Born: 19 November 1920, Ireland
Died: 22 September 2017
Country most active: Italy
Also known as: Norah Dennehy
This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Niav Gallagher. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Dennehy, Norah (Noreen) (1920–2017), Franciscan missionary nun, was born in Nantinan, near Killorglin, Co. Kerry, on 19 November 1920, one of four girls and three boys (her siblings were Margaret, Michael, Patrick, Nancy, Bernadette and John) to John Dennehy, a farmer, and his wife Mary Anne (née O’Brien). Although life on a family farm in 1920s Ireland was hard, with the work carried out mostly by hand, Dennehy later recalled a childhood filled with a great sense of family and community. She and her siblings milked their small herd of cows by hand; the fields were ploughed by two horses and planted with oats and barley, and at harvest time neighbours came to help with the threshing. Dennehy also recalled great music and dance sessions held regularly in the O’Callaghan household next door. By her own admission, Dennehy was somewhat rebellious as a teenager, and not above sneaking back out the window to enjoy dances after she had been shepherded home. From a young age Dennehy’s family considered her destined for a religious life. Her maternal grandmother, a very pious woman, prayed for a vocation for her, while her mother, who considered Dennehy a little wild, asked people to pray that her third daughter would enter a convent.
Dennehy attended the local school in Dungeel where her teacher was extremely hard on the children. The Dennehys had to walk almost 4km there and back every day, often barefoot in the summer months, and later carry out their chores on the farm. When Dennehy was seventeen, at her mother’s prompting she met with her cousin, Sr Mary Ciaran O’Brien, a missionary nun. Following their conversation, Sr O’Brien facilitated a meeting with a Sr Scholastica from the Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady, based in Ballinderry, Mullingar, Co. Westmeath, and on 23 February 1937 Dennehy and fourteen other girls from Kerry travelled to Westmeath to commence their postulancy. Following two years of training in Mullingar, Dennehy took her first set of vows and was one of twenty girls sent to complete their novitiate in Rome. The journey took several days – the sisters sailed from Dún Laoghaire to Holyhead, took a train to Dover and then a boat to Cherbourg. From there it was a two-day train journey to Rome, where they arrived shortly before the outbreak of the second world war and joined eighty other novices. Life in the convent was very strict: novices were forbidden to talk when out on the street, they could only travel in twos, and there was one hour of recreation allowed in the day, which began before dawn with communal prayers, mass and meditation. Their habit was very restrictive, consisting of a tunic made of heavy brown wool, a scapular, cincture, coif and veil. In the heat of the Roman summer, Irish novitiates found the weight of their robes especially burdensome. (Dennehy was delighted when the second Vatican council (1962–5) brought in changes to religious garb.)
Dennehy took her final vows in 1939 and joined the other professed sisters in the Franciscan generalate, located at that time on Via Nicola Fabrizi. As one of the younger nuns, it fell to her to do much of the work outside the convent such as shopping, accompanying older nuns to audiences with the pope and arranging tickets to events. Their mother superior had insisted on the sisters learning Italian and, following the German occupation of Rome in September 1943, she forbade them from speaking English outside the walls of the convent for fear they would be mistaken for spies. Inside the walls of the convent, the sisters were protected from German raids by virtue of their religion and their nationality. Dennehy recalled that a plaque on the door given to them by the German ambassador, Rudolf Rahn, ensured they were safe from raids, but it is more probable that the sisters were protected by the agreement between Vatican City and the German authorities relating to all Vatican properties; protective placards were placed on all buildings covered by the agreement.
From the time of their arrival in Rome in 1939, Dennehy and the other sisters from Kerry had been visited by Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, a priest from Killarney, Co. Kerry, who lived in Vatican City within walking distance of the convent. O’Flaherty had served as secretary to the papal nuncio to allied prisoners of war (POW) camps in northern Italy between 1941 and 1942. Appalled by the conditions he saw there, he undertook a clandestine operation to help dissidents, deserting Italian soldiers and others flee Mussolini’s fascist government. When the nine-month German occupation of Rome began, O’Flaherty escalated his efforts to help Rome’s Jewish population evade mass deportation to Europe’s death camps. At the start of the war there were between 8,000 and 10,000 Jews in Rome, many of them living in the ghetto established by Pope Paul IV in 1555. Despite paying a ransom of some 50kg of gold to secure their freedom, on 16 October 1943 German troops raided the ghetto and rounded up 1,259 people, of which 1,023 were identified as Jewish and deported to Auschwitz concentration camp. Of that group, only fifteen men and one woman survived. Between September 1943 and January 1944, 3,110 Jews in total were deported to Auschwitz and by the end of the war more than twenty per cent of Italy’s Jewish population had been imprisoned in jails and concentration camps, before being sent on to extermination camps. In total, 7,680 out of 44,500 Italian Jews perished during the Holocaust. O’Flaherty’s network was part of a broad effort to save Rome’s Jews, as well as POWs and dissidents, and it is estimated that through his actions more than 6,500 were smuggled out of Rome through a vast network of churches, monasteries, convents, seminaries and the homes of sympathisers. Every evening, in full view of armed German soldiers, he stood on the steps of St Peter’s basilica behind the white line demarcating the Vatican’s boundary, available to any who needed refuge. According to Dennehy, her mother superior Mother Mary Benignus and her assistant Mother Mary Marcarius were very much in sympathy with O’Flaherty’s efforts and their convent was one of the safe havens used by him. Hundreds of Jewish women and children, thirty or forty at a time, were smuggled into the convent where the sisters clothed, fed and sheltered them. In addition to providing shelter for O’Flaherty’s refugees, the sisters were also tasked with liaising between the monsignor and his supporters, including Prince Filippo Doria Pamphili, head of an ancient Roman noble family who had been a friend of O’Flaherty’s since before the war. Perhaps because she was already the sister tasked with chores outside the walls of the convent, Dennehy was chosen to liaise between the prince and the monsignor but was never told what she was actually doing, perhaps in the hope that her innocence would protect her. In later years she laughingly said, ‘I didn’t know what was going on half the time. I was just doing my job. Took everything as it came’ (O’Keeffe, Irish life and lore). Nonetheless, it was dangerous work and it was only after the war that her mother superior informed her what penalties she might have faced had she been caught.
