Mother Catherine, OLA Superior General 1920 to 1932
Last weekend, members of our leadership team attended Mass at Dromantine to mark 100 years of the SMA’s presence there. The OLA connection to Dromantine goes back almost as far.
In late 1926, four OLA sisters were sent to Newry to undertake domestic work at the SMA seminary. They managed the kitchen and the linen, attending to the daily life of the house.
The agreement for their presence was negotiated between Fr Slattery and the OLA Generalate in France, the Irish Province not yet existing. Mother Catherine was the OLA Superior General at the time. Among the terms was a clause that the sisters would not be required to do the laundry. The reasoning was stated plainly in the original document: this work added to the rest is beyond their strength.
By 1946, the number of sisters at Dromantine had grown to six. The arrangement continued, renewed at intervals, for nearly half a century, until June 1972 when the seminary closed.
In 2013, the Irish OLA Province held its Provincial Chapter at Dromantine. The sisters who gathered there came as chapter members, not as staff. They sat in rooms their predecessors had kept clean, ate in a kitchen their predecessors had run, and made decisions about the future of a Province that had not existed when the first four sisters arrived in 1926.The house held their story in silence.
We do not have the names of those first four sisters sent in 1926. The record was not kept, or has not survived. What remains is the contract, the terms they negotiated, and the fact of their presence. Four women, unnamed in the archive, the beginning of a forty-six-year presence.
