Ursula Stephens (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Today I would like to speak on the story of Blessed Mary MacKillop. We are all hearing a lot about what will happen in Rome on 17 October. Australians are rightly very proud of Blessed Mary MacKillop, who will be canonised on that day as a saint. Already almost 10,000 Australians have registered to travel to Rome for the occasion, to share in the celebrations, because the lives of Australians over many generations have been significantly shaped by the Sisters of St Joseph carrying out the work begun by their foundress, Mother Mary MacKillop.

So who is this person, why is she so important and why is she being celebrated as such an important Australian? I think it is timely to tell her story in this place. Mary MacKillop was born in 1842 in Melbourne, just a few hundred yards from where St Patrick’s Cathedral now stands. There is actually a plaque in the footpath marking the place of her birth in Brunswick Street, Fitzroy. Her parents were immigrants from the highlands of Scotland and were married in Australia by Victoria’s first priest.

Mary was the eldest of seven children. While she had little formal schooling, her father, who had studied for the priesthood, educated her to a standard of religious and literary knowledge that was unavailable at any colonial school of the period. The discovery of gold at Ballarat in August 1851 brought a dramatic change to the settlement of Port Phillip, as Melbourne was then known. In the roaring fifties, more gold was produced in Australia than in any other decade of the 19th century, and Melbourne became a boom town. Ships swung idly at anchor in Port Phillip Bay, deserted by their crews to join the mad rush of clerks and shopkeepers, government servants and farmers to the spreading goldfields. All this actually resulted in a scarcity of commodities which, paralleled by the use of gold nuggets as currency, triggered wild inflation.

This was the atmosphere in which Mary MacKillop grew up. In 1854, when she was not quite 13, unrest came to a head at Eureka, near Ballarat. The star-crossed flag of the Republic of Victoria flew over the stockade, to be dragged in sad defeat at the heels of a trooper’s horse just three days later. And yet for the last eight years of her life, Mary was to know that same flag as the honoured symbol of one nation, one people, one Commonwealth—Australia.

Mary was what must have been a rarity in the mid-19th century: a business girl. She gained work as a clerk with a printing and stationery firm, receiving the wages of a forewoman, which she used to support her family when her father’s business failed. Later, she worked as a governess in several places in the Western District. While acting as a governess at a homestead near Penola, in South Australia, Mary met Father Julian Tenison Woods, who, with a parish of 22,000 square miles, asked her to help in the religious education of children in the outback.

Early in the 1860s she became a teacher in the Catholic Denominational School at Portland in Victoria, receiving a small salary from the government, and soon afterwards she established there the Bay View House Seminary for Young Ladies in a rented house. It was a curious kind of enterprise—we would call it a ‘social enterprise’ today. It was part private school and part community supported. Here, Father Tenison Woods came into her life for the second time. He was a man with a remarkable and creative mind—a distinguished explorer and scientist as well as one of Australia’s great frontier missionaries. Among other works, he pioneered the geological study of Northern Australia. In 1865 he asked Mary to undertake teaching at a school which he proposed to open in Penola. Early in 1866 she crossed the border into South Australia with her two sisters and her brother John. In Penola a disused stable had been rented and, by dint of some hard work by John MacKillop, it was soon presentable enough to be the beginnings of a school.

All the adventures of these years are documented in Mary’s wonderful letters to her mother, which have been published by the Sisters of St Joseph. Young women came to join Mary, and the congregation of the Sisters of St Joseph was begun. Within five years the tiny community had grown to a body of 120 nuns. Mary met with opposition from people outside the church and even from some within it. In 1867, Mary was asked by Bishop Shiel to come to Adelaide to start a school. South Australia had been founded only 30 years before, with the expressed stipulation that ‘no Irish or Papists need apply’, so the enmity of those outside the church was understandable enough. What was harder for her to bear was, of course, the opposition within the church—opposition along the lines of ecclesiastical authority.

Mary wanted an Australia-wide congregation with a unified direction and common training for all her sisters. The church in Australia—or, more accurately, the churches in the various colonies which were eventually to become Australia—was not yet prepared for such unity of government and unity of purpose. So, in 1874, when she was 32 years of age, Mary decided to go to Rome to seek the approval of the Pope. She travelled in lay dress, partly to cause a minimum of fuss but also to save the expense of a travelling companion. She was certainly a very independent spirit.

