Katherine Butler

Sister Katherine Butler (27 May 1914 – 8 August 2000) was a nun with the Religious Sisters of Charity, teacher, writer, and aviator. Butler was one of the first women to get a pilot's licence in Ireland. 2Early life Born Katherine Bayley Butler, she was the eldest of two daughters of James Bayley Butler and Katherine Butler (née McWeeney). Both she and her sister Beatrice attended Alexandra College, Dublin, and later the Ursuline convent, Waterford. Butler had decided to take up a religious vocation from age 17, but was persuaded to wait until she was 21 by her parents. She used this time to undertake a degree in science at University College Dublin. 2Aviation Butler had become interested in aviation after seeing Sir Alan Cobham's Air Circus in the early 1930s, and so began to take flying lessons at Kildonan Aerodrome, with pilots such as John Currie. On 15 January 1936 she became the third woman in Ireland to receive a pilot's licence. She entered the novitiate of the Sisters of Charity in Milltown, Dublin five days later, on 20 January. She was given the name Sr Mary Alphonsus, though later reverted to Katherine Butler, remarking that "there were no nuns with double-barrel names." 2Educational career and later life Having finished her novitiate, Butler graduated as a teacher in 1938 and spent many years in the professio