Tea at Trianon: When St. Mary MacKillop Was Banished

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, September 5, 2019

When St. Mary MacKillop Was Banished

"Weeping she hath wept in the night, and her tears are on her cheeks: there is none to comfort her among all them that were dear to her: all her friends have despised her, and are become her enemies." ~Lamentations 1:2

St. Mary MacKillop, the first Australian canonized saint, is one to whom we should pray for those who have survived sexual abuse, and for those who did not survive. From an old article of ABC News (Australia):

In 1871, after only four years as a nun, she was excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church and turned out onto the street with no money and nowhere to go. MacKillop's cause for sainthood began in 1925 and has had the tireless backing of the Sisters of Saint Joseph of the Sacred Heart, the order she founded....While serving with the Sisters of St Joseph, MacKillop and her fellow nuns heard disturbing stories about a priest, Father Keating from the Kapunda parish north of Adelaide, who was allegedly abusing children. They told their director, a priest called Father Woods, who then went to the Vicar General. The Vicar General subsequently sent Father Keating back to his home country of Ireland, where he continued to serve as a priest.

Father Paul Gardiner, who has pushed for MacKillop's canonisation for 25 years, says Father Keating's fellow Kapunda priest Father Horan swore revenge on the nun for uncovering the abuse. "The story of the excommunication amounts to this: that some priests had been uncovered for being involved in the sexual abuse of children," he said. "The nuns told him and he told the Vicar General who was in charge at the time and he took severe action.

"And Father Horan, one of these priests, was so angry with this that he swore vengeance - and there's evidence for this - against Woods by getting at the Josephites and destroying them."

Father Horan was by now working for Adelaide's Bishop Shiel and urged him to break the sisters up by changing their rules. When MacKillop refused to comply, she was banished from the church at the age of 29. "Mary was not excommunicated, in fact or in law. She submitted to a farcical ceremony where the Bishop had ... lost it," Father Gardiner said. "He was a puppet being manipulated by malicious priests. This sounds terrible but it's true."

Five months later Bishop Shiel was gravely ill and dying. From his deathbed he instructed that MacKillop be absolved and restored. A statement from the Sisters of St Joseph says the events of September 1871 have "been comprehensively documented".

"There were several factors that led to this painful period for Mary and the sisters," the statement said. "The reasons for Mary's excommunication have been written about and commented on in the public domain since that time. This is consistent with the information contained in the Compass program."

In 2009, 100 years after MacKillop's death, Archbishop of Adelaide Philip Wilson publicly apologised to the Sisters of St Joseph for Mary's wrongful excommunication. "On behalf of myself and the archdiocese I apologise to the sisters, especially 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 and that this was a terrible thing," he said. (Read more.)