Susannah Grant provides a definitive history in Windows on a Women's World: The Dominican Sisters of Aotearoa New Zealand.
WINDOWS ON A WOMEN’S WORLD:
The Dominican Sisters of Aotearoa New Zealand
Susannah Grant
Otago University Press
By JIM SULLIVAN
This will probably be the definitive history of the Dominican Sisters in New Zealand. There were 170 sisters in the 1950s but there have been no new vocations since 1984 and the ranks of the remaining 50 or so sisters are thinning.
The changes in the order since the first 10 sisters arrived in Dunedin from Ireland in 1871 were almost imperceptible for the first 90 years until the watershed of the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s refashioned the Catholic Church. The Dominicans, founded in 1206, embraced the winds of change but not without some soul searching and, especially among the older sisters, a feeling of trepidation.
For most readers, Catholics included, the strict discipline of the old Dominican way of life will come as a shock. Even the hundreds of women educated by the sisters at St Dominic’s College, Dunedin, Teschemakers, near Oamaru, and other schools around the country will probably discover more about the lives of their teachers than they ever knew in their schooldays. Old girls who boarded at these schools can often be heard bemoaning the regulations which frustrated their teenage years but, for the sisters, the rules were even more rigid and, for the modern reader, almost draconian.
Convent life was conducted in profound silence in early times but, even later, the relaxation was only gradual. It was an existence governed by the horarium, the daily schedule in which prayer and contemplation filled many hours. Bells dictated almost every movement. One was even rung to alert the sisters to the presence of doctors, priests, workmen and others whose duties called them within the convent walls. Permission to move outside those walls was a rare privilege. The sisters attending lectures at the University of Otago were obliged not to go unaccompanied. Even so, the sisters managed to provide a standard of education much envied by many state schools.
It was no easy matter to leave the order if a sister later found her vocation was not as strong as she once thought. It was 1928 before the first dispensation from vows was granted, but from the 1960s such releases were more common. The story of Judith Graham who left the order in 1967 is well-known and was told in her Breaking the Habit: Life in a New Zealand Convent 1955-67.
Susannah Grant’s thorough and well-indexed history has been compiled just in time. Many of the past and present sisters interviewed are now elderly and their memories will fascinate the general reader. The lively oral history is supplemented with a detailed examination of the voluminous written records.
The post-Vatican II chapters explore the gradual closing of the schools, although those seeking detailed individual histories of each school will need to look elsewhere. This book is unashamedly about the sisters themselves, not only telling of their extraordinarily sheltered lives behind the walls but, in later chapters, explaining their unselfish work in support of any number of causes. By 1981 Dominican sisters could be found marching in anti-Springbok tour protests and today the sisters make regular submissions to the Government on peace and justice issues and give practical support to those in need.
Windows on a Women’s World, while telling a New Zealand story, is of special interest to Otago readers. The sisters started in Dunedin and their archives are held here. From those collections come superb black-and-white photographs of daily life at St Dominic’s Priory.
The building itself may well stand forlorn and almost forsaken, but the lives of the sisters who lived there and in other cloistered spots tell of tenacity, dedication and now, survival, in a world that needs all the spiritual values it can get.
- Jim Sullivan is a Patearoa writer
