Sr Biddy-Rose Tiernan: Sister with a Purpose

Sr Biddy-Rose Tiernan is one of South Africa’s most beloved religious Sisters. She told Daluxolo Moloantoa about her life of service to justice and education.

She is one of South Africa’s best-known and beloved religious Sisters, especially in the areas of Justice & Peace and Catholic education — so much so that Sr Brigid-Rose Tiernan is widely known simply by her affectionate nickname. Sr Biddy-Rose.

The Sister of Notre Dame de Namur is widely regarded as an enduring symbol of transformative power in South African society, a country in which she has spent most of her adult life.

Born in 1942 in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, to Eric and Doreen Tiernan, she was raised in a close-knit family of four.

Her grandparents were Australian by birth, but moved to Broken Hill, now the Zambian city of Kabwe, in 1929, to assist in the development of mining there. After the end of his contract, Sr Biddy-Rose’s grandparents returned to their home country, but Doreen remained in Africa to complete her university studies.

It was while teaching in Bulawayo that Doreen met locally-born Eric. They married in 1940.

Brigid-Rose did her primary schooling in Dominican schools in Bulawayo and the Zambian town of Ndola. “My happy memories of those carefree years include cycling to and from school each day, and of daily life very much focused on the local parish church, where both my parents were active members,” Sr Biddy-Rose told The Southern Cross. Daily Mass and evening benediction were part of the Tiernan family’s routine.

For her secondary schooling, Brigid-Rose was sent to the Convent of Notre Dame in Kroonstad, Free State. After five happy years at the boarding school, during which she detected a vocation to religious life for the first time, Brigid-Rose enrolled for a BA degree at Rhodes University, with a view to becoming a teacher.

Awakening to Justice

At Rhodes she became involved with the university’s Catholic Society and the National Catholic Federation of Students, which advocated for the social transformation of South African society. “The enactment of the 1959 Separate Universities Act, and its impact on Rhodes students’ relationships with students from nearby Fort Hare University, found me engaged in my first political activity in 1960. The following year, when South Africa became a republic and the state president visited Grahamstown, I took part in the student protests planned around the event,” she said.

Subsequent visits to Joza township and Fingo village on the outskirts of Grahamstown exposed her to the startling differences in living conditions of people of colour and white people in South Africa.

Dominican Father Timothy McDermott, a biblical scholar and preacher, visited Rhodes on several occasions from Stellenbosch, and workshopped different books of the Bible with the students. “At one of these sessions, I had a sudden insight that our God was a God of Love. All the apologetics that had been part of my religious education at school seemed to disappear from my horizon with this new vision,” Sr Biddy-Rose recalled.

Equipped with her BA degree, in 1963 she taught for two terms at Llewellyn High School in Ndola, where her mother was vice-principal. In October of that year, she entered the Congregation of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur in their Sussex novitiate in England. The next two-and-a-half years were challenging, “learning to live in a different climate, with a variety of cultures, and with none of my formators having any idea about the places where I had spent my first two decades. I felt like a misfit, and wondered what I had let myself in for,” she recalled.

Landing in South Africa

Sr Biddy-Rose made her first profession, along with 14 others, in April 1966. She returned to Southern Africa in October 1967. As the only Rhodesian in the congregation, she had expected to return to the country of her birth. As things turned out, she landed in Venterspost West, in the western Transvaal, where the Sisters had a small secondary boarding school.

“The next 11 years were very satisfying and rich ones, teaching in schools in Venterspost, Cape Town and Kroonstad. I am still in touch with former pupils from these years.”

The 1976 student riots and the ensuing school boycotts challenged educators to become sympathetic to their students. In Cape Town, Sr Biddy-Rose was then a member of the Christian Institute and later of the Black Sash.

“Sisters from different religious congregations met regularly in our community in Plumstead to explore how the call of faith, and living in apartheid South Africa, needed to speak to each other.

“By the late 1970s, the limitations imposed by educational departments, and even some fearful religious Brothers and Sisters in school leadership positions, left me questioning if indeed formal education was the best way to help form critical consciences,” Sr Biddy-Rose said.

She was blessed to have a sympathetic provincial superior and the support of Bishop Stephen Naidoo, then auxiliary and later archbishop of Cape Town. For the next six years she worked with the archdiocesan Justice & Peace Commission as its full-time development officer.

The position took Sr Biddy-Rose into various Christian communities and informal settlements, “learning how to sidestep bulldozers wanting to destroy these human settlements, often in the middle of the cold, wet Cape winters, and having to dodge teargas aimed at dispersing protesting crowds,” she recalled.

On a national level, J&P workers were formed in the Training for Transformation methodology, put together in handbooks by Anne Hope and Sally Timmel.

“The training was banned in South Africa. We had to travel to Roma University in Lesotho to be trained for it. We tried by all resources at our disposal to contribute to the future transformation of South Africa, making use of our vast Catholic Church networks, but often feeling we would be long dead before any change happened,” Sr Biddy-Rose explained.