Women with the courage of their convictions have made a considerable contribution to the history of this nation, and it is interesting to speculate on what influence Caroline Chisholm had on the vocation of Mary MacKillop. After her return from England in 1854, Mrs Chisholm spent some three years in Melbourne and was a frequent visitor to the MacKillop home in Darebin. Caroline Chisholm was a convert to Catholicism. She spent her early married years as the wife of an officer of the East India Company. In the 1830s they moved to Australia. A woman of strong and fearless character, a brilliant practical mind and simple personal piety, Caroline combined a conservative manner with a social radicalism that challenged the colonial governments and wealthy interests of the day. The story of her journeys on the Australian frontier, riding her white horse Captain and leading her armies of immigrants, caught the imagination of England. The London Punch called her a ‘second Moses in bonnet and shawl’. Perhaps Caroline Chisholm’s greatest and most lasting achievement was the establishment of the dignity of womanhood after the degradation of the convict era. Without rank or wealth, and with very meagre support, Caroline Chisholm settled some 11,000 women in security and independence, and, from the day she dedicated her ‘talents to the God that gave them’, she steadfastly refused any reward for her work.

Caroline Chisholm would have been a greatly honoured guest in the MacKillop home at Darebin. Her greatest achievements were in the process of development. For the young Mary, then in her early teens, the personality and burning enthusiasm of the visitor must have made a lasting impression—particularly about the needs of immigrants. In Sydney, Mary visited immigrant ships and offered what help she and her sisters could. Later, at Mackay in Queensland, she taught catechism to the children of the Kanaka workers—indentured labourers from the islands of the Pacific—in the plantations.

Mary travelled around in a buggy, collecting the children of immigrants to teach them the truths of their faith. This commitment continues in the work that the Sisters of St Joseph are doing today for the migrants—not only for the thousands of migrant children in their city schools, but also those in hostels and detention centres. And, like Caroline Chisholm, Mary MacKillop maintained her spirit of determination and unselfish commitment in the face of fierce opposition, willingly forgiving those who misjudged her. In the most difficult of times, when she was excommunicated from the church, she consistently refused to attack those who wrongly accused her and undermined her work, but continued in the way she believed God was calling her.

Mary and the early sisters, together with other religious orders and lay teachers of the time, had a profound influence on the forming of Catholic education as we have come to know and experience it in Australia today. Over her 40 years of active leadership Mary founded 160 Josephite houses, including 117 schools, 12 homes to care for orphans and the homeless and destitute, and refuges for ex-prisoners and ex-prostitutes who wished to make a fresh start in life. At her death the family she had founded in Christ numbered 1,000 sisters—an extraordinary record.

Throughout her life Mary suffered ill health. Her last years were spent in a wheelchair and she died in 1909. Since then the congregation has grown. It now numbers some 2,500, working mainly in Australia and New Zealand but also scattered singly or in small groups around the world—in Peru, Brazil and in refugee camps in Uganda and Thailand. Most recently, the Sisters of St Joseph have been sending their nuns back to Ireland. The ‘Brown Joeys’ can be seen in big city schools, on dusty bush tracks, in modern hospitals and in caravans working with homeless people, new migrants, Indigenous communities and with the lonely and the unwanted in direct care and advocacy—standing with and speaking with them. In their respect for human dignity and their commitment to social justice, the sisters continue the work that Mary MacKillop began. This feisty Australian woman inspired great dedication to God’s work in the then new colonies.

In today’s world, Mary MacKillop stands as an example of extraordinary courage and trust in her living out of God’s loving and compassionate care of those in need. I know that we will be hearing many local stories of devotion to this wonderful woman—whose prayerful intercessions brought about amazing healings of mind, body and spirit—in the lead-up to the canonisation in just 18 days time.

This is the background to the woman who will be canonised in Rome. Canonisation is the act by which the Pope declares in a definitive and solemn way that the person is actually in the glory of heaven interceding for us before the Lord and is to be publicly venerated by the whole church. There is a complex series of requirements before somebody can be canonised. Without going into the details of the examination of miracles—that is a story for another day—let me explain that the church does not make a saint, it recognises a saint.

Canonisation is actually a double statement: it is about the life of the person but it is also about the faith of the people who are alive at this moment. So while this canonisation recognises Mary MacKillop, it also recognises that we are a part of it. For those who will have the honour of being in Rome for this occasion it will be an extraordinary experience of the faith that is alive in the modern world.

I would like to place on record my appreciation for the fact that the government is supporting the canonisation of Mary MacKillop. The Prime Minister attended a fundraising event in Sydney during the election campaign and made a commitment of $1.5 million to help meet the costs of the canonisation and to contribute to the work of the Mary MacKillop Foundation, which works with rural and remote communities, particularly in supporting disadvantaged families. That commitment was supported by Mr Hockey, representing the opposition. I know that all sides of the parliament and all sides of politics understand that, with the canonisation of Blessed Mary MacKillop, we are honouring a great Australian.