Nagle, Honora (Nano)

Honora Nagle (1718–1784), founder of the Presentation Order of Catholic women religious and pioneering leader in the reestablishment of both Catholic education and women's religious institutions in Ireland during the eighteenth century, was born in Ballygriffin, Co. Cork, into a prominent, landowning Catholic family. Better known by her childhood nickname, Nano, Nagle was educated in a convent school in France and returned to Ireland in the 1740s with the intention of establishing a school for poor, illiterate Catholics in the city of Cork (an illegal act under the Catholic penal code in force at the time). She opened her first school in the early 1750s and by the end of the 1760s oversaw a total of seven establishments, each with several hundred students attending daily. Emboldened by the government's unwillingness to prosecute her, the support of some members of the Catholic clergy, and a large inheritance from her uncle Joseph Nagle, she expanded her enterprise by making a foundation of the French Ursuline Sisters in 1771, the first new establishment of religious women in Ireland for more than one hundred years. Although the Ursulines were able to staff Nagle's burgeoning schools, because they were an enclosed, or cloistered, order that had traditionally catered to the wealthy, they were not able to participate in her larger vision of having socially engaged religious women undertake active philanthropic work among the poor. Consequently, in 1775 Nagle founded a radically new congregation, the Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary (originally uncloistered and named the Sisters of the Charitable Instruction). At the age of fifty-seven, finally content that she had created the religious community she had earlier envisioned, Nagle took religious vows herself. Though the community experienced a slow and difficult start (and though it was deemed necessary to reorganize as an enclosed order after her death to gain greater support from wealthy Cork Catholics), by the end of the nineteenth century Nano Nagle's community was the second-largest women's order in Ireland, with foundations throughout the world.

SEE ALSO Religious Orders: Women; Roman Catholic Church: 1690 to 1829

Bibliography

Magray, Mary Peckham. The Transforming Power of the Nuns: Women, Religion, and Cultural Change in Ireland, 1750–1900. 1998.

Walsh, Thomas J. Nano Nagle and the Presentation Sisters. 1959.

Mary Peckham Magray