I’m tickled pink that Mary MacKillop is Australia’s first saint. A) Cause she’s a girl. B) Cause she’s a nun (and nuns are pretty cool – I was considering it myself at one point). C) Cause as a person, she’s a real Aussie.
You see, Mary espoused a lot of the virtues that have made Australia the country it is – she was a hard worker, she was loyal to her friends, she spoke up on behalf of the downtrod, when people were in trouble she went out and helped them and when the bureaucracy of the Catholic Church tried to put her in her place, she told them where they could stick it. Yep, that great Aussie irreverence for authority.
In fact, at one point Mary was excommunicated because she was considered such a rebel – that means basically she was chucked out of the church and banned from any of the sacraments. The Bishop of Adelaide didn’t agree with the rules Mary established for her new order of nuns, nor with their educational practices and tried to make her change, but Mary refused to budge and was removed from the church for a few months before the bishop relented.
Mary was in a lot of ways your typical frontier sort of woman – tough, determined, hard-working, no bullshit - it’s just that instead of being driven by love of a man, or love of her children, Mary was driven by love of God.
The first school I taught at, St Nicholas of Myra in Penrith, had the distinction of being one of the schools founded by Mary herself. The other primary school in the Penrith parish is called Mary MacKillop Primary. They had to put a Blessed up in front of her name when she was beautified in 1995, and are now going to have to take that down and put up the ST. So this canonisation thing is going to be expensive in many ways :)
I’ve been lucky enough in my life to have met some seriously cool nuns. These were women who saw their vows as giving them a responsibility not just to be good, but to do good. They saw they had a part in the fight for justice and equality. They were feminists who wanted to find the way within the structure they had to serve to give everyone the sense of power they deserved.
Everything I’ve read of Mary strikes me that she was this type of woman, and that’s why I’m really pleased that she is Australia’s first saint.