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Recognising a woman of faith

The Drum Rachael Kohn

Mary MacKillop dedicated her life to educating the rural poor.

Actors receive Oscars, scientists are awarded Nobel Prizes, but what recognition is accorded the outstanding men and women of faith?

A place in heaven you might quip, but down on earth their lives of selfless devotion remain largely unnoticed by a public that is more interested in glorifying teenage rock bands than the unglamorous people who live to help others.

And there are lots of them, chaplains and pastoral care workers, for example, who work in prisons and hospitals, giving people the emotional support and spiritual care they need in the most difficult times of their lives.

Compelled by faith in a God of love and compassion, these people are the anonymous saints in our community, who aren't in it for the money or the fame of which there is precious little of either for the work they do.

Perhaps that is why the canonisation of Mother Mary MacKillop (1842-1909), a woman who dedicated her life to educating the rural poor, will be welcomed by Australians, whatever their faith or lack of it.

Not, I would guess, because she is said to have performed miracles of healing posthumously, but because she exhibited the characteristics we admire: spirited determination, independence, and a keen sense of justice and fair play.

She even had a nose for bogus spiritual claims when a couple of sisters in the order pretended to be mystics in a bid to impress Mary's friend, the charismatic Father Julian Tenison Woods.

Even her loyalty to Father Julian, who had helped her in the early days, was sorely tested by his insistent claims to prophecy. In contrast, Mary's own divine calling was not to serve some extravagant belief in her own importance, but to establish a network of schools for destitute children who would otherwise have no chance to rise above the most grinding poverty.

Australians familiar with her story would be astounded at Mary's confidence, when in 1873 the country girl travelled solo to Rome (while Italy was still recovering from the revolution, the Risorgimento,) for an audience with the Pope to seek approval of both the rule of her order, the Sisters of Saint Joseph, and its method of central organisation.

Having been excommunicated merely two years before by Bishop Sheil, Mary weathered opposition by bishops who were angered by her method of central organisation which effectively disempowered them.

Even her old friend, Fr Julian, was incensed that she had rewritten the rule which he had drafted for the sisters. Fortunately, Mary and her sisters were greatly appreciated by the wider community, and when the church abandoned them, even Protestants and Jews, including the South Australian Member of Parliament, Emanuel Solomon, provided much needed financial support.

It is hard to imagine a similar story being played out in today's Roman Catholic Church. Just think of it, a 30-year-old woman with a history of insubordination, gaining the approval of the Pope after just one visit.

The Vatican's treatment of nuns in the modern period could not be more different. Sixty years ago when the Church was undergoing its greatest modern reformation, the Second Vatican Council, women were excluded during the first two sessions and their reluctant admission amounted to 23 spectators among nearly 3,000 men.

In an extensive study of nuns in America, Kenneth Briggs documents the hostility, rejection, high handedness and ultimately the betrayal of American women religious and their congregations. Little wonder that the nun is fast on the road to extinction, with their numbers shrinking in America from 180,000 in 1965 to just 68,000 in 2006, a reduction by almost two thirds in just over 40 years.

And it is a trend that is not likely to see a turnaround as the Church returns to pre-Vatican II positions, a drift that has left even less hope for religious communities, which are aging and living on stipends that are meagre compared with their professional cohort in secular society.

As more nuns seek university lectureships and other professional positions, their religious life requiring obedience to a distant male hierarchy seems less and less acceptable.

Occasionally, they write books that examine the problems facing women religious, such as Sister Barbara Fiand's Refocusing the Vision and Wrestling with God: Religious Life in Search of its Soul and Maryanne Confoy's Religious Life and Priesthood, and sometimes they see their books pulped on order of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, prompting their departure from religious life.

But it remains an open question whether their books are a map for a new future for nuns or are a collective swan song of a part of Catholic heritage that, as Briggs put it, is passing out of existence with relatively little notice.

No-one would dispute that Mary McKillop is deserving of the Church's highest accolade, but in a strange sort of way saintship confers on her a status that sees her as a passive vessel of God and plays down, if it doesn't mask, the very strong personality that made her a woman to reckon with.

By valorising her for miracle healings she is said to have wrought for the faithful who prayed to her, one is deflected from the story of a woman who resisted the bishops of her day who schemed to undermine her when she refused to hand over her schools, convents and charitable organisations to their control.

Characteristically, Mary continued to defy convention. Her disinterest in setting up fee-paying schools for well-heeled Catholics placed further strain on her relationship to bishops as well as to some of her own sisters, who would have preferred a more middle-class life with a guaranteed income.

Resolute in her commitment to providing care and education to the destitute, Mary paid the price with a life full of physical pain and the constant stress of insufficient funds, which probably led to the stroke at age 59 that left her physically debilitated for the last eight years of her life.

My guess is that the canonisation of Mary MacKillop will be welcomed by nuns less for the miracles and more because her struggles continue to be their struggles.

They can identify with a woman who would not acknowledge absolute obedience to the wishes of her superiors, but only "where these wishes were just."

And as for the anonymous saints out there in our community, who work selflessly for others, their halos continue to go unacknowledged and uncelebrated, but maybe Mary's story will begin to make us realise that they are an important part of the Australian story, past and present.

Rachael Kohn is a producer and presenter of The Spirit of Things on ABC Radio National Sunday 6:05pm and Tuesday 1:05pm.

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