Nano Nagle
Nano (Honaria) Nagle was born in Ballygriffin, Country Cork, Ireland in 1718. She was the Founder of the Presentation Sisters and pioneer of Catholic education in Ireland.
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Her family were devout Catholics who had managed to hold on to their land in penal times, when landownership and education were forbidden to Catholics. They were connected to some of the most prominent families in Munster and their ancestors had lived in the areas for hundreds of years.
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Nano was educated in Paris and enjoyed an active social life. The family had relatives in Paris and Nano lived with them for some years to escape the persecution of Catholics in her homeland. While enjoying the social life and the freedom that living in Paris allowed. Nano maintained a strong faith and sense of social justice.
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Between 1746 and 1748 Nano's life was marked by grief. Having returned to Ireland to be with her family, she now had to ensure the death of both her parents and her sister Ann. Nano returned to Paris and entered a convent.
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During her time in the convent Nano struggled with the problem of what to do about the poor in Ireland. She prayed, she consulted, she sought advice from the more eminent for their experience, they unanimously declared that to instruct poor children in Ireland was doubtless the object of Nano's vocation.
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Her First School
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Finally Nano decided that she could be of more use to the poor by actively helping them rather than by prayer alone. She returned to Cork, Ireland in 1750 to set up the first of her schools. It was based in Cove Lane and although Catholic schools were illegal at that time it soon had several hundred pupils.
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Although it is was not unusual for ladies, Catholic or Protestant, to interest themselves in charitable activities in Ireland at that time, they usually do so from the safety of their parlours or committee rooms. Nano's first school was a mud cabin in a very poor part of town.
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Nano Nagle spent all of her considerable fortune on establishing schools for the poor of Cork. In the school the children were taught to pray, work read and write. Nano lived with her brother and his family who supported her charitable works and who often pleaded with her to reduce her efforts as health was suffering.
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Nano's lantern has become a symbol of the work that she did and for the light of education that she brought into the lives of the poor and the destitute.
Woman of Welcoming Heart
They know her in the crowded lonely ways woman of welcoming heart, whose lantern sheds kind beams for eyes waste-minded by the weary miles,
for them her hands are open, for her their doors.
Room is made by dim and smoking fire, some small crust shared,
and she, receiving, knows still more ti give, and, welcomed, grows in art of welcoming.
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Apart, in shadowed hours of night and dawn,
leaning heart to heart on the One who pulses life
into the lowliest and least of all that lives, she learns to unclasp the last-kept store and lay it down in welcome: "Take and share'.
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'Until, the last loaf broke, the last wine poured, she can dare the outer darkness, the fine-piercing sword, and bear to be bereft ...
heart-certain that beyond this last black mile
light streams from beckoning windows and from wide-flung, door,
where she will hear the voice grown dear in silent listening years:
'Women of welcoming heart, here is your home'.
The Lady with the Lantern
In the evenings after her schools were closed, Nano was a familiar sigh t in the city's dark and dangerous streets, seeking out the hungry, the homeless and the elderly. With her lantern in hand, she tended those in need, but particularly any destitute women.
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By 1770 Nano and her supporters had decided that a religious foundation was necessary to ensure the permanence of her project to educate the poor. Nano set up her own sisterhood. It was the first female religious group in Ireland to combine religious life with systematic charitable works.
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In 1783 Nano established a home for aged and destitute women and she asked her companion to personally tend to the needs of these women. By 1784, Nano's health was very poor yet she continued to walk the streets giving aid to the poor and hungry.
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Nano died from tuberculosis in April 26th 1784 at the age of 65.
