Angelic in pose, Mary MacKillop was also a battle-hardened streetfighter of the finest political traditions, giving as good as the church hierarchy threw at her, reports Linda Morris. The black and white portrait of Mary Mac-Killop returns the gaze of the camera, penetrating eyes framed by full nun's habit.
Encapsulated in that one frame, hung in the MacKillop chapel in North Sydney and printed on prayer cards distributed in their hundreds of thousands to her devoted public, are all the characteristics of a future saint: humbleness, patience, virtue and compassion.
Yet there is another image of Mary MacKillop emerging on the eve of the Vatican's momentous decision as early as tomorrow to decree a second miracle through her intercession. This is the last step before canonisation, which should happen next year, making MacKillop Australia's first saint.
This Mary MacKillop is the tough-minded, astute political operator, struggling against patriarchal city-based church authorities to assist the poorest of the poor in Australia's most remote corners.
She was no passive bystander in her fate. After being briefly excommunicated by her bishop, she begged passage to gain papal approval for her order above the heads of her bishops, battled a split among her own sisters, and then drove an expansion of missions across eastern Australia.
A Jesuit priest, James Martin, author of My Life with the Saints, suggests that the excommunicated nun's imminent canonisation should give heart not only to religious women in the United States undergoing a ''visitation'' by the Vatican but for divorcees and gay women disenfranchised from the church.
He playfully suggests MacKillop might be regarded as the patron saint of troublemakers, a reminder that being in trouble with the church hierarchy is no barrier for holiness and a lesson to contemporary Catholics that holiness should not be conflated with unthinking, uncritical or blind obedience.
In Australia, supporters of women priests see in MacKillop a woman who - despite restraints on her by the church - lived out the gospel message by her conscience to do great things.
Marilyn Hatton, Australian representative for Women's Ordination Worldwide, sees parallels between MacKillop's struggles and those agitating for a greater role for women's ministry.
''She lived the gospel message as she saw it according to her conscience and there's parallels with women who are concerned about the ordination of women and women's leadership in the church,'' Hatton says.
''Not just for feminist equality reasons but women in leadership is crucial to carrying on the faith. These women too are living the gospel message and they see the hierarchy of the church as having lost its way.''
But becoming a torchbearer for disaffected Catholics would have been the last thing Mary MacKillop wanted or stood for, according to Professor Anne Hunt, the dean of theology at the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne.
''I think she would be devastated if women interpreted her life as an invitation to leave the church or set it aside or to mount a feminist agenda against it. That's not her message,'' she says.
''It is of getting on with the work to which you are called.
''She didn't let the persecution get her down and she always worked within the bounds of the church and its teachings.''
Mary MacKillop was born in 1842 in Melbourne and died in 1909, aged 67, after spending the seven previous years an invalid due to a stroke. Sixteen years later the then mother superior of the Sisters of St Joseph, Mother Laurence, began the process to have MacKillop declared a saint.
MacKillop was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1995. The Australian church is now awaiting the decree of the second miracle, a woman who recovered from inoperable lung cancer and secondary brain cancer.
Once the decree of the second miracle is made, the Australian church will await Pope Benedict XVI's announcement of her canonisation, expected in March or April but never a certain bet.
With official recognition of MacKillop due, attention has turned to her and what she represents.
In a critique of MacKillop's official history, the Australian academic Kathleen McPhillips said MacKillop was much more than a long-suffering passive woman of the church. She challenged the boundaries of acceptable feminine behaviour.
She travelled long distances, was thrown out of dioceses, begged passage to Rome, met clandestinely with isolated sisters and was publicly outspoken.
''In short she did little that could be identified with a typical feminity of her day and provides us with a girl's own colonial adventure.''
The real, very human MacKillop lies somewhere between feminist icon and humble saint, according to Tony Kelly, a priest, professor and member of the Vatican's Theological Commission.
He considers her battles with the church, especially the story of her excommunication, to be exaggerated; certainly, it was quickly overturned.
''No one is the loser if you recognise her sanctity and holiness, but you don't lift her out of the realm of human beings, as a woman struggling in tough times,'' Kelly says. ''In that way she was in the line of great pioneering women. There are familiar ambiguities in her life as every life.''
Flesh and blood MacKillop is a woman of strength and humour who had her share of personal heartbreak. Her eldest brother caught typhoid fever on the voyage to Australia to visit her and went overboard in delirium. Her father was a profligate dreamer who indebted the family, and her mother died in a shipwreck off the NSW coast.
