When Queen Victoria’s royal yacht sailed past south County Dublin in August 1849, on the first of her four visits to Ireland, the pupils and nuns of the Loreto convent in Dalkey lined out on the building’s terrace, opposite the seafront. Dressed in ceremonial veils and/or sashes, the nuns and pupils sang ‘God Save the Queen’ as the abbey bells rang. A half century later, in April 1900, when the elderly and frail Victoria visited Ireland for the fourth and last time, she kept her engagements to a minimum; however, among these was a visit to the Loreto Abbey in Rathfarnham in south County Dublin, where the school orchestra played ‘God Save the Queen’. The gestures of loyalty expressed by the Loreto community was symptomatic of the benevolent sentiments held by the Catholic middle classes—the social grouping providing Teresa Ball’s community with its pupils and postulants—towards the monarchy, and have been well explored by historians such as James H. Murphy (Abject Loyalty: Nationalism and Monarchy in Ireland During the Reign of Queen Victoria (Catholic University of America Press, 2001)) and Ciarán O’Neill (Catholics of Consequence: Transnational Education, Social Mobility, and the Irish Catholic Elite 1850-1900 (Oxford University Press, 2016)). Deirdre Raftery argues convincingly, in this new book, that the monarch’s visit in 1900 served not only as a gesture to the Catholic middle classes but, significantly, to recognise ‘the place that the Loreto order had come to hold in education, in several parts of the empire’. The author adds: ‘Several members of the royal family, including Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, visited Loreto convents in the colonies, while making official tours’ (p. 116). This vignette serves to illustrate the unique contribution made by Raftery’s volume, in exploring the role of the Loreto convents within a colonial context. As well as celebrating the monarchy, and wholeheartedly hosting visits by members of the aristocracy, the Loreto schools welcomed as boarders students from families posted in the colonies. Furthermore, Ball oversaw the extension of the Loreto community into the colonies, beginning with the foundation of a Loreto convent in India in 1841; by the time of Ball’s death twenty years later, convents were established in Canada, Mauritius and Gibraltar, among other locations: all of these overseas foundations were governed by the ‘mother house’ in Rathfarnham.
Teresa Ball and Loreto Education is arranged thematically, yet there is also a chronological spine running through the book: the early chapters contextualise Ball’s early family life in Georgian Dublin, its wealth and influence, and how this shaped Ball’s subsequent endeavours, before exploring the foundress’s education and training at the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary at the Bar Convent in York, leading ultimately to her foundation of the Loreto community in Ireland in 1821. The later chapters most stridently locate the Loreto project within a colonial context and conclude with Ball’s death in 1861. The extent of engagement with the community’s archives, across Ireland, Britain, Italy, Canada and Australia, is impressive, with the primary research being based largely on ‘in-house’ records of the community. Non-experts in the field of the history of female religious will find the glossary of key terms helpful.
The world of the Catholic middle classes that emerged so prominently in the Irish public sphere in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has been explored before, beginning with the work of Maureen Wall in the mid-twentieth century. The outline is well known: from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, there emerged in Ireland a rising middle class of propertied, wealthy Catholics, increasingly demanding greater participation in the civic sphere and access to public office, in response to the gradual waning of the penal laws. Such persons were also crucial to the increasing attention being paid within the Irish Catholic church to devotional practices, as evinced in the growth of confraternities, sodalities and charities, and outward assertions of piety and influence, as seen by the extensive church-building programme from the second quarter of the nineteenth century. From this social class emerged the founders and foundresses of the many new communities of female and male religious in the post-penal era. The Balls were a case in point, although constituting perhaps a notably extreme example of a particularly well-connected family within the Catholic world not only in Ireland but throughout these islands and, indeed, throughout the global Catholic world. John Ball, Teresa’s father, was a wealthy merchant, whose social circles included professionals and archbishops; his son, Nicholas, was educated at Stonyhurst and became only the second Catholic since the reign of James II to serve as a judge of the court of common plea in Ireland. His daughter Anna Maria married John O’Brien, from a wealthy merchant family, and was instrumental in numerous philanthropic initiatives in Dublin, most notably the early development of the Religious Sisters of Charity by her close friend Mary Aikenhead and that congregation’s establishment of St Vincent’s Hospital (1834). Another daughter, Cecilia (Mother Regis), served as the superior of an Ursuline convent in Cork. Furthermore, the Balls had a family vault in the newly-consecrated Pro-Cathedral in Dublin. Crucial to this social world of wealthy and influential Catholics was the establishment of new communities of female and male religious. Underpinning the establishment and sustenance of these communities and their various institutions—not only convents but also schools, orphanages, welfare asylums and hospitals — were the networks of family and friends who provided moral, organisational and financial support. The significance of these networks have been long acknowledged in the historiography, for instance in the works of Caitriona Clear, Maria Luddy and Jacinta Prunty, yet Raftery’s fresh consideration of the wider imperial context expands the historiographical focus in respect of these social networks.
Frances Ball (1794–1861), who took Teresa as her name in religion, was unquestionably a formidable character and a driven organiser, traits shared with the other pioneering women who established and led other communities of female religious in this period: Nano Nagle (Presentation Sisters); Teresa Mulally; Mary Aikenhead (Religious Sisters of Charity); Catherine McAuley (Sisters of Mercy); and Margaret Aylward (Holy Faith Sisters), to name but a few. Ball, who was educated by the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary at the Bar Convent in York, where she would later make her novitiate, established the Loreto order—with the primary aim of educating the daughters of the Catholic middle and upper classes—and oversaw the foundation of thirty-seven Loreto houses in seven countries during her lifetime. It is striking that despite the Loreto community’s emphasis on schooling for the wealthier elements of Catholic society, Ball was ‘an emphatic supporter’ of free schooling for girls, with free schools for poor children attached to Loreto day and boarding schools (p. 14). Raftery correctly notes the significance of Daniel Murray, the Catholic archbishop of Dublin between 1823 and 1852, and his role in supporting the establishment of new communities of female religious: Murray played central roles in the establishment of the Sisters of Charity, the Sisters of Mercy and the Loreto order, as well as bringing the Christian Brothers to Dublin. However, Raftery is careful to note that Ball, ‘an exceptional leader, and an able financial manager’ (p. 14), was given the opportunity by Murray to personally direct the growth of her community without his episcopal interference.
There are a small number of issues which may frustrate the scholarly reader, such as the shortened footnotes (upon instances of first reference) and the structure of the bibliography, but these constitute minor quibbles. All in all, this is a valuable text, bringing a unique contribution to the increasingly vibrant field of the history of female religious.
