Centenary Mass for Blessed Mary MacKillop
St. Mary's Church, North Sydney
Col. 3:12-17; Mt. 6:25-34
+ Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney
8 Aug 2009
Today we celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the death of Mother Mary of the Cross. We are gathered to thank God for her wonderful contribution and ask His continued blessing on the Josephite sister.
We know her better as Blessed Mary MacKillop, because Pope John Paul II declared her "blessed" in 1995, which is one stage short of being officially proclaimed a saint. It is almost completely certain that she will become our first publicly recognized Australian saint and we hope Pope Benedict will make this declaration soon.
We should remember that the Catholic Church celebrates the feast of her saints on the day they die rather than on the day they are born to emphasize the reality of life after death and the importance of God, who is the main cause of our happiness in heaven.
It is not easy to become a saint, (or so they tell me), not merely because it takes hard work to follow Christ's teachings heroically across a lifetime, but because the Vatican conducts a detailed examination of the evidence over many years.
To help him in this task the Pope has a Vatican department, the Congregation for the Saints, which decides not merely that the person proposed has done wonderful good works but also that they were persons of exemplary faith and prayer, hope and love. The term "devil's advocate" comes from the older canonization processes.
Therefore a saint is an outstanding follower of Jesus Christ, a model for everyone of how to live a full Catholic life.
Often Catholics have a devotion to a particular saint, because they admire the way that saint lived or because they feel that particular saint in heaven would understand them, listen to their prayers and intercede for them with Jesus Christ. I went to pray at the tomb of Mary MacKillop immediately before my installation as archbishop of Sydney.
Naturally Catholics do not worship the saints, because only the one true God, Father, Son and Spirit, is worthy of our deepest reverence and highest love. Like all Christians, Catholics worship the one true God alone, but they admire the saints, respect their example and ask for their prayers. Mary the mother of Jesus is the greatest saint, but there is an infinity of difference between the majesty of God and even the most wonderful of Christ's followers.
A saint has to live the Christian virtues in an heroic way, but often they live ordinary lives, doing their small daily tasks extraordinarily well. Mary was not a fantastic eccentric like the stigmatic Francis of Assisi, did not perform the miracles attributed to Joseph of Cupertino, and did not travel and baptize like Francis Xavier (although she travelled a lot visiting her convents), but she was a great and good woman, who was determined that young Australians would come to know Christ and the Catholic tradition and receive enough education to prepare them for life.
She knew this would mean trouble and she would encounter difficulties, because she took the name "Mother Mary of the Cross".
Saints need not be persons who come from other countries and from distant ages because every community needs its home-grown heroes, local models to encourage it in the right direction. We Australians need Blessed Mary as a guide and encouragement. Australians too can be good and indeed very good.
Mary was born in Melbourne on 15 January 1842 in Brunswick Street, Fitzroy, the eldest of eight children of Alexander MacKillop and Flora MacDonald, who had emigrated – separately – from the western highlands of Scotland a few years earlier. By happy choice in the year 2000 the Archdiocese of Melbourne opened the Mary of the Cross Centre at her birthplace for the support of families suffering from the effects of drug and alcohol abuse.
Mary was baptized at St. Francis' Church, Lonsdale Street, and grew up in the then-fledgling settlement of Melbourne where local legend has it, that she and her brothers and sisters played under the gum tree outside St. Francis' after Mass on Sundays. That gum was used to construct the bishop's chair in St. Patrick's Cathedral. Originally prosperous, the family soon fell into financial difficulties.
Working as a governess in Penola, South Australia, she came under the influence of the local priest, an unusual English geologist, Father Julian Tenison Woods and together they founded the Sisters of St. Joseph of the Sacred Heart.
She started her first school in 1866 when Australian education was something of a shambles before the "free, compulsory and secular" reforms of the 1870s. Many children did not go to school or want to go to school. In eighteen months she gained ten followers and a year later there were thirty nine sisters.
By the time of her death in 1909, she had established 109 houses, staffed by 650 sisters teaching 12,400 pupils in 117 schools across Australia and New Zealand.
Within the Catholic Church the fundamentals remain unchanged over the centuries, but popular understandings of these essentials, styles of prayer and personal devotion, the range of church activities and agencies do change across the generations and we must be careful to recognize Mary MacKillop in her own terms first of all, not reshaping her according to our present religious or even secular insights. It says something that we pray to her as Blessed Mary MacKillop, not Blessed Mary of the Cross.
Mary was not was not just a fine educator and philanthropist, although she was that. She was a saint and it was her love of God and his only son Jesus Christ which drove her on and prevented her from lapsing into bitterness at her mistreatment. She was not an agnostic like a number of worthy Australian heroes, but a woman of faith and daily personal prayer. She remained totally loyal to the church leaders even when they treated her disgracefully.
Scotland is still a rather anti-Catholic country and her Scottish background helps older Australians recognize that she was one of us. She lived here in North Sydney, is now buried here among us. She worshipped in the North Sydney chapel and in the half completed St. Mary's Cathedral. She crossed the Harbour in the ferry before there was a Harbour bridge and travelled slowly by horse and train to visit her convents and works of mercy.
Mary had many problems during her life, not only with bishops - one excommunicated her and another expelled her from Adelaide - but with her own sisters, who divided into the "Brown Joeys" and the "Black Joeys" under the control of the local bishop; with the shortage of money and with bad health; spending the last eight years of her life as an invalid after a stroke, although her mental faculties were unimpaired.
Despite all this she put God's work first. She wanted to do what God wanted and succeeded brilliantly, which explains why God blessed her efforts with so much fruit for her strong faith gave her the strength and tenacity to stick to her purposes, to refuse to abandon her principles.
She wasn't just looking out for herself. She practised the virtues Paul preached to the Colossians, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. She practised love by following the beatitudes and the Commandments.
She was a wise adviser to her sisters because she accepted Christ's message into her heart. She was grateful for the blessings she received and this enabled her to inspire confidence and transmit peace of heart to her sisters.
I hope that many of our young will be like Blessed Mary and do great things for the Church and our country of Australia and I hope and pray that all of us will be inspired by her example and pray to her that our faith and goodness will be strengthened and that Australia will remain decent, safe and prosperous.
In the Name of the Father, and of Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
