Cardinal Pell reminds Australians that the name chosen by our first official Saint is rich with meaning for the spiritual journey through life, both as individuals and as a nation. We can only find God through the Cross.
St Mary of the Cross MacKillop’s canonisation name is a warning not to play down the personal consequences of original sin and an inspiration to fight the pervasive spiritual anguish, Cardinal George Pell told a thanksgiving Mass for 5,000 Australians at St Paul Outside the Walls in Rome on 18 October.
“Today, we find strange the name she chose for her religious profession, ‘Mary of the Cross’, which explains our preference for the title St Mary MacKillop,” Cardinal Pell said in his homily at a Mass celebrated by 26 Bishops, including Bishops Gerard Holohan of Bunbury and Justin Bianchini of Geraldton, and 222 priests, including several from Perth.
“We like to think of ourselves as positive and affirming and one temptation today in our materially comfortable lives is to downplay the evil and spiritual anguish around us, to soft pedal the costs of redemption and ignore the flaws in our own hearts, the personal consequences of original sin.
“We are not born bad and depraved, but we are born selfish and imperfect. Nineteenth century Catholicism understood all this better than we do.”
This message of Cardinal Pell’s was said within a wider context of his comments in the week leading up to and on the day of the canonisation in Rome, when the prelate tied the event to the critical role of the Church in public life and the validity of the Christian way of life in modern-day Australia.
He said at the Thanksgiving Mass that St Mary worked to give poor Catholic families the capacity to exploit the opportunities provided by Major General Lachlan Macquarie who, after arriving in NSW in 1810, laid the foundation stone of St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney in 1821, though for most of the colony’s first 30 years the public celebration of Mass was forbidden.
Even on becoming governor, Macquarie was obliged to swear on oath that he did not believe in the Catholic dogma of transubstantiation. It was only in 1829 when Irish statesman Daniel O’Connell achieved Catholic emancipation through the British parliament after a long campaign of peaceful mass protests.
Cardinal Pell said many of the convicts were Irish Catholics who were flogged if they did not attend the Protestant service on Sunday and had no freedom to practise their religion. “Their numbers and sometimes their demeanour made officialdom uneasy,” he said.
This comment continues a recurring point the prelate also stressed in the press conference at Vatican Radio in Rome immediately after the 17 October canonisation ceremony up the road in St Peter’s Square: the importance of Christianity in public life.
At Vatican Radio, he praised former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s public recognition of the importance of Christianity in modern Australian society, especially around World Youth Day Sydney 2008. Mr Rudd was one of four in a bipartisan Australian delegation representing the Australian government including Coalition Deputy Julie Bishop, Nationals Senate leader Barnaby Joyce and Labor’s Ursula Stephens.
The quartet’s presence is recognition of “our (the Catholic Church’s) part in the community”, Cardinal Pell said.
He added that, just as the Murray-Darling System upon which much of the south-west depends, can dry and flood, so too has Christianity been “one of the great rivers that has nourished Australian life almost from the beginning”.
“From the first convicts and soldiers there was an evangelical Anglican Protestant who had a pretty hard time of it as Australia wasn’t a particularly religious country for a long time – much less religious than it is now,” he said.
“It was women like Mary MacKillop and the great reforms of State education that started our national history moving.”
The Cardinal noted that Rudd led the government when the first full-time Australian Ambassador to the Holy See – former Deputy Prime Minister Tim Fischer – was appointed.
He said Rudd’s critical contribution to public life was that “he wasn’t frightened to publicly acknowledge the contribution that Christianity has made and continues to make to Australian life”.
“That’s not universal in Australian political life; and I know at WYD that many Bishops and Cardinals from overseas remarked to me on the generous acknowledgement that the then-Prime Minster made and expressed their appreciation.”
St Mary’s canonisation is also a tribute to Catholic education, the prelate said, as the Church now educates 20 per cent of Australians, and added that an increasing percentage of non-Catholic parents have wanted to send their children to Catholic schools over the past 20 years, which overwhelmingly are “doing a good job … producing good adults, good Christians, good Australians”.
Mr Rudd told the Vatican Radio press conference that hearing the lives of the six Blesseds canonised “gives you a sense of smallness”.
Reflecting on Cardinal Pell’s comments, Mr Rudd said that “Australians, whatever their views of religion, it’s important to acknowledge one simple fact – the central role that the Church has played positively in the history of our nation”.
There would have been no churches, hospitals and no care for the poor in the 19th century following European settlement had it not been for the Catholic Church, he said, and “so many institutions which in the 20th century regard themselves as State institutions came out of these Church institutions,” he said.
He added that all charitable works in the 19th century were exclusively the function of the Church.
“So when people are critical of the Church in the modern age – and in a democracy they can say what they want in whatever view that they have – but in the spirit of an open mind and the spirit of a fair sense of history, and an appropriate sense of our future, let us all acknowledge the central place of the Church and the churches in our national life.”
Cardinal Pell said the next day at the thanksgiving Mass that while education was not the only contribution St Mary made, it may be her greatest.
After opening her first school in Penola, South Australia in 1866, Mary was confronted with students who did not want to go to school and parents who were “not too disturbed by this”.
Quoting St Mary to help explain her life’s work, he said that the Sisters as St Joseph’s true children were to “seek first the poorest, most neglected parts of God’s vineyard”.
The Cardinal also said he hopes and prays that St Mary’s arguably most famous exhortation – that the Sisters were “never (to) see an evil without trying to discover how they remedy it” – sinks into the subconscious of all young Australians.
The prelate also said that MacKillop’s life and spirituality proved the power of Christ over whatever life throws at those who believe in Him and seek to live according to His will.
“Unlike some of Australia’s best known humanitarians such as Fred Hollows or Weary Dunlop, Mary’s life was centred on God,” Cardinal Pell said.
“She realised that she was one of those ‘chosen of God, the holy people whom he loves’ and she wrote, ‘I want with all my heart to be what God wants me to be’, to do only God’s will and never to stand in God’s way.
“Whatever she did, she did in the name of the Lord Jesus and she set her heart first of all on God’s kingdom and His saving justice.
“It was this faith which motivated her service and motivated the many women who joined her. ‘Faith’, she explained ‘is the first essential if we are to cope’ with life’s difficulties.