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OCR
276 Cornelia Connelly and Her Interpreters
To the end of her life her sense of family and the cost of her loss of contact
with them were still fresh. In a letter to Dolores Wilkinson, extolling the
privileges of religious life, she wrote, on 1 September 1876:
Ah! This [religious life] is indeed a little foretaste of heaven which a
thousand times repays our little secret acts of the day, which are also a
pleasure in themselves; and again, are we not a thousand times repaid for
our natural sacrifices of families and friends which will more or less cling to
us humanly during our whole life to give us the merit of constant renewal.’!
Spontaneous comments and asides such as this provide a glimpse of her
ongoing sacrifice and suffering and are, therefore, a testimony to the value
she placed on motherhood. Bellasis described Cornelia’s loss of the
children as “a cross without alleviation” ”; and Cornelia is quoted as saying,
“The remembrance of my children never leaves me.”
Perhaps because she was so isolated, family ties were extremely
important to her. She ends a letter to her niece, Isabella Bowen, on 25
September 1872, “Ah! My dear Bella, I can only say that I love you as your
own Mother and am ever yours in JC, CC.” Yet she also recognised that
such motherly love had its limits. To another niece, Cornelia Duval, she
comments, on 27 January 1861(?), “none can ever quite equal a Mother's
love.” With such evidence it is difficult to countenance the myth that
demonizes Cornelia as an unnatural mother. Their parents’ choices had
painful consequences for the children; but there is little justification for
branding Cornelia, or Pierce, as unloving or unnatural.
Cornelia as Spiritual and Founding Mother
As founder, Cornelia often called the members of the Society to
motherliness and detailed for them what this involved. I suggest that the
term “mother” carried specific meaning for Cornelia, derived from her
experience of physical motherhood. She cannot have used it casually or
unthinkingly because it connects the two parts of her experience,
1 CC8:44-45.
°2173:213.
3.1 63:42.
°4CC1:114; CC1:117.