Sister Lavinia Byrne, 1998
(This is mostly a précis of Bryne's own account in From Inquisition to Freedom , with an article in the Irish Times, 24 February 2000, and my own comments. ) Born in 1947 in Birmingham, Lavinia was a cradle Catholic. She first met the sisters of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary (IBVM) at boarding school in Shaftesbury in 1958, and joined them in 1964. She read French and Spanish at London University and then trained as a teacher in Cambridge. “ For the first fifteen years, of my religious life” she wrote, “I was perfectly happy teaching in a number of girls’ schools which were owned by the community. ” [p176] Then came her ‘tertianship’, the third phase of her formation. This took her out of her smaller world to places and experiences she had not previously known, including “an all-night refuge, in a hostel, and with the Afro-Caribbean community in Bayswater, a very mixed-race part of London.” [ ibid. ] The experience changed her and s he could not return to life as a