Celebrating an inspirational Cork nun, born 100 years ago

I’D say it must be about 60 years ago since I first visited the Poor Clare Monastery at College Road, Cork.

Mam used often visit the Poor Clares if she was in Cork. I have a faint memory of her taking in parcels of tea to the Sisters. I was a bit overawed because I couldn’t quite grasp the idea of a ‘Closed Order’.

As a child on trips to Fermoy, we often met nuns from the Loretto and Presentation Orders and we had cousins who were nuns in different parts of the world - there was always great excitement and getting ready when one of them would visit when on holidays.

Mam explained that the Poor Clare sisters prayed for most of the day and stayed behind a grill. They could meet visitors in their parlour but a metal or timber lattice-type structure was always between the visitor and the Sister.

I suppose one prayer is as good as the rest, but when Mam wanted special prayers for sick relations or for those going for surgery, it meant a trip to College Road.

Vows of poverty, chastity and obedience as well as enclosure are the basic traits or foundation stones of those who are followers of St Clare of Assisi in the footsteps of St Francis of the same town in Italy.

It wasn’t until 2007 that I again set foot in a Poor Clare Monastery - not on College Road Cork but at the foot of the Pyrenees in Lourdes.

Born in 195,7 I celebrated my 50th birthday that year. It wasn’t that I wanted to mark half a century on this mortal coil in a very special way, but in May of that year I decided, on a whim, to go back to visit Lourdes after an absence of 36 years.

Each of the five Arnold children were brought to Lourdes in successive years by Mam as youngsters in the late 1960s and early ’70s.

Arriving in Lourdes in June, 2007, I didn’t know what to expect. In truth, it wasn’t like the U2 hit I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For - no, I didn’t go seeking something, simply to quell my curiosity.

What did I find? Oh lads, that’s the million euro question that I’m still trying to answer! Suffice to say, I’ve been back 25 times since!

In 2007, it was all so new and novel and awe-full for me, but I absorbed the Lourdes story as best I could.

Many of my fellow travellers back then spoke about going to visit ‘the Irish nun’ in the Poor Clares. The way they spoke I knew she was someone special -pilgrims nearly needed an ‘appointment’ to meet her in the Convent on Rue de Grotte because everyone knew her. Afterwards, they’d be laughing and smiling recalling their uplifting visits.

So, in 2008, I met Sister Therese Marie O’Connell for the first time. She was glad to meet me and told me her story - she must have recounted the same narrative to thousands.

Born in Mallow, her family moved to Parnell Place in Cork in the late 1920s. She worked in different jobs in her 20s and 30s. She first visited Lourdes in 1957 - the year I was born - and worked in a souvenir shop.

She told me she had no idea in the world about becoming a nun of any sort. 

“Then I heard a voice in my head, not upsetting or anything like that, just something telling me to visit the Poor Clares. I was 35 when I came here - just for a look - and I’ve never left!”

Hers was truly a remarkable story. She decided to join the contemplative Order and in April, 1960, she took her Final Vows. 

The only Irish girl in a community that had over 40 nuns at one stage.

She had fluent French, which she spoke with a perfect accent, but when she spoke in Cork English - well, you might as well be walking down Pana or the Coal Quay - she never lost her true Cork accent.

I started making a ‘winter trip’ to Lourdes on my own that year, and have been lucky to have got there each year since. Meeting ‘the Irish nun’ in November or December was very special as Lourdes is practically deserted that time of year, and with few visitors Sister had time for long chats.

For decades, her brother in Cork posted her pages from each Saturday’s Cork Examiner so she was well up with every tittle-tattle from home. Forever smiling, she told me that though only living a few hundred yards from the Grotto, she was only there a handful of times.

I met her for the last time in November, 2014, when she was 91. Her mobility was not great and her voice lower. She still chatted but asked for prayers as her health was declining.

She was now 56 years with the Poor Clare community in Lourdes - 18 other sisters from all over the world were then her religious companions.

Her serene, beaming smile will forever stay in my mind. I shook her hand as we bade farewell - for the last time.

The following June, when I was in Lourdes with the Cloyne Pilgrimage, Sister Fatima, the ‘doorkeeper’ at the Monastery - she meets the public on a daily basis - told me Sister Therese Marie was very weak and unable to receive visitors. We left for home on June 6. Five days later, on June 11, ‘the Irish nun’ died peacefully in the Poor Clare Monastery.

The Cork and Ross Pilgrimage were in Lourdes that week so she had a great Irish funeral. On Saturday, June 13, Bishop John Buckley and Bishop Padraig O’Donoghue along with many Diocesan priests, concelebrated her Funeral Mass, a joyous celebration of a wonderful person.

The old saying about the route to a cemetery was ‘The longest way round is the shortest way home’. So it came to pass on that Saturday. Though the Poor Clare cemetery is attached to their Monastery - down by the bridge over the river Gave - her funeral procession took ‘the longest way round’, through the narrow, ancient streets of her beloved Lourdes.

‘Far from the Madding Crowd’ is an apt description of the community burial ground. Literally under the shadow of the bridge that is thronged daily with thousands of pilgrims, it’s a haven of peace and quiet with only birdsong to be heard.

Sister was born on June 22 in 1923 so she’d have been 100 years old this year.

I would have loved to have been in Lourdes last month when the Cork and Ross pilgrimage went back there for the first time ‘since Covid’. On Tuesday, September 26, hundreds of pilgrims led by Bishop Fintan Gavin went down the 20 steps to the cemetery. There they placed a plaque on her grave to commemorate her centenary.

They prayed and sang hymns in her honour. Especially for ‘the Irish nun’, the Cork nun, they sang The Banks of My Own Lovely Lee. Sister Therese Marie would love that.

Please God, next month I’ll stand there and sing the same song.