Paul Maguire with Sister Conchita McDonnell, left, and Sister Monica Devine, right.
At the age of 26, after finishing her university studies and working for two years as a lay missionary in Nigeria, Monica Devine left her home in Roscommon to join the Missionary Sisters of the Holy Rosary. She spent more than 30 years of her life working in Nigeria and Tanzania in Africa and today, in her 70s, she’s among a group of more than 20 retired nuns from her order who are about to move into a retirement home in Dublin. A home with a mortgage they can’t afford because, while they had experience raising money for their missions, they’ve never before done it for themselves.
The words “retirement” and “home” have different meanings for this order of nuns, founded in 1924 by Bishop Joseph Shanahan in Killeshandra, County Cavan, to minister to the underserved women in Africa. Their job: teach, heal, farm, help, and become part of the community in which they lived. “We were told, wherever you’re going, these are your people,” says Sister Monica, a tiny, slight woman with glasses and a cap of silver-streaked hair.
The Sisters took that guidance to heart. In the late 1960s, the Killeshandra nuns, as they’re known, even found themselves on different sides in the Biafran Civil War, in which more than 1 million civilians died as the result of the fighting and famine. They didn’t return home because, says Sister Conchita McDonnell, they were home.
“The sisters on both sides of the civil war made the choice to stay with the people with whom they lived,” said the nun, who, with Sister Monica, visited the Philadelphia area recently as part of a fundraising campaign coordinated by a group of local Irish community leaders to help them pay for their Dublin home. Sister Conchita was stationed with the Igbo people of Southeastern Nigeria who were farmers, crafters and traders; Sister Monica with the Tiv, mainly farmers living around Benbue river in the Middle Belt of Nigeria. And the two peoples were at war.
At one point in the early days of the conflict, says Sister Conchita, also in her 70s, she and her community were visited “surrounded by the local chief and the elders of our little village who assured me that I would be protected as one of their own.” Later, when famine began taking lives in Nigeria, Sister Conchita went to the US and Europe to the US to talk to whoever would listen about the plight of her people, a program called the “Save the Igbo People.” Last year, she was given a chieftaincy title by one of the communities she served.
The sisters’ devotion to their chosen people often had profound consequences, as Sister Monica found when she was approached by a Tiv man who told her that he had converted to Catholicism because “you knew trouble was coming and you stayed with us because of the God you believe in.” So it wasn’t surprising to her that when she reunited with some of her former students in Nigeria a year or so ago, they were perplexed by her talk about plans to build a retirement home in their native Ireland. “One of them said to me, ‘Why do you have to go to Ireland to go home? Isn’t this your home?’”
It’s how the sisters still feel—Africa is still home, though much of their work has been taken over by African Holy Rosary sisters and other congregations trained by the order, which was part of the original plan. “We were told our job was to work ourselves out of a job,” says Sister Conchita. “The whole idea was to develop the potential of the people so they could find their own giftedness.”
But as the sisters got older and began experiencing some of the illnesses that can accompany aging (“I was only at the brink of death once,” quips Sister Monica) they also felt the need to return to Ireland. ” An early plan to live in government-subsidized housing for the aged was eight years in the works when it died suddenly, along with the economic boom of the Celtic Tiger. The sisters were disappointed, largely because living with elderly poor people would have allowed them to continue to be missionaries, a calling that has not been silenced just because they’ve retired. “I would have given the sisters the opportunity to use their pastoral care experience,” says Sister Monica.
The retired nuns are temporarily living in house provided by other orders while their own home, which will provide a “simple small bedroom for every sister,” is completed, says Sister Monica.
But even when those little bedrooms are ready, the Sisters will still have to find a way to satisfy the debt they incurred to build them, says Paul Maguire, a Kildare native and principal in the accounting firm Maguire Hegarty LLC, who learned of the nuns’ plight from Father John McNamee, retired pastor of St. Malachy’s Church and School in Philadelphia.
“We’re launching an international campaign to raise $4 million for the nuns, with $2.5 million to come from America and the rest from the Irish,” explains Maguire, who is on the board of the nonprofit Friends of the Missionary Sisters of the Holy Rosary, Inc. and a principal in Archeim Solutions, a marketing and strategic planning organization that’s coordinating the campaign.
“We have as our patron, Sabina Higgins, the wife of Irish President Michael Higgins, whose two cousins are members of the order,” says Maguire.
Over the next three years, he explains, the campaign will spread across the country with fundraising events in cities with large Irish populations, such as New York, Boston, and Chicago, but the start in Philadelphia is appropriate. One of the order’s founding nuns was Sister Philomena, born Isobel Fox, a graduate of Hallahan High School in Philadelphia, who died in 1999 at the age of 97 after spending many years in Nigeria. Maguire has introduced the sisters to some of the influential people in the region’s Irish community and to many of the county societies, asking for their financial support.
It hasn’t been easy for the nuns. “We’ve never done any fundraising for ourselves; it’s all been for the missions,” says Sister Conchita. They had really never given any thought to their own futures until now.
But what made it less awkward for them is that they’ve always seen those who contribute to them as “co-missionaries,” she says. And they’ve always had something valuable to give back in thanks. ”We pray for them every day,” she says. “many times a day.”
There are some who would say that’s better than a tax write-off.
To donate to the Killeshandra nuns, make checks payable to the Friends of the Missionary Sisters of the Holy Rosary, Inc., and send it to P.O. Box 589, Norristown, PA 19404. For more information, email Donations@knuns.org. The organization has filed for charity status so donations can be tax deductible.
