Celebrating Mary MacKillop this weekend – and some MSC links
Sunday is the feast day of our saint, Mary MacKillop (1842-1909). Her congregation has the name and patronage of St Joseph – whose special year this is. There is also the naming of The Sacred Heart.
St Joseph is described in the liturgy as a wise and just man. Mary MacKillop’s congregation has shown a sense of justice responding to 19th century challenges, and the sisters continuing to take stances, act, commit themselves to the continuous emergence of justice issues. That is their wisdom.
Fr Matthew Smith MSC was one of the priests who administered the last rites to St Mary.
Fr Paul Stenhouse MSC celebrated the daily morning Mass in the North Sydney chapel for many years during the 1960s and 1970s. MSC Priests also served with Mass supply for other communities like St Margaret’s in Darlinghurst.
Several MSC brothers and priests had sisters in the congregation, Brothers James McNamara, Terry Barry, Fathers John Burford, Frank Crilley. Fr Norbert Earl’s sister, Sister Denis, became Superior General in the 1960s. Today, Peter Carroll’s sister, Therese, has also been part of MSC groups, especially a consultant for aged care.
A Malone story of a grandaunt: Catherine Malone was born in Braidwood, NSW, in 1863. She met Mary MacKillop in 1881 and was invited to join the sisters, a friend of Mary, working in Josephite schools in New Zealand and Australia, dying at an advanced age in 1956. There is a postscript concerning the Madigan-Malone link. Mary Mackillop stayed at Philip Madigan’s hotel in Araluen on the southern NSW goldfields as did the sisters for nine months while the convent and school were built.
And a connection with the NT mission and community of Wadeye, Deacon Boniface Perdjert. Fr Brendan Reed, PP Deepdene, was present at the canonisation and notes: The Mass of Thanksgiving, on the day after the canonisation of Mary of the Cross, was celebrated with the inclusion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australian Catholics. Members of the Aboriginal Community ceremoniously danced the gifts of bread and wine to the altar. The late Aboriginal Deacon Boniface Perdjert, from the Northern Territory, assisted at the Mass. And after the Mass, a group of Aboriginal Catholics prayed and sang over the burial place of the young Francis Xavier Conaci, the young Aboriginal man who had accompanied Father Salvado to Rome in the mid-nineteenth century.
Finally, we are still trying to solve the mystery of the cloth from 1866, the year of the foundation of the Sisters of St Joseph, held in the museum in Mount Street, North Sydney. It contains the Latin motto that Jules Chevalier, Founder of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart from the later 1850s. Where did Mary MacKillop come across the motto, aged 24, founding the congregation, a motto in Latin from France? Fortuitous or a connection? No one has come up with a solution. We still hope.
