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SURMISING THE FIRE AT BANK BUILDINGS, BELFAST

MARTIN J MAGILL - THE POOR CLARES IN BELFAST 1924-2012

Martin and Poor Clares

There is something about committing to a city, giving yourself to it and for it. I think it is a Biblical idea. My friend Desi Alexander in his book From Eden to The New Jerusalem suggests, with some seriously well thought through Biblical evidence, that God was always planning a city. The getting ourselves back to the garden that Joni Mitchell suggested in her song Woodstock wasn’t the destination.

Jeremiah and Isaiah also seemed desperately keen that we prayed and acted for the well being of the city. Even in exile in Babylon, Jeremiah was asking, “Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.” (Jeremiah 29:7).  in Isaiah 61 we hear what the people of God would do for cities, “They will rebuild the ancient ruins and restore the places long devastated; they will renew the ruined cities that have been devastated for generations.”

In 1924 five sisters of the Poor Clares Order followed such a call to Belfast city. Arriving from Dublin they set up their enclosed Order firstly on the Antrim Road and latterly the Cliftonville Road where the order’s witness remains for 88 years. 

It could be said that Fr Martin Magill touched the hem of their habits when he became parish priest at Sacred Heart Parish in 2014. The sisters had gone by then but their legacy was still remembered and having an impact around Sacred Heart and beyond. Fr Martin gave a talk on the Poor Clare’s one evening and got hooked. This book is a labour of love. He has a done a fine job. With deep research into the Sisters well kept journals and news letters he takes us through the decades, laying out their ministry, revealing the characters of the Sisters as well as the events they lived through.

It is the way that the Poor Clares dealt with the events they lived through that caught my attention. I was particularly drawn into their experience of World War 2. On the nights that north Belfast was blitzed from the air by the Luftwaffe, the sisters were prostrate on the altar interceding for their neighbours and the city of Belfast. As I read I felt the terror of their positioning in those horrifying Belfast nights.

It challenged me about how we should be the presence of God in such hopeless and frightening places. The word made flesh and moving in among us indeed, as John called the incarnation in his Gospel prologue. They did it right through the Troubles too. They stayed out. While people were being murdered on the streets around them, these women believed that prayer might make the difference and committed to it. 

If my good friend had not written The Poor Clares in Belfast 1924-2012 would I have even picked it off a shelf. Of course not, but I am glad that I did. As ever I learned a lot about Catholicism and of course my Protestant sensitivities got a little roughed up at times! I thought they had moved up to convert us all, in the early pages! However, I was particularly enlightened about the life of a closed order and the lives that inhabitant such. 

These women were funny (I laughed out loud - who’d have thought!), completely on the pulse of the world around them and open to be listeners to a neighbourhood that needed listened to. Even boxing legend Barry McGuigan benefited from their pastoral gentleness. I was inspired about how the followers of Jesus should love a city, in war and peace.

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