Perth Archbishop Timothy Costelloe SDB has held up Saint Mary of the Cross MacKillop as the clearest Australian witness to a holiness drawn from the Eucharist, in a new conversation released for the national lead-up to the International Eucharistic Congress in Sydney in 2028.
Archbishop Costelloe, a systematic theologian, joined Professor Hayden Ramsay, Chair of the Theological Commission for Eucharist28, for the fifth volume in the congress video series, titled “The Eucharist and Sanctity.”
Across the episode and its companion reflection, he sets out why communion stands at the heart of Catholic faith and how that communion shapes a life of practical love.
Archbishop Costelloe opens with the Creed that Catholics profess each Sunday and its affirmation of the Communion of Saints.
He describes that belief as a reminder that communion and unity sit at the centre of who God calls his people to be.
Drawing on the Second Vatican Council, he explains that the Church exists as a sign and instrument of communion with God and unity among all people, a communion that reaches across time and space because it rests in Christ.
That communion takes concrete form in the saints, whom Pope Saint John Paul II called the lived theology of the Church.
As Australia prepares for the congress, Archbishop Costelloe urges Catholics to look to Mary MacKillop, the nation’s only canonised saint, to grasp what faithful discipleship looks like in this part of the world.
Mary MacKillop, he notes, was an ordinary woman who did extraordinary things, born in inner-Melbourne Fitzroy to an immigrant family and formed by the same land and life as those she served.
Her sisters recalled the hours she spent in silent vigil before the Blessed Sacrament, and in that prayer her mission took root.
Archbishop Costelloe traces the link MacKillop understood between the Christ she received in the Eucharist and the Christ she met in the poor. The same Lord who called her to rest awhile in prayer, he writes, also called her to feed, clothe, visit and love him in those most in need. That conviction produced her best-known counsel to never see a need without doing something about it, alongside a quieter instruction to her sisters to never forget who it is they are following.
Archbishop Costelloe closes on the Words of Institution, in which the Eucharist stands as the source and summit of Christian life. Catholics drawn into communion with Christ, he writes, are called to make of their lives a gift for others, pouring themselves out as he did and as MacKillop did after him.
The full podcast is live here: https://eucharist28.org/videos/eucharist-and-sanctity.
The school resources can be found here: https://eucharist28.org/schools/eucharist-and-sanctity.
The parish resources, including the original text by the Archbishop (‘academic text’), can be found here: https://eucharist28.org/parishes/eucharist-and-sanctity.