Tony Pasin (Barker, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is an honour to speak to this motion celebrating the sesquicentenary of the establishment of the order of the Sisters of St Joseph. It was a great privilege for me to join the Josephites on 20 March of this year to celebrate this anniversary at Penola, where the original Josephite seed was sown.

As I said in my maiden speech in this place, I regard myself blessed to serve an electorate so intrinsically linked to the life of our nation's only saint. While many now lay claim to Saint Mary of the Cross MacKillop, including the member for North Sydney—who, it must be said, needs to be congratulated for bringing this motion to the House—Mary's spiritual home is and will always be Penola, deep in the heart of Barker, in the south-east of South Australia. After all, it was there that a young governess met Father Julian Tenison-Woods, who inspired her journey in faith and who, in partnership, established the order.

For me, the Josephite story is a difficult one. The order was established by MacKillop and Woods on St Joseph's Day, 19 March 1866. It was on St Joseph's Day that my brother, ironically named after St Joseph, was taken from our family in a tragic work accident. So this day, which commemorates for so many the establishment of an order that has done so much good, is for me a particularly sad anniversary.

It was the father of Federation, Sir Henry Parkes, who probably best summarised the tenacity, determination and focus of the Sisters of St Joseph when he said, 'The Sisters of St Joseph are like white ants: once they've entered a locality you can't even starve them out.' It should be noted, of course, that Parkes's less than charitable reference owed much to the fact that he and Mary MacKillop shared different views on the role of the church in education. Parkes's attitude was not, thankfully, the prevailing view across the colonies of Australia at the time.

When the sisters were forced out of Queensland, The Brisbane Courier reported:

We regret extremely to hear that the Sisters of St Joseph are about to withdraw from Brisbane. The children of the working class and those of the entirely destitute have been taken under their care and educated in their schools. No distinction of creed has ever been made, the only passport to the favour of the Sisters of St Joseph being the need of assistance. Catholic or Protestant, Jew or Gentile, have been equally welcomed.

Without the heroic mission of the religious Sisters of St Joseph, who established primary and secondary schools throughout Australia from the 1870s onwards, a generation of Australian Catholics would never have gained the sound knowledge of the faith and access to the sacraments.

The Josephites established hundreds of schools across Australia with no support from state or federal governments. In these schools not only was Catholicism taught but the sisters, by their exemplary lives, gave living witness to the faith and inspired a deep devotion to it, which was maintained in the Catholic community. The fact that until the late 1960s over half of Australia's Catholic population attended mass every Sunday was a measure of the contribution these teaching religious orders, like the Josephites, made to the church and to Australian society.

Saint Mary embodied great personal holiness. Mary created a vision of what was needed to address the religious and educational crisis of her time. She had a ready willingness to accept the responsibilities which she had assumed and the burden of suffering which her vocation demanded. In the Josephites she created a vehicle to address the religious and educational crisis.

It is important to acknowledge Mary in this place because, of course, Mary and Woods understood the interrelationship between the sacred and the secular, and, indeed, a seat in the South Australian House of Assembly is named in her honour. She faced many challenges, including an excommunication, the product of bishops who had the ear of some and who were jealous of her success. We should also acknowledge today the people who assisted Mary on her journey. In particular, I refer to Joanna Barr Smith and Emanuel Solomon. Emanuel was a Jewish man, which is fitting given that St Joseph was a Jew.

Guided by Mother Mary's great holiness, the Josephites have tended to the poorest and most neglected parts of God's vineyard for 150 years. May they continue to do so for another 150 years.

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