I wonder how she would feel, Sister Mary of the Cross, had she been told before she died that the Church would make her a saint 101 years later. Perhaps, like another activist candidate for sainthood, the late US advocate for the poor and founder of The Catholic Worker, Dorothy Day, she might have said: 'Don't call me a saint. I don't want to be dismissed so easily.'
On 1 September 2010 Fr Peter Hosking SJ wrote in the Australian Jesuits publication Province Express that Mary Mackillop 'revered priests and respected authority', and that though 'Mary and her Sisters suffered persecution, [it was] not from enemies or from the church, but from certain bishops and some priests'.
But these men exercised the Church's authority, and excommunication meant more then than being marginalised by rogues, misogynists or weaklings.
Such history of women religious in the institutional Christian church as there is (because women's religious contributions were often not considered important enough to be formally documented; for a discomfiting review see Jo Ann Kay McNamara's Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns Through Two Millennia) makes for infuriating reading.
Despite the intimacy of powerful, generous women with the living Jesus — according to the gospels, written by men — men's control over Christian women's religious lives has grown vastly.
Women with missions, such as Teresa of Avila, were required to be genuinely humble in deferring to (or subtly avoiding the thrust of) the will and instructions of ambitious priests set over them, who might be quick to doubt their relationship with and understanding of the will of God for them, or to take custody of the fruits of their spirituality (Teresa of Avila's confessor even cut a finger from her corpse).
But they knew, these women, that games were being played: even the 'little flower' Therese of Lisieux prayed, a little disingenuously, for the frailty and (to a 21st century woman's eye) silliness of some of the priests in charge of them.
Despite the social and intellectual advances of the last 60 years, when women superiors of religious orders in the United States sought, as they were directed, to rejuvenate their communities and governance, the very mention of their traditional subjection to absolute authority, and of women's participation as equals within the church, saw them slapped down (as MacKillop had been) for insubordination.
Worse, after a public plea to John Paul II during his 1979 visit to the US, by the then President of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, five different women members were publicly humiliated by Vatican officials four years later, when they were forbidden to carry consecrated bread and wine to an assembly of male and female superiors, as agreed. Such 'petty' but cruel injustices should not be forgotten.
To a woman who, like me, was raised in the Spartan spirituality of Presbyterianism, MacKillop's canonisation is a conundrum. If the life of an authoritative, strong-willed and independent educator and helper of Australia's isolated poor was so exemplary as to be a model to others in 2010, why did she and her sisters suffer so badly during her lifetime at the hands of the Church that wants to praise her now?
MacKillop was excommunicated in 1871 for 'insubordination'. Her sisters were not permitted to continue their work of teaching poor children of the cities and remote regions, or even resume residence and the habits of their order, until the following year. They suffered greatly.
Why? Much has been made about MacKillop's possibly being victimised because of some role in 'outing' a pedophile priest. MacKillop herself, writing the history of her order, just said that 'much must be passed over' of this time.
That she fell into disfavour is undoubted. Remarkably little has been said about the failure of her long-time collaborator, Fr Julian Tennison Woods, to come to her support. Justifiably more has been said about the compassion and wisdom of the Jesuits of Saint Ignatius Norwood in South Australia who gave her refuge and sacramental ease during this time.
But her treatment then, as an immigrant woman who founded the first Australian religious order for women, should make modern Christian women wonder about their role in the Church today.
What would MacKillop have made of this? By all accounts this was a passionate woman who forged lasting friendships with other outsiders — her great friend, Joanna Barr-Smith, was a Presbyterian; one of her more generous donors, Emmanuel Solomon, was Jewish — and with political leaders, such as the South Australian governor who sent his son to be educated by her; but made Catholic religious men profoundly uncomfortable.
She was neither pretty, nor small, nor meek, nor malleable. She, like Day, believed in social justice and, whether or not she would ever have used a term such as 'feminist', the equality of persons.
Perhaps she might have agreed with Virginia Woolf, 'The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.' Or even: 'Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.'
Hail Mary MacKillop: a wonderful model of Australian courage to be herself.
Moira Rayner is a barrister and writer. She is a former Equal Opportunity and HREOC Commissioner. She is principal of Moira Rayner and Associates.