DEASE, ELLEN
Publication
28 February 2023Born, Kildare, Ireland, 1820. Died Toronto, Canada, 1889.
Author: Elizabeth Smyth
Numerous Irish born and Irish descended women served Canada and the Roman Catholic Church as women religious (nuns and sisters), building institutions of education, social service and health care from coast to coast to coast. As with many of their countrywomen, their names and contributions remain anonymous, with history capturing their fleeting presence with such infamous phrases as “and the good nuns taught” while the male clerics and their secular male collaborators are named and celebrated. One their number is Mother Teresa (Ellen) Dease, a teacher and religious superior.
At the height of the typhus epidemic, on 17 September 1847, Dease was one of the five pioneering members of the Rathfarnham-based Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary (the Loreto) sisters. They came to Toronto at the invitation of its first Roman Catholic Bishop, Michael Power, to staff parish schools and establish an academy for girls and young women. Within two weeks of their arrival, Bishop Power was dead of typhus. Within four years, three of the pioneering band would be buried alongside him in the crypt of the unfinished St Michael’s Cathedral, victims of tuberculosis. One of their number would return to Ireland. Dease, the one member to remain in Canada, would lead her community for most of the late nineteenth century.
As a teacher and superior, Dease’s career was remarkable. Despite an inauspicious beginning, she oversaw the community’s growth that, at the time of her death, numbered some 207 sisters. She deployed her community across Ontario and the United States, establishing 13 foundations where her teaching sisters lived, taught in parish schools and academies, taught music to children and adults of all faiths and ethnicities, and contributed broadly to the cultural and religious life of their communities.
Dease was an educational innovator. She encouraged the credentialing of her sisters by the state. She supported the aligning the curriculum of the Loretto schools with the provincial one, enabling its graduates to qualify as teachers and for admission to tertiary education. Thus, she laid the foundations for Loretto College at the University of Toronto. In governance, Dease oversaw the establishment of Loretto (changing the spelling of its name) in North America as independent of the Irish motherhouse in Rathfarnham. But Mother Teresa Dease represents much more than this. She embodies the largely unstudied multiple networks of which Irish women religious were a part. She was part of a biological family, an ecclesial family, and an ethno-cultural family.
Mother Teresa was born Elinor (Ellen) Dease in Naas, Co Kildare- one of 5 children of Ann Nugent and Oliver Dease. Her father was surgeon in the British Army who served in the 3 Rd Garrison Battalion primarily in Malta and retired back to Ireland at half-pay in 1818. His career serves as a reminder that British army was a tool for social mobility among Irish Catholics, offering entry into the commissioned ranks to members of the emerging Irish professional middle class. Mother Teresa and her siblings were orphaned in 1821 and for the following 10 years, they benefitted from the McGrigor’s Benevolent and Orphans Fund, that provided financial support to the widows and children of deceased army medical officers.
The five Dease children illustrate the gendered professional and migration patterns prevalent in nineteenth century Irish society. Anne joined the Loretos in Fermoy and Bridget, lived as a lay woman within that community until her death. William, a physician, emigrated to Melbourne, Australia. Christopher, a lawyer, also emigrated to New South Wales, becoming a newspaper publisher and politician. Family correspondences share the usual news of family hatches, matches and dispatches, news of the expat Irish community and illustrates the ways in which familial networks cross international lines and both intersect and rise above political and ecclesiastical jurisdictions.
The Loreto sisters were founded in Belgium in 1609 by an exiled English woman, Mary Ward, and dedicated to the education of girls and young women. It was brought to Ireland in 1821 by a Dublin woman, Mother Teresa Ball. When Dease entered the order in 1845, she became part of its world-wide network of teaching sisters, who shared the same charism, constitutions, and customs. When Dease prayed in community, she used the same prayer formulas as the Loreto sisters in convents that spanned the globe. Its schools shared the same mottos, missions and celebrations.
Dease’s self-described favourite convent was Loretto Niagara. She established the convent and boarding school. She taught there. She lived there. She chose to be buried within its grounds. Its location, perched just above the Horseshoe Falls, provided the perfect vantage point from which to view them. Indeed numerous visiting dignitaries did so, including many Royal parties. The quarterly literary magazine- founded at the school was aptly named The Niagara Rainbow in honour of the prism effect of that the Falls’ mist played on the convent walls. It included contributions by leading Irish authors.
Although her familial roots were entwined with the British empire and imperial identity, Dease considered herself Irish. At no time was this more evident than when Princess Louise, the wife of The Marquis of Lorne, Governor General of Canada, first visited Loretto Abbey. Decades after the meeting, the editor of the Rainbow (vol. XII, Jan., 1905) recorded the event: “The Princess charmed by her reception … with much evident admiration said to Rev. Mother [Dease] – “You are an English [emphasis in original] lady.” “No Princess” was the reply “I come from Dublin.” Ah! The two volumes of history that met in those queenly ladies! One was the descendants of the oppressors of Ireland; the other the descendants of her defenders. The ancestors of the one had robbed the ancestors of the other.” Even decades after her death, this memory of Mother Dease was evoked to emphasise her pride in her Irish identity.
Further reading
A Member of the Community [Costello, Mother Bride (Margaret)]. Life and Letters of Rev. Mother Teresa Dease. Toronto: McClelland, Goodchild & Stewart, 1916.
McGovern, K. IBVM. “DEASE, ELLEN, Mother Teresa,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 11, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003. http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/dease_ellen_11E.html.
Smyth, E.M. (2014) “Worlds within worlds: Canadian Women religious, international connections, ecclesiastical webs and the secular state 1639-1930.” In Fitzgerald, T. & Smyth, E. M. (2014) Women Educators, Leaders and Activists 1900-1960: Educational Lives and Networks. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 41-57.
Smyth, E.M. (2019) “Educationalization of the Modern World: The case of the Loretto Sisters in British North America” in R. Bruno Jofre (ed) Educationalization and Its Complexities. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 113-128.