History of Loreto Crumlin

 

 

In the late 1920s, Canon Deasy, parish priest of Dolphin's Barn Dublin, requested his sister, Mother Raphael, then Mother General of the Loreto Order to establish a secondary school in his parish. Mother Raphael purchased Carnclough House on Crumlin Road. Here in January 1930, Mother Pauline Dunne and a small community, with a budget of £5, opened a secondary day school and junior school, followed shortly afterwards by a commercial college and later, a primary school. From these very small beginnings, Loreto Crumlin expanded as it was called on to cater for the school-going population in this newly developing area.

In 1972, a new school block was built and in the 1990s, when the commercial college closed, the secondary school took over their building, known as Marian House. The original Carnclough House now accommodates the Loreto Centre.

 

Mary Ward was the founder of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary. She wasborn in York in 1585. She pioneered a new type of religious life for women which found apostolic expression in Catholic schools for girls.With remarkable foresight, she predicted the apostolic influence of women in time to come in families, in public life, and in the Church. Truth, freedom, justice, sincerity and joy are the core values which constitute the distinctive spirit of Mary Ward's charism and these core values underpin the Loreto educational philosophy and vision. 2009 marks the 400th anniversary of the foundation of Mary Ward's first school at St. Omer (now in France).

 

At age 15 Mary Ward was called to enter religious life. Since religious communities had been dispersed for many years in England, she went to the continent to enter a Poor Clare convent. Through special insights, God showed her that she was to do something different and great.

 

Leaving the Poor Clares, Mary worked in disguise to preserve the Catholic Faith in England before founding a community of active Sisters in 1609 in Northern France. Unlike the cloistered Sisters in other convents, she and her companions educated young women, helped persecuted and imprisoned Catholics, and spread the word of God in places priests could not go. The Sisters lived and worked openly on the continent, but in England they had to work secretly.

 

Many who knew Mary Ward admired her courage and generosity. She travelled Europe on foot, in dire poverty, frequently ill, founding schools in the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Austria, and what is today the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

 

Many of Mary Ward's ideas about religious life and about the work to be done by women were so novel in the early seventeenth century that in 1631 her Institute was suppressed.  Mary was imprisoned by Church officials who called her a dangerous heretic for her efforts to expand the role of women religious in spreading the faith. Her work was destroyed and her Sisters scattered. But she never gave up her trust in God, and right to the end of her life, she trusted totally that what God had asked of her would be accomplished in the future. She died near York in 1645.

Frances Ball was born in Dublin on 9 January, 1794. She was the foundress of the Irish Branch of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary. . At the age of nine years, she was sent to school at the Bar Convent, York, England, conducted by the English Ladies of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary. In 1814, Frances Ball was received into the Bar Convent Novitiate at the request of Dr Daniel Murray, the Archbishop of Dublin, to be trained as a religious of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary so that she could make a foundation of the order in Ireland. There she received her religious training and made her profession in 1816, taking the name of Mary Teresa. In 1821 at the request of Dr Murray, she returned to Dublin with two novices to establish a convent and school there.

 

In 1822 she opened the first house of the Institute in Ireland, in Rathfarnham House, four miles from Dublin. Because there were three of three sisters there that first evening, Mother Teresa decided to call the house 'Loreto' after the village in Italy where the Holy Family's house was said to have been miraculously transported to. The name “Loreto House” was to be used for all the subsequent foundations that came from Ireland and resulted in the sisters of the Irish Branch of the IBVM being popularly known as “Loreto Sisters”.