An Australian nun who will be canonised by Pope Benedict later this month should be made the patron saint of clerical abuse victims, an American Jesuit has said.The suggestion comes amid claims that Blessed Mary MacKillop was excommunicated from the Church for speaking out against an abusive priest.
The claims have been made in a documentary that will be broadcast by Australian television on October 10, one week before her canonisation.
Fr James Martin SJ said in the Catholic magazine America: “Now victims of sex abuse and their families and friends, and all who desire reconciliation and healing in the Church, can pray to Mary MacKillop, who understands them perhaps better than any other saint.”
Mary MacKillop was born in Melbourne to Scottish immigrant parents in 1842 and became a nun in 1866.
The following year, she became the first nun, co-founder and mother superior of the newly formed order of the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart, or simply the Josephites.
Dedicated to the welfare of the poor, it was the first religious order founded by an Australian.
In 1871, Sister MacKillop was excommunicated by Bishop Lawrence Shiel of Adelaide, supposedly for insubordination.
The documentary claims that Sister MacKillop discovered that children were being abused by Fr Patrick Keating, an Irish priest, in Kapunda parish near Adelaide, and reported him to the director of the Josephites, Fr Julian Tenison-Woods. Fr Keating was eventually sent back to Ireland.
The documentary further claims that Fr Charles Horan, another Irish priest and a colleague of Fr Keating, was enraged by Sister MacKillop’s actions and asked Bishop Shiel to excommunicate her on the charge of insubordination when she opposed changes to Josephite rules.
Fr Paul Gardiner, one of the sources for the documentary, told the Irish Times: “She submitted to a farcical ceremony where the bishop had … lost it. He was a puppet being manipulated by malicious priests. This sounds terrible, but it’s true.”
Five months after her excommunication, Bishop Shiel gave orders for her reinstatement from his deathbed. After her return, she devoted her life to the service of the poor, prisoners and prostitutes.
In 2009, Archbishop Philip Wilson of Adelaide publicly apologised to the Sisters of St Joseph for her wrongful excommunication. “On behalf of myself and the archdiocese, I apologise to the sisters … for what happened to them in the context of the excommunication, when their lives and their community life was interrupted and they were virtually thrown out on the streets … This was a terrible thing,” he said.
Mary MacKillop was beatified in 1995 by Pope John Paul II, who cited her intercession as the cause for a Sydney woman’s cure from terminal leukemia in the 1960s.
In December last year, the Congregation for the Causes of Saints issued a papal decree attributing a second miracle to her – the complete and permanent cure of an Australian woman of lung and secondary brain cancer, following which Pope Benedict announced in February that she would be canonised on October 17.
SIC: CHO/UK