At the heart of the Church

Martin O’Brien meets the two co-directors of the Drumalis Retreat and Conference Centre, Sr Anna Hainey CP and Sr Margaret Rose McSparran CP

“We believe the Church is going to be re-newed by the empowering of women working away in the background.” Those confident and assuring words are from Sr Anna Hainey CP, co-director and one of the triumvirate who comprise the management team of the Sisters of the Cross and Passion’s Drumalis Retreat and Conference Centre situated on a hill overlooking the sea in Larne, on the road to the Glens of Antrim.

Sr Anna adds: “The women and also the men who come here [in smaller numbers than women] are very strong Church people and it is their own personal faith that is prime.

“In the past they would have waited for the priest to tell them what to do, but not anymore. They have been empowered by their own personal response.”

Empowered, empowering, empowerment, words that one recalls first hearing from Mary Robinson in her presidential campaign nearly a quarter of a century ago were to recur several times in my conversation with the leadership team one morning recently in the oasis of tranquillity that is Drumalis.

Holy
ground

Situated on holy ground where the first Irish friary of the Premonstratensians or Norbertines were founded in 1180, Drumalis offers a remarkable menu of retreats principally in adult faith formation and other forms of spiritual nourishment to around a staggering 8,000 souls each year.

Drumalis House is steeped in history. Once a Victorian big house owned by Sir Hugh Smiley, a wealthy merchant, it was where the Larne gunrunning was planned and organised during the Home Rule crisis in April 1914, and it was partially requisitioned by the US military during WW2.

It was bought by the Sisters of the Cross and Passion in 1930 as a place to perpetuate the charism of the international congregation founded in Manchester in 1851 by Elizabeth Prout who ministered to poor mill workers and to refugees from the Famine in Ireland.

Sr Anna, 71, a native of Saltcoats in south west Scotland, not that far across the North Channel from Larne, came to Drumalis in 1996 after almost 20 years pastoring to immigrant Catholics in Sweden.

“The whole point of Drumalis is to respond to the spiritual needs of the community we live in,” says Sr Anna.

“We have asked that question time and time again down the decades since the Sisters of the Cross and Passion bought this house in 1930, and tried to answer it in accordance with the prevailing need.”

Her co-director, Sr Margaret Rose Mc-
Sparran CP, 70, a native of Cushendun, Co. Antrim, and former principal of her alma mater, Cross and Passion College, Ballycastle, had also worked for a period in Sweden and had been appointed director of Drumalis eight years earlier in 1988 amid some of the darkest days of the Troubles.

Sr Margaret Rose’s remit was to revitalise the centre and help devise a distinctly Cross and Passion contribution in the pressing area of peace and reconciliation.

It is a cause close to the heart of the two nuns and of Maura Burns, the third member of the management team, psychotherapist and former teacher from Belfast, and programme developer at Drumalis.

They are only too mindful that during the Troubles, thousands of women came to Drumalis from parishes in Belfast on retreat and that the traditional silent retreat was ended to enable those who had lost loved ones or had relatives in prison to articulate their pain.

Earlier this summer, Drumalis hosted a cross-community celebration of the 20th anniversary of the formation of the Tuesday Group, comprising the four main Churches and others in Larne which was co-founded by Sr Margaret Rose in the aftermath of 1994 ceasefires.

Such an initiative was bold in a place like Larne where sectarian tension is never very far below the surface.

The Tuesday Group continues to thrive, its most recent meeting taking place in Drumalis last Tuesday morning.

Sr Margaret Rose says the group has helped overcome religious divisions in the community and “encourages all to ‘wedge’ the door open however difficult the situation to encourage openness and dialogue”.

As early as 1992, Sr Mary Rose led a Cross and Passion presentation to the Opsahl Commission which, controversially for a Catholic body, backed integrated education.

They also supported ‘the idea of people empowerment’ and churches making their buildings available for cross-community playgroups and youth clubs.

Both Sr Margaret Rose and Sr Anna are proud of their confrere Sr Marie McNeice CP who co-founded the victim support charity WAVE (Widows Against Violence Empower) in 1991.

Art
retreat
centre

Maura arrived in 2003 with the opening of a new state-of-the-art retreat centre which was built in harmony with the historic house, replacing a flat-roofed Sixties building that, having served its purpose, was demolished.

Today, a wide range of retreats and courses is available throughout the year including the popular Pathways course, a two-year course held on Saturdays from October to June covering a broad sweep of theology and spirituality.

There is a suite of courses validated by St Mary’s University College including certificates in Christian thought and Lectio Divina facilitation.

Of Christian Thought, one participant said: “The best decision I made all year, I loved it.”

Six- and eight-day directed retreats have been particularly popular along with parish retreats and 100 people snapped up places at a one-day conference conducted by Fr Timothy Radcliffe OP in May.

This month, Drumalis began for the first time the Diploma in the Ministry of Spiritual Direction which will run for 14 weekends over two years in conjunction with Manresa Jesuit Centre of Spirituality in Dublin. Full details at www.drumalis.co.uk

From the numbers they attract not just from the North but from all over Ireland and abroad, and from the positive response they have received to their quiet peace-making, it appears that Drumalis has, under the leadership of Sr Margaret Rose and Sr Anna – in the words of that famous Vatican Two invocation –“read the signs of the times” in a striking way.

Drumalis has evidently anticipated spiritual needs and the quest for meaning by many people.

Sr Margaret Rose explains that their congregational independence means “we are not working under the auspices of the [diocesan] Living Church initiative but we are in parallel to it”.

She says their programmes “tally with the diocesan focus” and that dovetailing with the diocesan pastoral plan “is a work in progress.”

“For the sake of the People of God, there is bound to be overlapping and integrating.”

Asked what she makes of Pope Francis’s call for a profound theology of women Sr Margaret Rose is unimpressed thinking it may amount to “slightly delaying tactics. They keep putting the issue of women on the long finger, they are not grasping the nettle. There are women in the world losing patience.”

“I am not angry about that. Let’s empower the women we work with to the best of our ability. Let them grow. We have seen the women we meet here growing before our very eyes.”

Women
deacons

Asked for her views on women deacons – an idea that received considerable support at a meeting in Ballymena parish last year – Sr Margaret Rose said it would “add another dimension to the clericalism we are suffering from already”.

She had never particularly wanted to be a priest but “I         do see the good work Protestant women ministers do”.

Alongside spirituality and ecumenism, the other great strand of activity in Drumalis is ecology – a field in which Sr Margaret Rose has been something of a pioneer.

“The Irish people have been finding God everywhere for many centuries. Look at the words of St Patrick’s Breastplate! I found God in the Glens of Antrim as a kid playing camogie.”

As much as they may hope and pray for vocations to the religious life, Sr Margaret Rose and Sr Anna have for some time been preparing for the day when traditional vocations may have dried up.

A typical example of such preparedness is a laywoman taking responsibility for organising the parish retreats.

Sr Margaret Rose and Sr Anna strike one as exceptional women of grace, vision, courage and imagination whose work in Christ’s vineyard today may help lay the foundations for a different and more collaborative Church in Ireland in the second quarter of this century.