more than I did, and they didn't want to offend any of them by picking one above the others. So I suppose they thought no-one would complain if they named it after a nun!.”

    With the York community on the point of dispersal, Sr. Brendan had a choice to make. That choice would be influenced not just by her own discernment and the concerns of her superiors, but also by the many changes that had taken place in the other locations and activities of the order.

    The James Island motherhouse, where most of the order’s retired sisters live, was completed in 1975 and is more than ten miles from the original downtown location of the order (the Legare Street property alongside the Cathedral was sold, and the site has been cleared and redeveloped as town houses). 

    St. Francis Xavier Hospital, which had continued to expand in the 1960s and 1970s with the addition of over 120 beds, no longer had a significant OLM presence and would eventually come under the management of the Bons Secours order and move from its centre-city site to a new location in the suburb of West Ashley. The last member of the order to be involved there was Sr. Catherine McAuliffe, who was a pastoral visitor to the sick. She died in 2001.

    The other ministries of the order were also changing. The orphanage had closed. The original Cathedral School administered by the sisters had gone through a number of formats and locations, eventually becoming Charleston Catholic School, supervised by another order of nuns. 

    Schools in Mount Pleasant, adjacent to Charleston, and in other prominent South Carolina towns such as Aiken, Greenville and Summerville continued to be administered by the sisters into the late 1990s, but only Mount Pleasant had a sister in a school principal position at the end of the era and as in other instances the sisters there have by now transferred to parish administration or social work in the parishes they had served as teachers.

    Other members of the order were carrying out ministries to the aged and the poor, some living in facilities related to their mission, but returning to the mother-house to greet colleagues and take part in the life of the order on special occasions.

    Of the dispersing York community, a small number planned to set up residence in an apartment in Mauldin, near Greenville, where one of the sisters was acting as a parish administrator. Hearing the discussion, Sr. Brendan was interested in the possibility of living in a small community with parish involvement.

    "I wanted to keep going, being out and about. I thought that if I went into a retirement community, I would die of boredom," she says.

    Sr. Brendan spent most of the next decade spent as a member of a community of three in the Mauldin apartment. She was involved in some of the ministries of the parish and loved to meet and greet people at parish functions. 

    She worked closely with others who had similar views on retirement to her own. One was Edmond Filliette, a gentleman of French background who had founded with his wife Edith a society dedicated to the promotion of devotion to St. Mary Magdalene. Edith had written a book on the saint in 1983, and the couple moved to South Carolina in 1986. In 1988 Edith died but Edmond continued the work and Sr. Brendan assisted him, traveling to his home daily to handle correspondence and the distribution of devotional materials. 

    Another was  Fr. John O'Holohan, an Irish-born Jesuit, former Classics teacher at Belvedere College in Dublin, and long-time African missionary, who had with native roots in the same Irish county as Sr. Brendan. He had lived in retirement in Florida for a number of years, and was now delighted to be back in parish work in the Mauldin area. Sr. Brendan assisted him with some of his promotional work, and they continue to be in regular contact (Fr. O’Holohan was an active pastor with responsibility for two rural parishes and a mission station in central South Carolina until he retired to Ireland in his mid-eighties).

    In the early years of the new millennium, the small OLM community at Mauldin had to face some of the realities that advancing age and ill-health bring with them, and a decision was made for all three sisters to return to the motherhouse. By then Sr. Brendan, though still mobile, was in a better position to appreciate the advantages of professional care, and she was able to settle in to life in the larger community with comparative ease.

    She participated in all of the liturgical and social activities of the community, and was involved in an exercise set by the general superior of the order, Sr. Bridget Sullivan, to plan a new community. Sr. Brendan made her contribution based on all she has experiences and learned down through the years. ‘I knew it was just an exercise,’ she says, ‘but it was a wonderful way to keep the mind active.’

    Sr. Brendan Lacey has a unique significance as the longest-living survivor of an unusual tradition that links the Kilkenny area to Charleston through the Mission House in Callan. She is also a link with the many young Irish girls, a good proportion of them from her own native region, who have served the Sisters of Charity of Our Lady of  Mercy since its foundation over 175 years ago.

    Amazingly, her contribution covers almost half of that time span. And even though her ministry was carried out in more subdued times, she has continued the work of pioneers such as Sr. de Sales Brennan in more turbulent times.

     In the meantime, she had been back to Ireland on ten different occasions, the last in 1986. By that time most of her immediate family had died, but she was in contact with her nieces and nephews and can still recite all of their names and family connections (the Lawlesses and Healys in Ballyragget, and the Alleys in Dundrum, Co. Tipperary).

    Her sister Bridie worked in India for more than fifty years as a Good Shepherd Sister (known in religion Sr. Brigid) and died in 1983 (in an amazing co-incidence, her niece Judy Lawless was on a Scandinavian tour when she met the doctor who had tried to save Bridie's life). A second sister Josephine, who like her sister entered the Good Shepherd order at Angers in France, died as a young nun on the Indian mission in 1941. The remaining Lacey sibling, Mary (Molly), who emigrated to England and married there, also died young (Molly's grandson now lives in New Jersey and has visited Sr. Brendan in Charleston).

    Both of Sr. Brendan’s brothers remained at home until after their mother died in 1965, when the elder, Bill, moved to Dublin to work on the farm at High Park Convent in Drumcondra. He was killed a few years later in a traffic accident.

    Jim, the youngest of the family, married Bridie Grace of Grennan and he was the last of the immediate Lacey family in that area when he died in 1991. The former Lacey cottage on Lisbigney Hill is no longer inhabited.

     She was contented to be in the warm caring atmosphere half a world away from her native land. “I don’t miss it. This is my home now.” she said. How has she lived so long? “Well, I was always interested in people. Wherever I found myself I always made it my business to talk to people and learn from them. That’s what has kept me alive!”

 

Based on an interview with Sr. Brendan conducted by Denis Bergin in 2010.