Page 6, 28th September 2007

28th September 2007

Page 6

Page 6, 28th September 2007 — LIVES REMEMBERED Sister Gregory Kirkus of the Congregation of Jesus
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LIVES REMEMBERED Sister Gregory Kirkus of the Congregation of Jesus

(formerly Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary) was an outstanding historian of English convent life and leading Catholic archivist. She presided over the archives of the Bar Convent in York, the oldest convent in England but now a bedand-breakfast business, which houses a magnificent collection of antique books, artefacts and manuscripts. From university professors to television personalities such as Robbie Coltrane, visitors took delight in hearing Sister Gregory’s talks on the convent’s hidden Georgian chapel, complete with priest’s hiding hole, and its recusant history.
Phyllis Kirkus was born in York and sent to a Dames school, which she found “extremely backward”, with lessons that consisted of hours of writing sums on a slate. After finishing at Sutton High School she gained a place at Newnham College, Cambridge, in 1929, eight years after the university voted against conferring degrees on women. She saw herself as an atheist but her desire to explore Christianity and devote her life to a worthwhile purpose led her to attend lectures in Catholic apologetics given by the Dominicans of Blackfriars. These, and the Confessions of St Augustine, led her to become a Catholic in a convent chapel since, under Mgr Alfred Gilbey, the Catholic chaplaincy was also closed to women. Miss Kirkus took great satisfaction in knowing that two former pupils of hers had served as assistant Catholic chaplains at the university.
To the devastation of her family, Miss Kirkus became Sister Gregory in 1936 after she discovered Mary Ward (1585-1645), a fellow Yorkshirewoman who founded an unenclosed order of women modelled on the Jesuits, only to be imprisoned as a heretic and have her order suppressed in 1631. Sister Gregory went to teach at St Mary’s Convent, north London, from where she was evacuated with her pupils to the stately East Sussex mansion of Lady Catherine Ashburnham.
Their eccentric hostess saw the evacuees as unwelcome intruders, and had meals served by footmen in full livery in her well-heated quarters, while hungry nuns and children froze in the bitter winter of 1940. In an era when convent school pupils rarely saw the domestic life of nuns or thought of them as normal human beings, the closeness of evacuation engendered the relaxed and humane spirit which characterised St Mary’s School in Shaftesbury, Dorset, founded on the exiled school in 1945.
Sister Gregory’s years as headmistress ended with her appointment as provincial superior in 1972. In the tense period of reforms after Vatican II her conservative instincts engendered some frustration, but she ran international summer schools enabling Sisters from the worldwide order to grow in solidarity and to dedicate themselves to faith and education beyond the limits of nationality. Now under lay management, St Mary’s Schools in Hampstead, Ascot, Shaftesbury and Cambridge, as well as All Saints, York, owe much of their present-day success to Sister Gregory.
Nine years later she set up the Bar Convent Museum, archives and library, writing sketches of school and convent life in the 17th and 18th centuries for the Catholic Record Society. Despite her shyness, she proved a natural on television, astonishing her Sisters by appearing on a Channel 4 documentary buying lottery tickets in an attempt to secure the convent’s future.
After retiring to the convent infirmary, she died on the feast of St Margaret Clitherow, whose relics are kept in the Bar Convent chapel.




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