MARY MacKillop's recognition as Australia's first saint might have come 20 years earlier if not for a delay that is still formally unexplained. A HUNDRED and one years after her death and 84 years after she was set on the road to sainthood, Mary MacKillop's canonisation tomorrow has not been particularly slow by the standards of a church that can take centuries to recognise somebody as a saint.
But MacKillop's recognition as Australia's first saint might have come 20 years earlier if not for a delay that is still formally unexplained but says much about the tribulations the Melbourne-born nun faced at the hands of her male colleagues in the Catholic Church.
The hiatus from 1931 to 1951 in the pursuit of MacKillop's sainthood has been widely reported in recent days to be the result of an important document being "missing" when it was sought by her supporters in 1931.
But the crucial document was not missing.
The sainthood campaign that comes to a climax in St Peter's Square tomorrow was actually stymied by a cover-up, a deliberate attempt within the Vatican to suppress the truth about how MacKillop and the Sisters of St Joseph's order of nuns she founded were bullied and manipulated by priests and bishops who were supposed to be helping them.
Father Paul Gardiner, an 86-year-old Jesuit priest and retired academic, knows more about MacKillop's life than anybody else alive. He says the supposedly missing document was sitting on full view for those 20 years in the archive of the Vatican's Propaganda Fide, the department responsible for propagating the faith in relatively new countries such as Australia.
"I went there myself in the 1980s and found it in a flash," Gardiner tells The Weekend Australian in Rome this week.
"It was just sitting there on a shelf, and the dates on the back of the bindings showed it had been there right from the start."
The "missing" document was an 1884 report by the newly appointed bishop of Sydney, Irish-born Patrick Moran, into a controversy that had broken out around MacKillop in Adelaide the previous year.
"The people in Rome who said they couldn't find the report were simply trying to protect the church because the material in it about what went on around Mary in 1883 was so damaging and so embarrassing," Gardiner says.
"That is what cost her cause 20 years. And as soon as you read it, you realise why they didn't want it to get out. There had been such bad behaviour and dishonesty by the bishop and some priests that people could just about have gone to jail if the true story had come out. And you have got to remember that 1931 was only a few decades after that, and some of the players were still around, so people in Rome were not at all keen to bring it all out in the open."
Moran's report showed that the bishop of Adelaide, Christopher Reynolds, and some of MacKillop's other foes within the church had used lies and unfair allegations to drive her out of his diocese, falsely claiming to have received papal authority for an inquiry into her order and even accusing her of being, in Gardiner's term, "a booze artist".
One of the main reasons that MacKillop, who was then 42, had upset so many priests was her insistence that the fast-growing order of nuns she had founded should have its own chain of authority rather than reporting to the mostly Irish priests of that era, who were used to a structure in which priests and bishops ruled over almost all religious workers active in their dioceses.
In 1871, Adelaide bishop Laurence Sheil declared that MacKillop was excommunicated from the church for supposed insubordination after she tried to defend the independence and future of her congregation. She had been dragged into that row when an influential priest, Father Charles Horan, set out to destroy her order because some of MacKillop's nuns had exposed as a child abuser another priest who was his friend.
Although her excommunication was never legally valid and was revoked within six months, MacKillop was deposed as leader of her order 14 years later.
Cardinal George Pell says that even today's priests and bishops should reflect on the obstacles that some 19th-century priests and bishops placed in MacKillop's way as she tried to educate the poor and build her order of nuns.
Asked whether the harsh treatment of MacKillop by the clergy should be considered a problem of the past, Pell said: "No, no, it is always possible that we are going to do the wrong thing.
"I think it is true that the 19th-century Australian Catholic bishops by our standards were a boisterous lot, but having said that, we have got to try very carefully not to be unjust - not to be unjust to anyone but perhaps especially to those who are doing the best work."
Pell says he would not use the word "rebellious" to describe MacKillop, insisting that while she was strong-minded she still respected authority and the church's laws.
"She was very clear on what she wanted and if she thought it was important, she wasn't going to be swayed by anybody on those important points. She was a very loyal person, a very forgiving person and a very strong person," the cardinal says.
Tim Fischer, Australia's ambassador to the Vatican, says that much of MacKillop's trouble came down to a simple cause: sexism.
"She was not only a woman, she also had a clear agenda and the oldest organisation in the world is officially male-dominated," Fischer says.
Like Pell, Fischer is quick to note that when MacKillop came to Rome in 1873 to seek Vatican backing for her order's independence, she won the pope's support, although her congregation's rules were not formally approved until 1888.
Gardiner says that when the 1931 request for Moran's 1884 report was turned down by Rome, one "relatively junior" Australian priest who was frustrated by the stonewalling was 35-year-old Norman Gilroy.
"He grew up to be cardinal Gilroy (the first Australian-born cardinal) and when he asked again for Moran's report in 1951, he got it within 13 days," Gardiner says.
The report was very favourable to MacKillop and the wheels were turning once again on her sainthood cause.
Moran said years after writing his report that his early view of her had been soured by what he had heard from other priests.
Dealing with her over the coming years changed his view to the point that after visiting her on her deathbed in 1909, he came away saying that "I have this day attended the deathbed of a saint".
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