Mary MacKillop (1842–1909)

Three labels are used:

• established: supported by primary records, official bodies or several independent reliable sources.
• shared: the core fact is sound, but sources disagree on details, dates or interpretation.
• traditional: widely repeated but not traceable to a primary or independent source.

Mary MacKillop's life is very fully documented. Her letters survive in large numbers, the Sisters of St Joseph keep her papers, and the cause for her canonisation, opened in 1925, gathered testimony and records over eighty years. The standard short account is Osmund Thorpe's entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography (1974). The fullest biography is Paul Gardiner's Mary MacKillop: An Extraordinary Australian (1993), written by the postulator of her cause. Lesley O'Brien's Mary MacKillop Unveiled (1994) is a shorter life. The Sisters of St Joseph publish material on her parents and her travels, including her visit to Scotland.

There are two weak points. The first is her father's birthplace. The Sisters of St Joseph and the Australian Dictionary of Biography place both parents in Lochaber; Scottish reports of 2010 say Alexander was born in Perthshire and grew up near Roy Bridge. No primary record of his birth has been found in the sources used here. The second is why she was excommunicated. Bishop Sheil's sentence gave insubordination as the reason. Since 2010 the Sisters and Father Paul Gardiner have said that a priest's abuse of children, reported by the sisters in 1870, set off the clerical campaign against them. The Sisters themselves describe it as one cause among several. Both points are marked as shared below.

The Highland background

established Lochaber. The Australian Dictionary of Biography says that both her parents came from the Lochaber area of Inverness-shire. Lochaber, around Fort William, Glen Roy and Glen Spean, was Catholic country. Callum Brown, in Religion and Society in Scotland since 1707 (1997), describes how Catholicism survived after the Reformation in a belt of the western Highlands running from Knoydart, Morar and Moidart up the Great Glen, under Catholic chiefs and landowners. In Brae Lochaber the MacDonalds of Keppoch were Catholics, and the old burial ground of Cille Choirill above Roy Bridge served the district. Mary's parents were Gaelic-speaking Catholics from this world.

established Flora MacDonald. Her mother was born at Fort William in 1816. The Sisters of St Joseph record that she sailed with her mother and brother on the Glen Huntley and arrived at Port Phillip in 1840, aged about twenty-two. Typhus broke out on the voyage, and the passengers were held in quarantine until June 1840. She was no relation of the Jacobite heroine of the same name.

shared Alexander MacKillop. The Sisters of St Joseph give Alexander's birth as 1812, in Lochaber. The Aberdeen Press and Journal and Independent Catholic News, reporting in 2010, say he was born in Perthshire and spent his early childhood near Roy Bridge. The Sisters' account of Mary's 1873–74 journey records her visit to Murlaggan, in Glen Roy, as the site of the home of Alexander's grandparents. The two accounts can be reconciled: a Perthshire birth and a Lochaber upbringing in a Lochaber family. No birth record has been checked, so the exact birthplace stays uncertain.

established A failed priest. Alexander began his schooling at the Catholic seminary on the island of Lismore. At about thirteen he went to the Scots College in Rome to train for the priesthood. He later studied at Blairs College, the Catholic seminary near Aberdeen, and left after seventeen months. He was clever and well read, and he educated his daughter largely himself. He was also restless and bad with money, and his failures shaped her childhood.

Emigration

established The bounty ships. Alexander arrived in Sydney in 1838 on the Brilliant. The Sisters of St Joseph describe him as a bounty migrant, one whose passage was paid from colonial land sales. Marjory Harper, in Adventurers and Exiles (2003), explains that New South Wales appointed the ship's surgeon Dr David Boyter in 1836 to recruit emigrants in Scotland, and that most of the 5,200 Scots sent out under the bounty scheme between 1837 and 1840 were probably Highlanders. The first Highland potato famine of 1836–37 drove many to go. Harper quotes the Inverness Courier of 30 May 1838 on Boyter's arrival at Fort William, when news spread "like the fiery cross of old" and crowds gathered "anxious to quit the land of their forefathers". It is not known from the sources used here whether Alexander MacKillop sailed under Boyter's own recruitment, but he came from the same district in the same years.

established Marriage in Melbourne. Alexander worked for the Sydney merchants Campbell & Co. and then moved to Melbourne. In 1840 he offered the newly arrived MacDonalds lodging in his small cottage in Fitzroy. He and Flora married within weeks of her release from quarantine, at St Francis' Church, the first Catholic church in Melbourne, with Father Patrick Geoghegan officiating. In 1841 they bought a house in Brunswick Street, Fitzroy, and Alexander held land between the Merri and Darebin creeks.

