VATICAN CITY (CNS) Pope Benedict XVI has formally recognised the miracle needed for the canonisation of Blessed Mary MacKillop, the Australian founder of a religious order dedicated to educating the children of the poor. Although the nun was briefly excommunicated in 1871 during a disagreement with local church authorities, Pope Benedict visited her tomb in Sydney in 2008 and praised her as one of the most outstanding figures in Australia’s history.
In other decrees signed at the Vatican Dec. 19, the pope:
Recognised the martyrdom of Father Jerzy Popieluszko, the chaplain to Poland’s Solidarity labor union, who was murdered by members of the communist government’s secret police in 1984. The move clears the way for his beatification.
Recognised the heroic virtues of Sister Mary Ward, founder of the Congregation of Jesus and of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, who — like Blessed Mary MacKillop — drew the ire of church authorities for the unconventional structure she gave her order. A miracle attributed to her intercession is needed before she can be beatified.
The decree that prepared the way for Blessed MacKillop’s canonization sometime in 2010 recognized that the 1995 cure of a woman suffering from an invasive and inoperable cancer was a miracle granted through the intercession of the Australian nun.
Mother MacKillop, founder of the Sisters of St. Joseph of the Sacred Heart, will become Australia’s first saint. Born Jan. 15, 1842, in Fitzroy near Melbourne, she died in Sydney Aug. 8, 1909.
Although her sainthood cause was initiated in the 1920s, it faced some serious hurdles, not the least of which was her brief excommunication and the temporary disbanding of her religious order.
Sister MacKillop and other members of the order were committed to following poor farmworkers, miners and other laborers into remote areas of the country in order to educate their children. But local church officials disapproved of the sisters living in tiny, isolated communities — sometimes only two to a hut — frequently cut off from the sacraments in the remote Australian outback.
Within a few months, the bishop who had excommunicated her lifted his censure and a church commission cleared the sisters of all wrongdoing.
Beatifying Mother MacKillop in Sydney in 1995, Pope John Paul highlighted her courage and her commitment to serving the poor, especially those who were emigrants to Australia like her parents were.
Three hundred years before Blessed MacKillop’s death, Mary Ward attempted to begin a religious order for women in England modeled on the Society of Jesus — the Jesuits — "with a freedom from religious enclosure and a readiness for apostolic works which would put them at the direct service of the church," according to the Congregation of Jesus Web site.
Although she began the order in 1609, "Mary Ward’s vision of apostolic life for women on the Jesuit model was not accepted for centuries," the congregation said. "We did not have an official name for many years," so members of the order were known "as ‘English Ladies’ or, by our enemies, (as) ‘Galloping Girls’ or ‘Jesuitesses.’"
In 1631 the congregation was suppressed by Pope Urban VIII and Ward was described as a heretic and imprisoned for a time by the Inquisition.
Ward died in 1645, and the Congregation of Jesus was definitively approved by the church only in 1877.
Father Popieluszko, who was born in 1947, was an outspoken advocate of the then-outlawed Solidarity trade union movement. The bound-and-gagged body of the 37-year-old priest was found in the Vistula River Oct. 30, 1984, 11 days after his abduction by agents from Poland’s Interior Ministry. In 1985 four officials from the ministry were tried and found guilty of killing him.
At his trial, Grzegorz Piotrowski, the Interior Ministry agent who beat and tied up the priest, testified that Father Popieluszko was still alive when thrown, with weights, into the river. Piotrowski and his three accomplices were released from prison early after controversial amnesties.