Despite the protection that their religion and nationality offered Dennehy and her sisters, the German occupation of Rome was an oppressive and dangerous period. Romans were forbidden to ride bicycles, walk on certain paths or cross certain streets, stock up on food or send telegrams or phone outside Rome. Punishable activities included harbouring or helping escaped prisoners of war, for which the penalty was death; life imprisonment for circulating news derogatory to the prestige of the Axis; and death for owning a wireless transmitter. It was common for Italian males to be rounded up, put on lorries and driven to other parts of Italy for forced labour, or killed in reprisal for the deaths of German soldiers in the city. Dennehy and her consoeurs were occasionally prevented from walking certain routes while the Germans rounded up Italian men. The policy was that ‘if one German was killed they’d take ten Italians and put them into a truck and they were dynamited outside Rome. And if we didn’t keep out of the way, we were rightly in it’ (O’Keeffe, Irish life and lore). In addition to the threats from occupying German troops, there was a nightly curfew often broken by air raid sirens signalling bombing raids by allied troops. Dennehy hated going into the shelter and delayed getting there as long as she could; she would often go up onto the convent’s roof terrace to watch the planes fly overhead. Liable to suffer grave consequences if found outside the neutral territory of Vatican City, O’Flaherty often walked the streets of Rome in disguise, unrecognisable even to those who knew him well. He met Dennehy one time on the street and hailed her in English, but because he was disguised as a coalman she walked on by. On another occasion, she recalled that he dressed as a nun in full habit and tried to sell rosaries to the German soldiers.
In late May 1944 Roman citizens prepared for a lengthy battle as allied troops advanced on the city. The nuns were told to ensure they had plenty of food as they might have to stay indoors, possibly for weeks. In the end, the German army retreated without incident – Dennehy recalled the endless stream of German soldiers trooping past their convent throughout the night of 3 June, and running with her consoeurs into the streets in joy when they heard American accents outside their windows. Following the liberation of Rome, one of the first visitors to the convent was Fr Daniel Kelleher, a Kerry man and chaplain to the Royal Irish Fusiliers. As part of the British army’s 1st Armoured Division he had been present for almost every major battle fought in the North African desert campaign, after which he participated in the invasions of Sicily and Italy. In December 1943 he was posted to the 38th (Irish) Brigade and for his actions at Cáira near Monte Cassino on 6 April 1944 he was awarded the military cross. He told the sisters he would bring fifty soldiers for dinner in the convent, but in the end showed up with 150 Irishmen, all looking to be fed in the company of Irish nuns.
Dennehy remained in Rome for twenty-seven years, unbroken except for a visit home in 1950. In 1965, at her own request, she was sent to the United States where her brother Patrick and sister Margaret were living. She was first based in Boston, then Brooklyn and the Bronx in New York city, where she qualified as a geriatric healthcare worker. In 1986 she travelled to Augusta, Georgia, to take over directorship of the city’s Catholic Social Services (CSS) mission, offering non-denominational assistance to the area’s poor, providing food, clothing, medical aid, housing and financial aid. Between June 1988 and 1989 alone, the mission assisted more than 1,400 families and provided more than 13,324 people with clothing and food. In May 1989 Dennehy came to national attention when her work with migrant peach pickers featured on Ted Koppel’s Nightline on the ABC television network. The workers faced serious exploitation and abuse in the peach orchards of South Carolina, and during the months of May, June and July would walk thirty or forty miles (48 to 60km) to avail of CSS aid. Dennehy’s interview on national television was instrumental in getting conditions improved for the workers, although she received personal threats in the aftermath.
Between 1986 and 2006 Dennehy ministered in Georgia and became a well-known and beloved figure in the community, although her driving meant she was more acquainted with law enforcement than most nuns – her love of speed was legendary and even at the age of eighty-five was pulled over for speeding, but let off with a warning. For two years she lived in the order’s house in Newton, Massachusetts and then, at the age of eighty-eight, retired to Tenafly, New Jersey. She died on 22 September 2017 and is buried with her consoeurs.
Throughout her life, Dennehy spoke very little about her time in Rome during the war and the part she and her fellow nuns played in saving Rome’s Jewish population from extermination. Her first detailed conversation about it was with local historian Maurice O’Keeffe following a chance meeting when she was visiting Ireland. However modest she was about the role she played, she was forceful in her praise for O’Flaherty and in 1995 she wrote in support of his being named ‘righteous among the nations’ by Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre. Mary Elmes remains the only Irish person recognised as ‘righteous among the nations’ to date.