The canonisation process was delayed because of accusations of alcoholism. MacKillop is said to have battled dysmenorrhea, painful menstruation, for many years and self-medicated. Without the halo, her determined commitment to make a difference might be interpreted as pig-headedness and steeliness.
''She was a straight down Scottish Catholic and she did things that had never been done before; and she is a feminist icon in that sense of the utter radicality about caring for those who had no one; she was very ecumenical and working with indigenous people was well ahead of her time,'' Kelly says.
''The church authorities had no idea of the size of Australia and what it meant to be a religious congregation travelling around. There was no jet planes then. Her personal toughness is not something to be exaggerated.''
At 25 MacKillop took her vows and founded the congregation of the Sisters of St Joseph. Within four years she had established 34 schools in South Australia. But her work was not without internal tensions, as well as those with church leaders, and she fell out with her mentor and co-founder, Father Julian Tenison Woods, over the direction of the order.
By going above the heads of local bishops and accepting Vatican rule over the order, Tenison Woods felt MacKillop had betrayed their mutual vision for a congregation living in extreme poverty among the people they served.
The disputed ''The Rule of Life'' enabled the order to serve beyond the boundaries of dioceses, bringing education and culture to the remote corners of Australia, but also allowed it to accumulate property. Despite her overtures, they never fully reconciled. The sisters eventually spilt into the Black and Brown Josephites who remain independent but share the same founding spirit.
According to Martin, there is a tendency in the church to ''tame the memory of saints and smooth out the rough edges''.
''Catherine of Sienna would excoriate popes and bishops and was herself a real thorn in the side of the church. Then there was Dorothy Day whose local bishop asked her not to use the word Catholic in the title of her lay worker organisation,'' Martin says. ''What happens is we domesticate them so centuries later they seem like nice old women when these were foundresses who had to be pretty tough.''
Their real stories, not the hagiography, the official biography of a saint, draw people to them. Sister Therese Carroll, a St Josephite nun, wants an authentic image to prevail because that's how MacKillop connects with ordinary Australians. Hence the sisters' oft repeated mantra of MacKillop: an ordinary woman living an extraordinary life.
Says Carroll: ''We want our saints to be inspiring but to understand the pathways we walk. She is a model of human possibility and she worked with what she had available to her and made things happen in a practical, humanly sensitive way.''
Had she liked a tipple, Kelly says, Australians would not have judged her.
Says Martin: ''The saints are prophetic figures and are always calling the people of the church back to its real Christian roots. When you know their real stories you realise they are human beings and that means they are human. If you leave them on the pedestal you can leave the saintly work to them because you can say, 'I'm not perfect like you.' But when you see them as human beings you are reminded of your own responsibilities as a flawed and imperfect person. Understanding their humanity brings us closer to them and them closer to us.''
The message of MacKillop is that excommunicated Catholics might be tomorrow's saints, Martin says. Joan of Arc was burnt at the stake at the behest of church officials. The writings of Thomas Aquinas came under suspicion during his 13th-century lifetime..
A respected Vatican commentator, John Allen, says: ''You know the old saying: 'Today they excommunicate you, tomorrow they canonise you.' Saints such as Padre Pio offer examples: he was investigated and suspended multiple times and his relationship with officialdom seemed to ping-pong depending upon who was pope. Yet here he is, one of the great saints of the 20th century.''
MacKillop's reputation has been only enhanced by her skirmishes with bishops. Her grassroots Catholic supporters, says the historian Ed Campion, respect her as much for the run-ins with the high and mighty of the church as for her austerity. Her reputation is likely only to grow.
Which image of MacKillop will prevail? As always, it all depends on who is fashioning that image, says Allen. ''That's the great thing about a canonisation - the subject is a person, not a doctrinal formula, which means it's far more elastic and open to multiple interpretations.''
MacKillop stands as a challenge to religious women to engage with the wider community, Kelly says.
He offers a different image from her prayer card portrait. It is drawn from a statue of MacKillop in the grounds of the Australian Catholic University in North Sydney of an old wheelchair-bound woman broken by age and her own heroic labours.
''The real Mary MacKillop was, in her youth, a rather photogenic, nice nun who grew up to be a remarkable woman of toughness and imagination in the way she lived her faith. But she was also an old lady in a wheelchair nursing her little dog long after her active days were over.''
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