First published in Eureka Street on 15 October 2010.
Mary MacKillop's face is on the Sydney Habour Bridge, at least temporarily. Is she becoming one of the clichés for Australia, alongside bushmen and Hills Hoist mums in our catalogue of national identity?
Paradoxically, in these days leading up to the canonisation of Australia's first saint, Mary MacKillop's connection with ordinary experiences (even clichés) of living in Australia is part of the story, and also what she moves us beyond. We can see the pattern of her life as something we already know and can follow, even as we acknowledge a unique stamp of goodness in her choices, and (if we follow her own lead) more than that again. It is great that she is on the Harbour Bridge, but would she want us simply to see the banner? She had her eye on something else.
Recognising someone as holy has probably always involved a dynamic between a particular life that reflected values already admired in a community and the call to recognise its challenges to a deeper way of being.
Since the Catholic Church began to formalise the process of canonisation, finally centralising it in 1200, and giving it a bureaucracy in 1588, the run of statistics on saints shows interesting trends in holiness. Martyrs and crusaders were likely to be recognised in times of persecution and threat, teachers in times of consolidation or controversy, missionaries and founders of new groups in times of change, and, some wryly note, peasants and exemplars of simple piety from times and places where the institution had trouble with the intellectuals.
But, however centralised and formal the process, every saint of the thousands acknowledged officially also has to have a popular following. The institutional wheels do not move until someone somewhere, and usually a community of people, calls the person not just good, but extraordinarily holy.
That link in the canonisation process between formal and spontaneous, institutional and popular, makes the sociology of sanctity complex. Saints need to be robust enough to carry several layers of meaning and survive fashions in their interpretation. Saints do not usually define comfortable boundaries; the best ones expand what a community imagines itself to be.
What does it mean for Mary