Feast of Mary MacKillop—August 8

The story of Australian Mary MacKillop (1842–1909) begins with an insecure childhood; no one would’ve been surprised if she wound up in an orphanage. Her father’s financial failures meant the loss of many childhood homes, and constant moving with her seven siblings. But at least he educated the children. At fourteen, Mary went to work to help support the family. With two of her sisters, she eventually started a school in a Penole stable. (Cue “Away in a Manger”?)

When in 1867, Mary founded the Sisters of St. Joseph of the Sacred Heart, their school was revolutionary for admitting both paying and non-paying students. She was the first religious sister outside the cities, and first to educate children in the far-flung regions of the Outback. With characteristic humor, the Australians called the nuns the “Brown Joeys,” the color of their habits like the local kangaroos.

Then the story gets really interesting. The audacity of the congregation being directed by an elected mother general, rather than the local bishop, caused predictable grumbling among Australian hierarchs. Worsening the situation, the sisters lived in the community, not in convents—Mary even consulted a neighbor about the fish she was trying to cook, which had crumbled. Not the way nuns did things then! They were supposed to be above the mundane concerns of ordinary folks.

When Mary and her sisters reported a priest who’d sexually abused children, the tension with Australian bishops hit a peak: for a time they excommunicated her. It’s interesting to speculate how patterns of clerical pedophilia in other countries might have changed if more women—sisters, mothers, teachers, grandmothers–had known, then spoken up.

A diorama in Sydney shows the bishop railing at Mary and kicking her dramatically out on the streets. The country people saved the sisters from starvation, and Mary named those who caused this suffering her “most powerful benefactors.” From a remote corner of the Australian Outback, she tapped an insight known to the world’s wisdom traditions: we sometimes learn more from our “enemies” than our friends.

While the bishops’ names are mercifully forgotten, Mary became Australia’s first canonized saint in 2010. The Harbor Bridge in Sydney bore her name in lights, and Australians belted out in the Vatican their raucous Olympic cheer: “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi, Oi, Oi!”

Excerpt from More Hidden Women of the Gospels, (Orbis, 2020) https://orbisbooks.com/800-258-5838