Blessed Mary MacKillop

By every criterion, Mary MacKillop, the first Australian to be beatified, was a most heroic, saintly, intelligent woman, a brilliant administrator, a realistic visionary for promoting the faith in the most difficult and remote parts throughout the huge continent of Australia and New Zealand. She had an extraordinary genius for understanding people from every stratum of life because she loved everybody, so forgiving and compassionate. By world standards, spiritual and secular, she was surely one of the truly great women of the 19th century.

Early life

Mary was born in Melbourne in 1842. Her father, Alexander MacKillop, was a Highland Scot. Before Mary, his first child, was a year old, he had to sell the family house to pay debts. He left his wife and seven children behind, without support, to make a two-year sentimental journey to Scotland and while he was away, the farm mortgage was foreclosed on.

He was not a drunk but enjoyed many visits to hotels, sometimes spending money his wife and children had gained with much difficulty for essential ends.

When he died, Mary wrote to her mother: 'I am sure you cannot regard Papa's death as a trial'.

As the oldest child and the most capable member of the family, Mary often bore the responsibility for the support of her mother, brothers and sisters that rightly belonged to her father.

In 1864, when she was twenty-two (and before she became a religious) Mary managed to organise a school with a residence large enough to bring all the family together.

With typical magnanimity she wrote. 'It is so pleasant to have Papa with us. He is so nice, kind and good to us all. I do not remember being so happy'.

Four years later he died, an apparent failure, but the positive side of his life story is this: the broad education this intelligent Scot had received in his seminary days, was not wasted.

With deep sensitivity, Fr Gardiner finishes his biography reminding us that Alexander did not employ his intellect as intended, as a priest, but his talents were brought to focus on his daughter Mary, whom he educated. 'She never attended any high class school, her education was clearly of a superior quality. It can only be explained by the influence of her father... Alexander may have considered himself a failure, and so may many others, but there could well be a very different verdict to pass on his life'. (1)

He educated Mary and his intellectual gifts were, as it were, sublimated in Mary and her brilliant educational vision.

The humble beginnings of the Sisters of St Joseph

Under Mary's direction this new, unique Institute of St Joseph had its origins in a small country town, Penola, in South Australia and soon spread to other parts of Australia - Queensland, Bathurst, Sydney (NSW), Victoria and ultimately New Zealand.

Inevitably the authorities in Rome had no idea of the size of Australia and the complexities of starting Catholic education in remote and poor bush towns. When writing to Rome for approval of her institute, Mary stressed a most important point: 'What would seem much out of place in Europe is still the very reverse in Australia...' Rome could hardly understand that Australia was a continent as large as Europe.

Mary's new institute of sisters fitted easily in the Australian scene. They lived poorly and in little houses like the people around them. Because of the utter simplicity of their lifestyle, they were the perfect solution to the Church's educational problem as Government funds were no longer available.

Throughout her long life, Mary always showed boundless courage and vision. She realised only too well the indifference of secular governments towards the Catholic poor but she aimed to defend human dignity and human rights against the many public and secular powers that were directed against them. Her vision was not restricted to one section - but the whole continent, long before political unity was achieved at Federation in 1901.

Many trials and crosses

It was a grand and most heroic vision but inevitably its achievement would call for much toil, hardship, opposition (even from bishops) and many trials, but Mary, with boundless faith in the power of Christ - because she was doing his work - could well echo the famous sentiments of the 16th century English Jesuit martyr, St Edmund Campion: 'The expense is reckoned, the enterprise is begun, It is of God and cannot be withstood'.

The most difficult family and financial problems of Mary's early life must have steeled and annealed her soul - in God's providence - for the many trials, misunderstandings, calumnies that would seem to be the inevitable lot of all those who try to do big things for Christ, e.g. the Jesuit founder, St Ignatius Loyola, with his new concept of an order of priests who would go everywhere, mix with the world and not be confined to monastic life. And the great St Teresa of Avila, the innovative reformer of the Carmelite nuns, one of the most brilliant and saintly women in the history of the Church and now declared a Doctor of the Church, felt the full blast of calumnies and crosses, and wrote in her classic book The Way of Perfection: 'It takes great humility to find oneself unjustly condemned and to be silent, and to do this is to imitate our Lord. The truly humble person will have a genuine desire to be thought little of, and persecuted and condemned unjustly even in serious matters... On the cross, Our Lord had only a thief to defend him'.

Mary MacKillop would later be known as Mother Mary of the Cross because she suffered so much, often, alas, at the hands of the Church, especially certain bishops and such trials would be the hardest to bear and call for heroic faith.

