Santa Mary MacKillop: The Sister of the Disarmed
First santa born in Australia · Penola, South Australia · 1866-2010
A childhood marked by poverty and faith
Mary Helen MacKillop was born on January 15, 1842 in Melbourne, the daughter of Scottish immigrants. His father, Alexander MacKillop, had been a seminarian before poor health forced him to abandon priestly studies. The family lived closely, and Mary began working very young to help her parents and younger brothers. That experience of poverty lived from within did not bitter it - it made it a compassionate observer of the dissidents.
In 1866, in the small town of Penola (South Australia), Mary met Father Julian Tenison Woods, a priest with whom she shared the same concern: children in rural areas in the interior of Australia who grew up without access to any education. Together they decided to find a religious congregation that would reach where no other one would reach.
The Sisters of San José: the first Australian religious order
El 19 March 1866Mary MacKillop took the habit and became the first religious of the new congregation: the Sisters of St. Joseph of the Sacred Heart. The charism was clear: free education for the poor, especially in rural areas. In a few years, the Sisters opened schools, orphanages and homes for women in need throughout South Australia.
The road wasn't simple. In 1871, the Bishop of Adelaide excommunicated it - an act that the Holy See later recognized as unjustified and revoked the following year. Mary followed the decision with an equanimity that her contemporaries kept admiring. He died in Sydney on August 8, 1909.
- Mary MacKillop, cited in her canonization process
The verified miracles and the canonization of 2010
The canonization process began in the 1920s. John Paul II beatified her on January 19, 1995 in Sydney - the first time a pope beatified someone in Australia. Benedict XVI, during World Youth Day 2008, prayed at his grave in Sydney. In December 2009, he approved the second miracle: the unexplained healing of a woman with terminal myeloid leukemia, attributed to the intercession of Mary MacKillop.
El 17 October 2010in St. Peter's Square, Benedict XVI canonized it. Australia had, for the first time in its history, a saint of its own. His party is held on August 8.
Santa Mary MacKillop,
you who found Christ in the face of the forgotten children inside Australia,
Teach us to look without dodge
to whom no one else looks.
Amen.