Childhood in poverty

established Birth. Mary Helen MacKillop was born on 15 January 1842 in the Brunswick Street house. She was the eldest of eight children; five of them died young. Within months her father's investments failed and he went bankrupt. The house was sold and the family moved to farmland outside Melbourne. For the rest of her childhood they depended on relatives and friends.

established Breadwinner. Alexander took a series of short-lived jobs, including three months as a clerk on the Back Creek goldfield, and in 1862 went to look for gold in New Zealand without success. From about the age of fourteen Mary was the family's main earner. She worked as a shop assistant in Melbourne and then as a governess. In 1860 she went to Penola, in the south-east of South Australia, as governess to her aunt's children. In 1862 she taught at Portland, Victoria, first at the Catholic school and then at her own small boarding school for girls.

Penola and the founding

established Julian Tenison Woods. At Penola she met Father Julian Tenison Woods, the English-born parish priest, a gifted amateur geologist and naturalist, who wanted to found a religious order to teach poor children in the bush. She placed herself under his direction.

established 19 March 1866. On the feast of St Joseph in 1866, with the approval of Bishop Laurence Sheil of Adelaide, they founded the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart. Mary was its first member and superior. The first St Joseph's school opened in a converted stable at Penola. The schools were free, and the sisters lived in poverty among the people they taught, often in pairs in remote districts.

established Adelaide. In 1867 Woods became director of Catholic education in South Australia. Mary moved to Adelaide, took the religious name Mary of the Cross, and ran the main Catholic school. The order spread fast. Sister Marie Foale, in the South Australian history entry, records that by 1871 it had 127 sisters teaching in 41 schools, and ran an orphanage, a house of refuge and a home for destitute women.

established Central government. The Rule that Woods wrote placed the sisters under their own superior-general, not under each diocesan bishop. It also required strict poverty, with no personal property and no fixed endowments. Both features worried bishops and many priests, who wanted local control over schools and staff.

Excommunication

established The sentence. Some Adelaide clergy pressed Bishop Sheil, who was often absent and in poor health, to change the Rule. On 22 September 1871 he excommunicated Mary MacKillop "for alleged insubordination", in Osmund Thorpe's words. Most of the order's schools closed. About forty-seven sisters were turned out of their convents and depended on the charity of friends.

established The lifting. On 21 February 1872 Sheil lifted the excommunication. He died nine days later, and the order was restored.

shared Why it happened. The sentence named insubordination. The order's own account, and that of Father Paul Gardiner, the postulator of her cause, links the campaign against the sisters to their report in 1870 of a priest who was abusing children. Gardiner told the Associated Press in 2010 that priests were angry that "somebody had uncovered it". The Sisters of St Joseph said the exposure was one of many factors, along with bitter rivalries among the clergy and disputes over the control of schools. Mary MacKillop did not make the report herself, but as superior she bore the consequences.

Rome and Scotland

established Papal approval. In 1873 Mary travelled to Rome to seek approval for the order. Roman officials revised the Rule, keeping central government but relaxing the ban on owning property. They gave provisional approval, and definitive approval followed in 1888. Woods would not accept the changes. Their friendship ended, and the break was permanent.

established Visiting her parents' country. While in Europe she also studied teaching methods and looked for recruits and money. An account published by the Sisters of St Joseph traces her journey in Scotland from October 1873 to February 1874. It lists Glasgow, Greenock, Oban, Tobermory, the Ardnamurchan peninsula, Fort William, Roy Bridge, Glen Roy, Cille Choirill, Fort Augustus, Stratherrick, Inverness, Nairn, Keith, Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Alloa. At Fort William she stayed with a cousin at Invernevis House. At Roy Bridge she stayed at Keppoch House, and a Highland Council heritage record notes her stay at the Bunroy chapel house there. She visited Murlaggan, where Alexander's grandparents had lived. In Alloa she saw her uncle Archie MacKillop, for some forty years a supervisor of Inland Revenue in the town, who died in Edinburgh in 1897.

shared What Scotland meant to her. She had grown up hearing Gaelic and the Highland stories of her parents' families. Her letters from the journey show interest in her relatives and in Catholic schools, but little sign that Scotland changed her plans. The visit was part of a longer European tour, and she also went to Ireland, which supplied many of the order's later recruits.