One eminent modern theologian expressed it thus: 'I don't mind suffering for the Church but not from the Church'. Cardinal Newman in the last century is a classic example. It was Mary's incredible faith, spirit of forgiveness and patience throughout her constant trials that won the admiration of all who knew her and are the hallmarks of heroic sanctity.

There were two visits to Rome to get final approbation for her institute, only to suffer delays, anxieties, uncertainties and loneliness. She wrote: 'Bodily health bad but mental stress worse than all'. Ultimately her institute was substantially approved, especially the vital question of central government which meant that the institute was not under the authority of the bishop in each diocese but a single mother general.

By 1874 she had achieved what she had set out to do. Poor Mary had been excommunicated (albeit invalidly) in 1871 by Bishop Sheil of Adelaide. There were many tussles with other bishops who had not her grand vision and boundless faith.

The spirituality of Mary

Her whole emphasis was on the deep spiritual life and charity was what she considered the essence of her institute. She wrote: 'Are we not religious first - teachers second?' She proposes to her sisters the charity and obedience God expects of them. There is always a realistic acceptance of human limitations. She warned: 'Don't try to do too much ... God knows we cannot do impossibilities'. Mary constantly reminded her sisters that the difficulties that are inevitable in all human life, sometimes resulting in heavy crosses, must be seen in the light of faith as a precious sharing in the sufferings of Christ, and echoing St Paul she wrote: 'If our intention is pure and we have charity in our hearts, we shall have God with us - and with him on our side, what need we fear?'

The Josephite sisters, valiant women scattered all over Australia, often in small communities and in remote country towns, living in dire poverty, in the extremes of heat and cold, needed all the spiritual guidance and encouragement they could get - and Mother Mary, by her letters and example - certainly gave it.

Mary's humanity

In assessing the saints we must strip away all pious accretions and fantasies and see the humanity and realism in the saints. Mary's best lessons were taught by example. When visiting a very poor country convent which had scarcely any food, a simple meal was prepared for Mother Mary when a poor man knocked at the door and asked for food. When she saw the man, Mary said: 'Give that poor creature what you have prepared for me. The very look of him would draw tears from a stone. A cup of tea and a slice of bread and butter will be sufficient for me. It will do me more good to give him a dinner'.

When farmers at Mount Remarkable declined to drive her to Port Augusta to attend a dying sister, Mary followed them into the hotel and demanded they at least lend her a horse so she could ride to the deathbed! Such compassion and concern inspired one of the farmers to get his cart and drive her there himself.

On another occasion, in one of her schoolsy Mary ripped out a partition that someone had built to separate fee-paying children from 'charity' ones. 'The qualities of goodness were described by the apostle Paul in the 13th chapter of the first letter to the Corinthians and Mary had them all'' writes Fr Gardiner. 'She had more than enough grievances to brood over and what she endured would have provoked a stone to anger. Yet she made allowances for the grossest behaviour, excused the inexcusable and repaid unkind treatment with sweetness that astonished those who witnessed it...

'She respected all, high and low, because every person she met had an unspeakable dignity as a son or daughter of God, redeemed by Christ ...

It was the, outcasts of society that were her speciality, poverty-stricken children, orphans, prostitutes, prisoners, murderers. It was the untitled poor who had first place in her heart, people of flesh and blood and dirt and squalor, children who had never known love.'

Fr Gumpel SJ, who worked with Fr Gardiner SJ, for Mary's beatification, summed up her life thus: 'It was a flesh and blood fulfilment in a rough vale of tears, not the attainment of one protected from life's harsher realities ... This is a story of goodness enduring all things'.

Mary's death leagacy

In 1909 Mother Mary died after a long illness. As she looked back on her life, from the humble origins of one school in obscure Penola, her achievement was truly prodigious; 650 Sisters of St Joseph caring for eleven charitable institutions, one hundred and seventeen schools educating 12,409 children! Little could she have dreamed then that in less than ninety years the pope himself would fly all the way to Sydney for her beatification. Surely one of Australia's - and the world's - great personalities!

(1) Fr Gardiner SJ is the official postulator for the canonisation of Mary MacKillop and his recent authorised biography is a classic (E.J. Dwyer, Sydney). Mary had a brother a Jesuit, Fr Donald MacKillop, and throughout her life the Jesuits in Australia and Rome were her constant support. Another recent book is Called to Love. Mary MacKillop, by Felicity O'Brien, ST PAULS, Homebush, 1993.