Mary MacKillop
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Blessed Mary Helen MacKillop (January 15, 1842 - August 8, 1909) was an Australian Roman Catholic nun, who together with Father J.T. Woods founded the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart. Since her death she has attracted much veneration within Australia as a symbol of the strength of the early Catholic church, and as such is the only Australian to be beatified, with many Australians awaiting her canonisation as Saint.
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[edit] Early life
Mary was born to Alexander MacKillop and Flora Mackillop in Fitzroy, Victoria in 1842. Her parents came from the Roman Catholic area, which was located around the village of Roy Bridge, near Fort William in North West Scotland. The eldest of eight children, she was well educated at the insistence of her father who himself spent a few years studying for the priesthood in Rome before bad health. Alexander eventually migrated to Australia from his native Scotland with his father in 1835.
Unfortunately, Alexander lacked financial skills and the family was often destitute, living without a home and relying on other wealthier members of the family.
At the age of 14, Mary earned her living as a governess and substantially helped support her family. She spent a brief time as a teacher in Portland, Victoria before moving to Penola, South Australia to act as the governess of the children of Alexander Cameron, her uncle by marriage. She was already concerned with helping the poor and taught other needy local children with the Camerons. It was about this time that she decided that she would like to become a nun. Through these actions, she met Father Julian Tenison Woods, the local Catholic priest, who needed help in the religious education of children in his large parish. At the time, her family still relied on her financial support so she was unable to take up the offer.
After working for the Camerons for two years, he moved back to Portland to take up another teaching job and opened his own boarding school, Bayview House. This enabled the financial security his family needed and they joined her in Portland.
While teaching in Portland, Father Woods asked Mary and her two sisters, Annie and Lexie to come to Penola and start a Catholic school. In 1866, Mary opened the first Saint Joseph's School in a disused stable in Penola under the guidance of Father Woods teaching around fifty children.
Saint Joseph's School was the first free Catholic school in Australia. At that time, only the rich could afford schooling. At Mary's school, pupils were accepted whether their parents could afford to pay or not.
[edit] Legacy
Although she still felt a religious calling to become a nun, she was unable to find an order that suited her, so she and Father Woods started their own. In 1867, Mary became the first Sister, and Mother Superior, of the newly formed Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart. Dedicated to the education of the children of the poor, it was the first religious order to be founded by an Australian. The rules written up by Father Woods and Mary for the Sisters to live by were; An emphasis on poverty, a dependence on Divine Providence, no ownership of personal belongings as God would provide and the Sisters would go wherever they were needed. The rules were approved by Bishop Sheil. By the end of 1867 ten other Sisters had joined the Josephites.
She was asked by Bishop Shiel to come to Adelaide to start a school there and she moved to the new Grote Street convent in 1867. In 1869 she and some of the Josephite sisters arrived in Brisbane (Saint Stephen's Chapel, N.D.). They were based at Kangaroo Point and took the ferry or rowed across the Brisbane River to attend Mass at the Pugin Chapel. She left Brisbane in 1871. By the end of 1869 more than seventy Sisters were educating children at twenty-one schools in Adelaide and the country. Mary and her Josephites were also involved with an orphanage, neglected children, girls in danger, the aged poor and in Kapunda a reformatory, a home for the aged and incurably ill. Generally, the Sisters were prepared to follow farmers, railway workers and miners into the isolated outback and live as they lived. They shared the same hardships whilst educating their children.
[edit] Excommunication
In 1871, Mary was wrongly excommunicated by Bishop Sheil, who was against most of the things she had fought for, on the grounds that 'she had incited the sisters to disobedience and defiance'. An Episcopal Commission exonerated her and she was reinstated in St Ignatius Church in 1872.
Despite her ordeal she never publicly blamed the church leaders for their actions.
[edit] Josephites expand
The Sisters spread, in groups to small outback settlements and large cities around Australia. By 1877 it operated more than forty schools in and around Adelaide, with many others in Queensland and New South Wales. Today there are schools in New Zealand, Peru and Brazil and the order have administered education and aid at refugee camps in Uganda and Thailand. Mary and these early Sisters, together with other Religious Orders and Lay Teachers of the time, had a profound influence on the forming of Catholic Education as it is today. Mary also opened orphanages and Providences to care for the homeless and destitute both young and old, and Refuges for ex-prisoners and ex-prostitutes who wished to make a fresh start in life.
[edit] Death
Throughout her life Mary suffered ill health. She suffered from rheumatism and after a stroke in New Zealand in 1902, became paralysed on her right side. For seven years she had to rely on a wheelchair to move around but her speech and mind were as good as ever. She died on August 8, 1909 in the convent in Mount Street, North Sydney.
After her burial, people continuously took earth from around her grave and as a result her remains were transferred, on 27 January 1914, to a vault before the altar of the Mother of God in the Memorial Chapel in Mount Street Sydney.
[edit] Beatification
The conviction that she was a saint grew stronger with the years, but Australia had no experience of how to go about having someone canonized. Eventually in 1925 the Mother General of the congregation, Mother Laurence, was encouraged by the Apostolic Delegate, Archbishop Cattaneo, to take the necessary initiative.
Due to countless technical difficulties, it took until 1993 to prove that Mary had been responsible for a miracle.
His Holiness Pope John Paul II formally beatified Mary MacKillop on 19 January 1995 at Randwick Racecourse in Sydney.
To be canonized, the postulator of the cause must now prove the existence of a second miracle.
[edit] Other information
In 2001, a Callistemon shrub was released in Australia to honour Mary Mackillop and friends (http://www.abc.net.au/cgi-bin/common/printfriendly.pl?/gardening/stories/s429579.htm)
MacKillop College in Bathurst and MacKillop Catholic College in Canberra were both named after Blessed Mary MacKillop.
[edit] Reference
Saint Stephen's Chapel (N.D.). Unpublished Guide notes. Brisbane: Author.
