Sr Camilla Roche, IBVM, who died on June 25th, 2015, in the 96th year of her life and her 77th year as a Loreto Sister, will be recalled with gratitude by many past pupils of Loreto schools in Enniscorthy, Killarney, Cavan, Foxrock, Stephen’s Green, Milford and Dalkey.
Sr Camilla was born Irene Roche, in Ballygillistown near Enniscorthy. She was a descendant of Fitzgodebert de la Roche, who landed at Baginbun in 1167 with Strongbow, and she had the energy and organisational capacity of the Normans in abundance. She took an honours BA and a higher diploma in education in UCD in the 1940s.
The Loreto Sisters encouraged their pupils to aspire to a university education and to enter the professions and were among the first secondary schools for girls in Ireland to teach science subjects. When science was first introduced in the Loreto schools, Sr Camilla was one of a number of arts graduates who sacrificed their holidays for many years to take courses in science subjects so that they could teach them.
The Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, more familiarly known as the Loreto Order, was founded in the aftermath of the Reformation by the Venerable Mary Ward (1585-1645), a member of an English Recusant family in York who dared, despite Vatican disapproval, to provide Catholic girls with an education similar to that of boys. In the 1980s, Sr Camilla took a master’s in education in NUI Maynooth. Her dissertation on the educational ideas of Mary Ward showed them to be astonishingly progressive for the 17th century.
Sr Camilla’s first post as principal was in Loreto College, Cavan, and she lived to attend the retirement celebrations of a teacher she had recruited 40 years earlier. In the 1970s she established the first Loreto Community School in Milford, which was co-educational and multidenominational. She then moved to Loreto Abbey, Dalkey, where she served as principal until her retirement.
After her retirement from secondary teaching, Sr Camilla moved to Loreto Hall, St Stephen’s Green, Dublin, where she worked in the secretarial college, mastering information technology in her sixties. Sr Camilla lived in Loreto Hall until the last year of her life, occasionally taking classes for absent teachers in Loreto College, St Stephen’s Green, into her eighties.
Sr Camilla encouraged all her pupils to realise their potential. On her death bed she was visited by several distinguished past pupils who thanked her for encouraging them in their career aspirations.
Sr Camilla was devoted to her family, and her greatest happiness in her retirement was visiting and being visited by her nieces and nephews and her grandnieces and grandnephews. She tracked the progress of all of them, encouraging and advising to the end. She lived a life of indefatigable activity, always eager to help others. It is easy to imagine her, on entering Heaven, straightening the cherubims’ ruffs, asking what grades they achieved in singing and then checking which floors of the heavenly mansion needed polishing.
Sr Camilla is survived by her sisters, Sr Diane OP and Sarah McNamara, her brother William, her nieces, nephews, grandnieces and grandnephews and her six beloved little great-grandnephews and great-grandnieces.
“Give her of the fruit of her hands: and let her own works praise her in the gates.” Proverbs 31:31.