Sydney and the later struggles

established Superior-general. She returned to Adelaide on 4 January 1875, and in March 1875 the sisters elected her superior-general. Over the next years she founded schools, convents and charitable homes across South Australia, Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and New Zealand.

established Bishops. The central government of the order kept bringing her into conflict with bishops who wanted the sisters under diocesan control. Bishop Matthew Quinn of Bathurst and Bishop James Quinn of Brisbane set up separate diocesan Josephite congregations rather than accept the Rule. In 1883 Bishop Christopher Reynolds of Adelaide, misunderstanding his authority over the order, told her to leave his diocese. She moved the headquarters to Sydney.

shared Allegations against her. Foale records that she was banished from Adelaide amid allegations of drunkenness and financial mismanagement. Her biographers attribute the drink allegation to her medicinal use of brandy, prescribed for severe and recurrent pain, and regard the charges as unfounded. In 1885 Rome named another sister as superior-general, and Mary served under her. She was re-elected in 1899.

established Last years. On 11 May 1901 she had a stroke at Rotorua, New Zealand. She kept her mind but was an invalid for the rest of her life and governed the order from a wheelchair. She died in North Sydney on 8 August 1909 and was later buried in the memorial chapel there.

Sainthood

established The cause. The cause for her canonisation opened in 1925. Pope John Paul II beatified her at Randwick Racecourse, Sydney, on 19 January 1995. On 19 February 2010 Pope Benedict XVI announced that she would be canonised, and on 17 October 2010 he declared her a saint in St Peter's Square, with five others. Vatican Radio reported that about 5,000 Australian pilgrims came to Rome for the ceremony. Benedict said she "dedicated herself as a young woman to the education of the poor".

established Scotland's part in the celebrations. Vatican Radio described her as the daughter of Scottish Catholic immigrants. Independent Catholic News reported that about 140 pilgrims from Lochaber and elsewhere in Scotland went to Rome for the canonisation, with Cardinal Keith O'Brien and the Bishop of Argyll and the Isles, Joseph Toal, who is related to her through her great-uncle John MacKillop. The Highland Council's heritage record notes local coverage of the canonisation in Roy Bridge. Fort William's St Mary's Church has a shrine to her, and her order has had sisters in Scotland since 2005.

shared Australia's first saint. She is the first Australian to be canonised, and Vatican Radio called her Australia's first native-born saint. Some earlier saints had served in Oceania, such as Peter Chanel, killed on Futuna in 1841, but none was Australian.

The Scottish thread

shared A Highland family in a colonial church. The Catholic Church in nineteenth-century Australia was overwhelmingly Irish in clergy and people. The MacKillops were part of a smaller Scottish Catholic stream, from the Highland districts where the faith had survived. T. M. Devine, in To the Ends of the Earth (2011), counts 138,036 Scots arriving in Australia between 1853 and 1880, most of them servants and labourers, and argues that the working-class Scottish migration to Australia is easily overlooked. The MacKillops belonged to the earlier, assisted migration of the late 1830s. Their daughter's order was built in Australia by Australian, Irish and other women, and she herself was a native of Victoria. The Scottish part of her story is her parents, their faith and their Gaelic world, and her one long visit to it.

• Mary MacKillop's mother, Flora MacDonald, was born at Fort William, and was no relation of the Jacobite heroine.
• Her father trained for the priesthood at the Scots College in Rome and at Blairs, near Aberdeen, but was never ordained.
• Her father came to Australia in 1838, the year crowds met a bounty emigration agent at Fort William.
• The first Josephite school opened in a converted stable at Penola.
• She was excommunicated for five months in 1871–72.
• In 1873–74 she visited Roy Bridge, Glen Roy and Fort William, and stayed with an uncle in Alloa.
• She had a stroke in Rotorua, New Zealand, in 1901 and led her order from a wheelchair.
• She was beatified at a Sydney racecourse.

• Myth: Mary MacKillop was born in Scotland. She was born in Fitzroy, Melbourne, in 1842. Both her parents were Highland Scots.
• Disputed: her father's birthplace. The Sisters of St Joseph and the Australian Dictionary of Biography place the family in Lochaber; Scottish reports of 2010 say Alexander was born in Perthshire and spent his early childhood near Roy Bridge.
• Myth: her mother was the Jacobite Flora MacDonald, or her descendant. They shared a common Highland name. Mary's mother was born at Fort William in 1816.
• Myth: her father was a priest. He trained for the priesthood in Rome and at Blairs but left without being ordained.
• Disputed: why she was excommunicated. The bishop's stated reason was insubordination. The order and the postulator of her cause link the campaign against the sisters to their report of a priest's abuse of children; the Sisters call it one of several causes.
• Disputed: the allegations of drunkenness. They were made against her in Adelaide in the 1880s. Her biographers attribute them to brandy prescribed for illness and treat them as unfounded.
• Myth: the excommunication lasted for years. It lasted five months, from September 1871 to February 1872.
• Myth: "Never see a need without doing something about it" is a quotation from her letters. It is widely attributed to her, but no source in her own writing has been traced.