| PATRON - MARY MACKILLOP |
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Mary MacKillop and Social Justice
Kath Burford rsj
Motivation
Conscious always of indebtedness to God's loving goodness to her personally and
to all humankind without exception, Mary MacKillop responded by an intense desire to show
to others God's love for them. Her relationship with people was thus bound up with the
proclamation of God's Kingdom and the Gospel message of God's justice and love. It was
through the circumstances of her own upbringing that she perceived the presence of social
injustice in the Australian society into which she was born, as being caused by
humankind's forgetting that 'all is gift' from the Creator. Further, she perceived that
these gifts are for universal use and for the subsistence of all to be held as common, in
readiness for those in need.
For Mary MacKillop personally, 'all was gift', and thus she
learnt to practise an inner freedom, a detachment from things, places and persons, and
clung to nothing, not even to what was hers by right as a private person. In her letters
to the Sisters she frequently encouraged them to attain this inner freedom from individual
tastes and preferences for the sake of 'the common good' of the people they served. To
them she demonstrated this inner freedom or spirit of dispossession, by total dependence
on God's providence, as the means by which their authentic human living in community would
be strengthened and enhanced. In short, their community life was to be marked by respect
for the human dignity of each other.
Ministry
Further, these same qualities were to be visibly present in the organisation of
the Sisters' works, education and social welfare, in their efforts to stall those
processes of society which become the sources of social injustice. In 1873 Mary MacKillop
sought approval from the Roman authorities for what she believed was 'a necessity' for
Australia, that is, the Catholic education of the poorer classes in its isolated rural
settlements. She explained: 'in justice to the poor' the administrative structure for an
Institute which 'would seem out of place in Europe is still the very reverse in most parts
of Australia'. The Institute of the Sisters of St Joseph then, was designed to meet
Australian conditions, where the personnel needed to be mobile and trained to live an
itinerant lifestyle, for the sake of the underprivileged in rural areas.
Similarly, in a society relentless in pursuit of a value
system based on possession, prestige and power, the Sisters' work demonstrated the same
justice in respecting the dignity of the human person, especially those who became
casualties. These included the homeless, the needy in their own homes, prostitutes, or
offenders brought before the lawcourts. With a sense of urgency to liberate these 'poor'
and without any discrimination, Mary MacKillop's Sisters gave refuge, accommodation and
care that endeavoured to raise them from their feeling of inferiority and rejection to one
of personal well-being. In both education and social welfare, education in the faith was
given priority. Her message of social justice for Australia is contained in her belief
that 'all is gift' from the Creator, to be shared, because all human beings have the same
basic right before God to be treated equally with justice and dignity.
