Patron

ST MARY OF THE CROSS

St Mary of the Cross (MacKillop) was a tenacious woman who let nothing stand in the way of her care of the underprivileged.  As a young woman in the 1860s, guided by the charming but eccentric priest, Julian Tenison Woods, Mary established a unique form of Australian religious life dedicated to the service of the poor, especially through the education of their children. 
Mary MacKillop and Social Justice  - Kath Burfordrsj

Motivation

Conscious always of indebtedness to God's loving goodness to her personally and to all humankind without exception, Mary MacKillop responded by an intense desire to show to others God's love for them. Her relationship with people was thus bound up with the proclaimation of God's Kingdom and the Gospel message of God's justice and love. It was through the circumstances of her own upbringing that she perceived the presence of social injustice in the Australian society into which she was born, as being caused by humankind's forgetting that 'all is gift' from the Creator. Further, she perceived that these gifts are for universal use and for the subsistence of all to be held as common, in readiness for those in need.

For Mary MacKillop personally, 'all was gift', and thus she learnt to practise an inner freedom, a detachment from things, places and persons, and clung to nothing, not even to what was hers by right as a private person. In her letters to the Sisters she frequently encouraged them to attain this inner freedom from individual tastes and preferences for the sake of 'the common good' of the people they served. To them she demonstrated this inner freedom or spirit of dispossession, by total dependence on God's providence, as the means by which their authentic human living in community would be strengthened and enhanced. In short, their community life was to be marked by respect for the human dignity of each other.

Ministry

Further, these same qualities were to be visibly present in the organisation of the Sisters' works, education and social welfare, in their efforts to stall those processes of society which become the sources of social injustice. In 1873 Mary MacKillop sought approval from the Roman authorities for what she believed was 'a necessity' for Australia, that is, the Catholic education of the poorer classes in its isolated rural settlements. She explained: 'in justice to the poor' the administrative structure for an Institute which 'would seem out of place in Europe is still the very reverse in most parts of Australia'. The Institute of the Sisters of St Joseph then, was designed to meet Australian conditions, where the personnel needed to be mobile and trained to live an itinerant lifestyle, for the sake of the underprivileged in rural areas.

Similarly, in a society relentless in pursuit of a value system based on possession, prestige and power, the Sisters' work demonstrated the same justice in respecting the dignity of the human person, especially those who became casualties. These included the homeless, the needy in their own homes, prostitutes, or offenders brought before the lawcourts. With a sense of urgency to liberate these 'poor' and without any discrimination, Mary MacKillop's Sisters gave refuge, accommodation and care that endeavoured to raise them from their feeling of inferiority and rejection to one of personal well-being. In both education and social welfare, education in the faith was given priority. Her message of social justice for Australia is contained in her belief that 'all is gift' from the Creator, to be shared, because all human beings have the same basic right before God to be treated equally with justice and dignity.