What Difference Does It Make Now That Mary Mackillop Is a Saint?

What difference does it make now that Mary MacKillop is a Saint? Frank Brennan SJ – October 13, 2011 Last week, the world went into iMourning, at the death of Apple's Steve Jobs. Many of us on our iDevices looked back to the Stanford graduation address he delivered in 2005 just after he thought he had beaten cancer. While the cognoscenti debate whether he was an inventor or a visionary, there can be no doubt that he was the embodiment of so much of our contemporary technocratic culture. He spoke of death in these terms: No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. He concluded the talk with the words inscribed on the back of a 1960s world guide for hitchhikers: 'Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.' Even those of us Australians committed to our religious faith are infected by much of this, our contemporary cultural context. Death is presumed simply to be the end. Human beings are disposable. Others' opinions are always suspect, and often classed as interfering static at best. Dogma is anathema, no matter what the authority. Social institutions are crumbling. Membership of community organisations — whether political parties, unions, churches or community service groups — is declining. People prefer to join virtual communities through social media which they control at the click of a mouse. Authority is mistrusted. Truth is illusory. But for us who are Christian, death is not the end; it is not merely the clearing house for terminal subjects. It is the gateway to life eternal. Those of us who are Catholic always see a place for dogma and for others' opinions. We cherish the Church both as a community in which we might celebrate and as an institution in which authority can be exercised faithfully, so that the present generation might share the fruits of reflection on experience in the light of the kerygma handed down from generation to generation. But like Jobs, we are always attentive to the inner voice – that voice of the formed and informed conscience where we attend to the opinions of others, where we scrutinise the dogma, but then ultimately take our stand before God and before others because we can do no other, in good conscience. Like all social institutions, the Church is not perfect, and some of these who exercise authority in it, do so unhelpfully, perhaps ineptly and even scandalously. Some of them are very removed from us and our concerns and seem motivated by some of the more base human desires. And thus the need for saints like Mary MacKillop. Let me contrast Steve Jobs' advice with the observations last month by Pope Benedict when he visited the Augustinian Convent at Erfurt where Martin Luther undertook his theological studies. Benedict said: What constantly exercised (Martin Luther) was the question of God, the deep passion and driving force of his whole life's journey. 'How do I receive the grace of God?': this question struck him in the heart and lay at the foundation of all his theological searching and inner struggle. For Luther theology was no mere academic pursuit, but the struggle for oneself, which in turn was a struggle for and with God. 'How do I receive the grace of God?' The fact that this question was the driving force of his whole life never ceases to make a deep impression on me. For who is actually concerned about this today – even among Christians? What does the question of God mean in our lives? In our preaching? Most people today, even Christians, set out from the presupposition that God is not fundamentally interested in our sins and virtues. He knows that we are all mere flesh. And insofar as people believe in an afterlife and a divine judgement at all, nearly everyone presumes for all practical purposes that God is bound to be magnanimous and that ultimately he mercifully overlooks our small failings. The 1 question no longer troubles us. But are they really so small, our failings? Is not the world laid waste through the corruption of the great, but also of the small, who think only of their own advantage? Is it not laid waste through the power of drugs, which thrives on the one hand on greed and avarice, and on the other hand on the craving for pleasure of those who become addicted? Is the world not threatened by the growing readiness to use violence, frequently masking itself with claims to religious motivation? Could hunger and poverty so devastate parts of the world if love for God and godly love of neighbour – of his creatures, of men and women – were more alive in us? I could go on. No, evil is no small matter. Were we truly to place God at the centre of our lives, it could not be so powerful. The question: what is God's position towards me, where do I stand before God? – Luther's burning question must once more, doubtless in a new form, become our question too, not an academic question, but a real one. In our reflections on the Canonisation of Mary MacKillop, we Australians are better able to address these questions raised by the Holy Father. On this very day one year ago, I flew out of Australia. The customs man asked with a smile if I was travelling on to Rome. There were obviously going to be quite a number of pilgrims on board. I happened to be on my way to an annual meeting of Jesuits who gather at the Jesuit Curia to plan co-operative international initiatives involving universities and our commitment to social justice. This was the second time that my Jesuit meeting was to coincide with the Canonisation of a saint of interest. Five years earlier, Pope Benedict in one of his first moves as pope Canonised Alberto Hurtado, a 51 year old Chilean Jesuit lawyer who was very committed to social justice. Being 51 at the time and a Jesuit lawyer, I felt some connection with this guy. At the Canonisation mass, I stood behind a Chilean woman in tears, clutching a photo of two boys I presumed to be her sons. I never learnt their story, or hers. But I was left in no doubt about her faith and confidence in the intercession of Alberto and the Christian community gathered around that enormous Eucharistic table in St Peter's square. This time the connection with the one to be Canonised had a nationalistic flavour and a local pride that a little Aussie battler was to be declared saint. Like most Australian Catholics, I have come across the Josephites established by Mary MacKillop in some of the unlikeliest and toughest places in Australia, as well as East Timor. I also feel connected through her brother Donald, a Jesuit who ministered amongst the Aborigines of Daly River in the Northern Territory at the end of the nineteenth century. He wrote one of the great letters to the editor when he penned a note to the Sydney Herald at Christmas time 1892: 'Australia, as such, does not recognise the right of the blackman to live. She marches onward, truly, but not perhaps the fair maiden we paint her. The blackfellow sees blood on that noble forehead, callous cruelty in her heart; her heel is of iron and his helpless countrymen beneath her feet.' I also feel connected through Julian Tenison Woods the one rightly credited by Mary as a co-founder of the Josephites. She once told Archbishop Kelly that 'nearly all was due to him...He may never be overlooked in the history of what God has done by our sisters.' Julian and Mary did much to educate and liberate the poor Irish Catholics who migrated to Australia, though neither of them was Irish. My own Irish forebears owe much to Julian who eventually fell out with Mary, thinking in part that the Jesuits had infected her mind permitting her to loosen up too much on their original shared vision of poverty and obedience for the sisters. Woods on one of his scientific expeditions turned up in Maryborough, Queensland where my widowed great great grandmother Annie Brennan had arrived in 1863 with her five children – a courageous move by any reckoning. Family legend has it that Woods got my great grandfather Martin off the grog and back to church. So his next son, my grandfather, was named Frank Tenison Brennan, as am I. One of the good things about a Canonisation is that ordinary events and ordinary connections in life take on a graced dimension. Our history becomes holy, while our present remains messy.

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