Welcome to Eureka Street

back to site
Forgot your password?
Subscribe

Keywords: Mary Mackillop

  • RELIGION

    The Mary MacKillop reality test

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 14 October 2010
    4 Comments

    It is possible to represent MacKillop as a brave woman, a feisty woman, her own woman, a feminist before her time, a woman who resisted clerical tyranny, a scourge of pedophilia and an activist for the poor. Each of these descriptions misses what was central in her.

    READ MORE
  • RELIGION

    Patron Saint of abuse victims

    • James Martin
    • 13 October 2010
    3 Comments

    MacKillop can be properly seen be as someone drawn into the sexual abuse scandal a century before the rest of the Catholic Church was. As a result, she might be someone that victims and their families feel drawn to in prayer.

    READ MORE
  • CARTOON

    Aussie Mary

    • Fiona Katauskas
    • 13 October 2010
    1 Comment

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Australia's feminist saint

    • Michael Mullins
    • 11 October 2010
    5 Comments

    Sexual abuse was part of the mix of challenges facing Mary MacKillop and her sisters, but it was only one of many elements of disfunction within the Church and society of the time. Historian Father Ed Campion has described MacKillop as 'a heroine to modern Australian feminists'.

    READ MORE
  • RELIGION

    A feminist's view of Mary MacKillop

    • Moira Rayner
    • 11 October 2010
    12 Comments

    Men's control over Christian women's religious lives has grown vastly over the centuries. Perhaps MacKillop 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.'

    READ MORE
  • RELIGION

    Mary MacKillop's template for the Independents

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 23 September 2010
    9 Comments

    The aftermath of the election gave play to the mythical Australian preference for the underdog as people enjoyed the Greens' and Independents' day in the sun. There is an intriguing contrast to be drawn between this and the life of Mary MacKillop, who will become Australia's first saint.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Atheist 'Real Julia' courts Christian vote

    • Michael Mullins
    • 09 August 2010
    17 Comments

    Gillard was photographed looking up to Cardinal George Pell with an admiring glance, and attended a fundraiser for expenses associated with October's Mary MacKillop canonisation in Rome. She offered $1.5 million in government money, but much more than that in flattery to Catholic electors.

    READ MORE
  • RELIGION

    Martyrdom and other revolutionary miracles

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 04 February 2010
    12 Comments

    Reports regarding Mary MacKillop's miracles have provoked the ire of those who see miracles as evidence of the irrational character of religious faith. Another angle on this debate may be found in an apparent oddity in the processes of saint making.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Patron saint of troublemakers

    • James Martin
    • 07 August 2009
    8 Comments

    In 1871 Mary MacKillop was excommunicated by her local bishop on the grounds that 'she had incited the sisters to disobedience and defiance'. The idea of a holy woman who had been at loggerheads with the hierarchy is not new in the annals of the saints.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    National pride begets blind arrogance

    • Michael Mullins
    • 13 July 2009
    10 Comments

    Assumptions that detained businessman Stern Hu could not be guilty because he is Australian show how national pride can cloud perceptions. Something similar was at play in calls for Kevin Rudd to lobby the Pope for the canonisation of Mary MacKillop.

    READ MORE