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Podcast: The Essay
Episode: Chastity and Lots of Praying
Description: Great empty buildings, which only a few decades ago were bustling convents, tower over most towns and villages in Ireland, but they represent a world which is disappearing along with the once all-powerful Irish Roman Catholic Church. In this series of The Essay, Olivia O'Leary, convent-educated and a lapsed Catholic, asks where all the Irish nuns have gone. In her first essay, Olivia recalls her 12-year-old view of nuns: their long black clothes, their heads encased in stiff linen, their obsession with prayer and the Virgin Mary and purity - and making sure that girls would never...