Sisters of Charity withdraw - A profound, challenging acceptance

THE announcement that the Sisters of Charity will not be involved in a new national maternity hospital must have been a bitter pill to swallow for the order, the Catholic hierarchy and the wider tradition of Irish Catholicism. 

The nuns, their clerical colleagues and their lay supporters may feel they are being marginalised by an increasingly intolerant, cold society.

They may feel that their contribution to the development of this society — it was defining and spectacular — is being cast aside rather too enthusiastically by the very entity they did so much to create.