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THE CARMELITES OF MALAHIDE - 700 YEARS OF TRADITION

Carmelite nuns trace their origins to a group of hermits who lived on Mount Carmel in Palestine in the early 13th century.

In 1562 St. Teresa reformed the Carmelite Order and soon after her death her nuns founded contemplative communities in France and the Netherlands.

The first evidence we have of the presence of Carmelite nuns in Ireland is found in a reference in the Rinnucini Manuscripts, Vol. 4, p.135, and can be back-dated to the 1640's.

Still in Dublin in 1661, they probably moved to Loughrea during the Williamite Wars (1690). In 1730, the Dublin Convent was re-founded, first in Fisher's Lane (now St. Michan's Avenue) and then on Arran Quay, where they kept a boarding school, as all nuns did at the time.

In 1788, the community moved to Ranelagh, to the former Ranelagh Gardens and to a house in which the Protestant Bishop of Derry, Dr. William Barnard, had lived between 1757 and 1768. In 1785, the first balloon ascent ever attempted in Ireland was made by Richard Crosbie from Ranelagh Gardens.

In their quiet home in the Dublin suburbs the Carmelites lived their contemplative life, as St. Teresa had wished, their prayers reaching out to the whole world, to all in sorrow and distress.

An Irish Carmelite nun from the Convent of St. Denis in Paris, fleeing from the French Revolution, found refuge in Ranelagh Carmel for a time. She was Sr. Stanislaus Kavanagh and had been a novice of Madame Louise of France, who had left the court of her father, Louis XV, to become a Carmelite nun.

In those early years, a frequent visitor to the convent was a little boy named Thomas Moore. Tradition, recorded in a letter written in mid-century, says that the future poet often took tea of an evening with the nuns, when a boy.

A notable member of their community in those early years was Sr. Ann West, grand-daughter of the Georgian stucco worker and artist, Robert West. Ann herself excelled in portrait painting. Before her death in 1829, at the age of 46, she left us remarkable portraits of her Carmelite Sisters.

But, as the Irish proverb says: "Nuair is géire an gá, is goire an cabhair". A Scottish lady, Mary Ann Hamilton, a convert to Catholicism, entered in 1846. By her mother's will, she could not alienate any of her capital during her life-time, but she could use the income from it. She made this available to the nuns, though she had to appear in court to secure it for them. The note of relief is apparent even in the account books! It was she who procured our beautiful Paschal candlestick through the good offices of a friend in Rome.

The grim reality of Ireland's struggle for freedom was brought close to the community at midnight of January 2nd, 1921, when the convent was raided by the Black and Tans, "in search of arms, ammunition and seditious literature", as they said. Wild rumours about the raid even crossed the Atlantic but the nuns had not been molested.

The dark years brought their legacy of anxiety and financial pressure, no strange visitors to the nuns. As time went by it became increasingly difficult to keep the old house in repair. "There is a tide in the affairs of men" and in 1975 that tide brought our community to Malahide, to continue here our contemplative witness to the presence and power of God in this 21st century world.