|
|
NANO NAGLE
Foundress of the Presentation Sisters
Cork, Ireland
April 9, 1718 – her birth
December 25, 1775 – founded the Congregation of the Presentation Sisters
April 26, 1784 -- her death
Having at length despaired of accomplishing the religious subjection of the Irish as a race, the enemy of the faith turned to new and more insidious devices. By stultifying the people, by paralyzing the national and intellectual life that was in them, by striking them with the curse of stupidity and ignorance, by brutalizing them through the cutting off of every source of education, the oppressors hoped to succeed where earlier penal enactments had failed. Consequently, those ferocious statutes of William III and Queen Anne, the object of which was to make it penal, under penalty of banishment, fine, confiscation, or imprisonment, for any Catholic in Ireland, man, woman or child, to teach or to be taught, were set in motion.
The race that had resisted so long and so valiantly against the oppressor’s onslaughts found in this latest weapon a device of such diabolical cunning as to make ultimate defeat appear inevitable.
Just, however, when the people had sunk into the silence of despair, a Deborah (Old Testament) arose in the land and grasped the spear that was destined, under God, to turn defeat into victory. Nano Nagle was the woman chosen by Divine Providence to be the mother of that Irish Catholic education which has preserved the faith of Ireland and sent forth missionaries to the ends of the earth to be apostles to nations.
No human power, of course, could have been responsible for the extraordinary expansion during the past century and a half of this congregation, inspired by a heroic girl and composed of a handful of retiring, humble women. Cork may feel proud of being the cradle-bed of such an illustrious religious Order, as all Presentation Sisters, to the end of time, must cherish the memory of its valiant Foundress, Nano Nagle.
Breaking of Morn
Sr. Mary Pius O’Farrell, PBVM
|
