Australia's saint Mary MacKillop founds her order at Penola in South Australia in 1866 to help/educate the poor
Mary MacKillop, Roman Catholic saint and founder in South Australia. of Australia's first religious order that would open schools, orphanages and institutions throughout the Australian colonies.
Canonised as Australia’s first Roman Catholic saint in 2010, Mary MacKillop started her work helping the poor in Penola, South Australia, in 1866.
The Victorian-born MacKillop was working as a governess in South Australia’s south east where she was encouraged and guided by parish priest Julian Tenison- Woods to found what became the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart – Australia’s first Roman Catholic religious order.
Poverty was central to the rule of life for the order that, starting with a school at Yankalilla on the Fleurieu Peninsula in 1867, would go on to establish many schools, orphanages and institutions throughout the Australian colonies.
A two-storey convent for the Josephites was built in Franklin Street, Adelaide, in 1869. The ground floor was a school for poor children in the city’s west.
By 1871, Adelaide bishop Laurence Sheil was facing complaints about the order’s members living in the community and begging for money to fund their work. (Tenison-Woods, as Catholic education direction, had also come into conflict with other clergy around this time.)
After MacKillop (called Mother Mary of the Cross) argued against calls that some members of the order be lay sisters and that each convent should be under a priest’s authority, she was excommunicated by Sheil in the convent chapel.
Fifty other sisters were told to leave the order, and the Franklin Street, Adelaide, convent was transferred to the Dominican sisters.
While she was excommunicated, the wide respect for MacKillop and her nuns is reflected in the support from Adelaide’s non-Catholics such as the Jewish businessman Emanuel Solomon and MacKillop’s (Presbyterian) friend Joanna Barr-Smith.
In 1873, MacKillop received papal approval for the order but its original rule of life, laid down by Tenison-Woods, had to be discarded.
A network of St Joseph’s schools was still operating in Adelaide metropolitan and country towns in the early 21st Century.
