From Thomastown to Timbuktu - Treacy sisters’ religious calling

When Tom and May Treacy began their married life together in rural Kilkenny in the early 1940s little could they have expected to one day be receiving air-mail letters from destinations as far flung as Zambia, Los Angeles and the legendary Timbuktu!

But the Treacy family of Ballyduff includes three sisters who would become world travellers, dedicated, hard-working religious sisters whose calling led them to lives of adventure they couldn’t have imagined on an Irish farm!

In a family of six boys and six girls, at one stage all six sisters were in different countries around the world! (While the boys all stayed in Ireland!)

Not only have they been to exotic sounding places, but the three sisters - Margaret, Maeve and Joan, will this weekend be back in Kilkenny to celebrate their religious jubilees. It is 60 years since they entered religious life.

A grand, family gathering will be held in Thomastown and the city this weekend.

One after the other, Margaret, Maeve and Joan left Kilkenny to join the Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Mary. In the mid 1950s they were encouraged into religious life by a visit from Mother Stanislaus, herself a Sister of the Institute of the Sacred Heart of Mary, who had been tasked with finding girls from Irish families who might want to become a nun.

The order was well known in South Kilkenny, known as the ‘Ferrybank nuns’ because of the day and boarding school for girls they ran there.

Mother Stanislaus met Margaret, Maeve and Joan on her visit. As the Treacy family history says: “Margaret was ‘ready’, Maeve was nearly ready, and Joan was still a bit young, and could wait and see.” Young as they were they ‘heard the call’ and were eager to respond.

Pat and May were not so sure, but guidance from Fr Rice, and knowledge that a Kilkenny woman had been the head of the order until 1940, reassured them.

“That is how it all began. God chose Mother Stanislaus who chose our family, and we girls chose to answer the call, little by little, one after the other,” they say in the family history.

Margaret left home first, when her youngest sibling Pat, was just five years old. One of Pat’s earlier memories is Joan leaving for the boat in Cobh, as she set off to enter religious life in America.

When they first left the family thought they were saying goodbye, possibly, forever. Thankfully for all families with people in foreign, religious orders, that changed after Vatican II and each sister was to visit home every two years. Click 'NEXT' to read on and see photographs from the sisters' lives.