Within the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, the 1970s brought lots of soul-searching about impact in ministry. “It was sociologist Marie Augusta Neal’s survey of Catholic education in South Africa in 1971, with the unfair distribution of human and material resources dedicated to it, that prompted us as a congregation to undergo a deep review of the situation. It ended with us giving up our 65-year-old convent and boarding school for white girls in Kroonstad, knowing that there were many other good schools our much-loved students could attend.”

By December 1974, the Sisters had closed three of the congregation’s high schools for white girls, but kept its schools in Thabong township in Kroonstad and in Orlando West, Soweto.

The congregation also moved from institutional living to living in smaller communities, with all that this involved. The story of that is told more fully in Sr Biddy-Rose’s book Journey Under the Southern Cross: The Story of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur 1975–2020.

In the early 1980s Sr Biddy-Rose was elected to the leadership of her congregation. She had to give up her full-time work in Cape Town’s J&P and move to Johannesburg. “As our group of Sisters was a small one, and I was younger and energetic, I always managed to keep close to the ground through various part-time ministries during the years of leadership.”

The leadership experience was repeated with intervals over the next three decades. Throughout the world, the Sisters were struggling “with team and participative leadership styles, after the authoritarian models of leadership that had characterised religious communities prior to Vatican ll”, Sr Biddy-Rose noted.

Back in education

After an exhilarating sabbatical in 1986 — some of which she spent in the Holy Land studying a Ecce Homo course and in Ireland for a rigorous Faith and Justice programme — she was invited by Marist Brother Jude Pieterse to join the newly-established Catholic Institute of Education (CIE) team, made up of five experienced educators.

“While in the role of facilitator or in J&P, I was always conscious that my basic style was that of a teacher — once a teacher, always a teacher — so returning to formal education was like a homecoming for me,” Sr Biddy-Rose recalled. In early 1987, she was asked to take on the directorship of the CIE).

“At the end of these years, and many battles with the state over financing of Catholic education, I felt I was beginning to run on empty. The CIE, now with over 40 staff members in several offices around the country, needed fresh leadership and a new vision to take it into the 21st century,” Sr Biddy Rose said. “I continue to be in awe at all the CIE has managed to do for Catholic education in South Africa and beyond our borders,” she said.

Looking back at her 12 years at the helm of the CIE, some landmarks stand out for her. These are

• calling for the first National Catholic Schools’ Conference, and the 18-month-long preparation process that led up to the conference;
• preparing the input for the 1996 National Basic Education Act.
• putting in place regional Catholic education structures to work with newly-formed provincial governments and their education departments in the nine new provinces after 1994;
• working with the Australian Catholic University in offering master’s degrees in educational leadership to some 40 leaders in Catholic schools in South Africa in the mid-1990s;
• assisting in the formation of the Association of Catholic Education of Africa and Madagascar (ACEAM).

She is thankful for having had the late Bishop Johannes Brenninkmeijer OP of Kroonstad as the liaison bishop for much of the 12 years.

For several decades, Sr Biddy-Rose has been a parishioner of St Francis Xavier church in Martindale, witnessing parish priest Fr Victor Kotze’s commitment to Vatican II. Fr Kotze involved her in the Reginald Orsmond Counselling Centre (ROCS), which he and fellow psychologist Dr Joan Schön had been running for over two decades.

“My task was to put in the structures needed for the centre to apply for NPO status. I had four happy years working in this hugely different milieu, and in 2004 was able to hand over a small but well-run organisation to community psychologist Joanne Kistner, who has continued to grow it and move into its own property in Westdene, under the name of Sophiatown Counselling Services,” she said.

Fruitful retirement

Sr Biddy-Rose’s retirement years have been abundant and fruitful. “I have been involved in the parish in diverse ways, on the PPC, as a confirmation class teacher, a minister of the Eucharist, and a reader. I have worked with several religious congregations around the country, facilitating chapters, and offering training and accompaniment to their leadership teams. This has enabled me to share the growth opportunities I received as a member of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur. I continue to be grateful for the calling I received to join the congregation over 60 years ago, and to strive to be an agent of God’s goodness — our congregation’s charism — in so many different milieux,” she said.

“Today, as we appear to be witnessing the demise of many congregations like ourselves, I am curious to know how the Spirit of God will be working in the hearts of Jesus’ followers in the decades to come. For sure, that Spirit is always at work. Over the decades my own spirituality has continued to broaden and deepen: care for our threatened planet has evolved out my earlier passion for Justice & Peace. Pope Francis’ two letters on this topic stir me deeply,” Sr Biddy-Rose said.

“Similarly, a synodal, a listening Church, is a vision to work for in whatever small and bigger ways we can. The slowness of the institution of the Catholic Church to recognise women’s potential at all levels, from ordination to decision-making, makes it seem at times irrelevant to the younger generation, and at other times, to the older ones, as an unaware ignorer, even abuser, of women’s dignity and potential,” Sr Biddy-Rose said.

“Where I live in a retirement village in Johannesburg, I am aware of so many small groups in existence, helping folk to express and respond to their craving for spirituality and relationship with the Divine, however this expresses itself.”

Her message to young Catholics today is to “open your eyes and read God’s primary self-revelation in the natural beauties offered to us, everywhere, in each season of the year. Take time, away from technology, to find in each person and in all creation God’s image and likeness, which sometimes struggles to be recognised and to be born.”