Saint Mary of the Cross MacKillop: Australia's First Saint

This Saturday, 8 August, the Church in Australia keeps the feast of Saint Mary of the Cross MacKillop, the first saint our country has given to the universal Church. Such is her place in the heart of Australian Catholics that her feast is celebrated here as a solemnity.

In 2026, the feast falls on a Saturday, the day the Church has always set aside for Our Lady. It is a fitting coincidence: Australia's first saint took the Cross for her religious name, and bore it, as Our Lady did, to the end.

A daughter of poverty

Mary Helen MacKillop was born on 15 January 1842 in a small weatherboard cottage in Brunswick Street, Fitzroy, when the city of Melbourne was not yet seven years old. She was the eldest of eight children of Scottish immigrants. Her father had studied for the priesthood before ill health sent him home from the seminary; he gave his children a solid formation in the Faith, but little security in anything else.

Money was always short. From the age of fourteen Mary went out to work, first in a Melbourne shop and later as a governess and schoolteacher, and her wages often supported the whole family. She knew poverty long before she vowed to take it up.

She would later write to her sisters, “We must teach more by example than by word” (1867). Her childhood was the school in which she first learned that lesson.

The stable at Penola

In 1860 Mary went to Penola, a small town in South Australia, as governess to her cousins. Soon she was gathering in the other children of the district: the poor children no one was teaching.

There she met the Reverend Father Julian Tenison Woods, the young parish priest, who shared her conviction that the children of the bush would be lost to the Faith without Catholic schools. In 1866 they opened St Joseph’s School in a disused stable, offering a Catholic education to every child who came, whether they were able to pay or not.

The Church in Australia has never forgotten where that school was held. It is fitting that so great a work of God began, like Our Lord Himself, in a stable.

On the feast of Saint Joseph that year, Mary declared her dedication to God and began to wear black. Other young women joined her. On 21 November 1866, the feast of the Presentation of Our Lady, she took the name she would carry to the altar, Mary of the Cross, and the following year made her vows. So began the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart, the first religious congregation founded on Australian soil. Australians came to call them the “Brown Joeys” for their brown habit.

Her counsel to them never changed: “Seek first the poorest, most neglected parts of God’s vineyard” (1900).

Mary of the Cross

A religious name is a prophecy. In taking the Cross for her title, on a feast of Our Lady, Mary took her place beside Our Lady on Calvary: “Now there stood by the cross of Jesus, his mother” (John 19:25).

The cross came quickly. In September 1871, amid painful disputes over the governance of the young congregation, His Excellency, the Bishop of Adelaide, surrounded by his priests, pronounced her excommunicated for alleged insubordination, and most of her sisters were dispersed. Mary was twenty-nine years old. She later described that moment in a letter to the Reverend Father Woods:

“I really felt like one in a dream… I felt, oh, such a love for their office, a sort of reverence for the very sentence which I then knew was being passed upon me… I was intensely happy and felt nearer to God than I had ever felt before. The sensation of the calm beautiful presence of God I shall never forget.”

There was no bitterness in her. Days later she wrote to her scattered sisters: “If we cannot agree to what our poor dear old Bishop requires, at least be humble in the way we refuse” (September 1871).

Cut off from everyone in the Church, she was sheltered by Emanuel Solomon, a merchant who gave her a house in Flinders Street, Adelaide, rent-free. From that exile she wrote: “Don’t you remember ‘The foxes have holes and the birds of the air their nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head’? I always loved that, but now more than ever” (September 1871).

Within months the bishop, gravely ill, ordered from his deathbed that the censure be lifted, and a Church commission later exonerated her completely. Looking back on those years, she wrote: 
“When I could not see my way, God kept my heart full of trust” (1874).

In 1873 she travelled alone to Rome to seek approval for her congregation’s Rule, and won what she had suffered for: her sisters would be governed centrally, answerable to Rome, and so remain free to go wherever the poorest needed them.

Mother to a continent

The works multiplied at a speed that startled the colonies. Within two years the sisters in Adelaide were running an orphanage, a refuge for young women released from prison, and a House of Providence for the homeless and the frail aged. Within four years there were 130 sisters in more than forty schools and charitable institutions across South Australia and Queensland.

No respectability was allowed to limit the charity. When Mary opened shelters for former prostitutes, the city fathers protested that such women should not be helped at all. The sisters went on regardless: to prisoners, to neglected children, to the aged poor, and above all to the bush schools, where the children of the poor received a free Catholic education. That work helped lay the foundations of the Catholic school system Australia has today.

New foundations followed across the other colonies and New Zealand. Mary crossed the continent again and again to visit her sisters, trusting Providence for everything. “Do all you can with the means at your disposal and calmly leave the rest to God” (1891).

A stroke in 1902 confined her to a wheelchair; her sisters re-elected her superior general in 1905 all the same. She died at North Sydney on 8 August 1909. Four days before the end, Cardinal Moran of Sydney left her sickroom saying: “I consider this day I have assisted at the death bed of a saint.”

Her final counsel sums up her whole life: “Love one another, bear with one another, and let charity guide you in all your life” (1909). At her funeral the faithful pressed forward to touch her coffin with their rosaries, and earth from her grave was carried away as relics. Her tomb, in the Memorial Chapel at Mount Street, North Sydney, remains a place of pilgrimage.

Australia’s first saint

Pope John Paul II beatified her before a vast crowd at Randwick in Sydney on 19 January 1995, telling Australians that “Mary MacKillop embodied all that is best in your nation and in its people.”

Pope Benedict XVI prayed at her tomb during World Youth Day in 2008, and canonised her in St Peter’s Square on 17 October 2010, holding up her “courageous and saintly example of zeal, perseverance and prayer.”

She is a patroness of Australia, the nation entrusted since 1844 to Our Lady Help of Christians.

What Saint Mary of the Cross teaches us

This story is rich in lessons for our own interior life.

First, trust under trial. Misjudged and censured within the Church she loved, she answered with humility and charity, and God vindicated her in His own time. When we cannot see our way, we can make her words our own.

Second, the Cross as a gift and not only a burden. She chose the Cross for her very name, and everything fruitful in her life grew out of it: the stable, the poverty, the humiliations, and the long years in a wheelchair. She stood where Our Lady stood on Calvary, and never doubted the Resurrection on the other side of it.

Third, she shows us what answering Our Lady looks like on Australian soil. Mary MacKillop died eight years before Our Lady came at Fatima asking for prayer, penance, and sacrifice for the salvation of souls; yet her whole life answered that request in advance. If we wonder whether the Fatima message can be lived in this country, our first saint is the proof that it can.

How to keep her feast

• Assist at Mass on Saturday 8 August, when her feast is kept as a solemnity throughout Australia.
• Pray the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary for the families and children of Australia, asking Saint Mary of the Cross to intercede for them.
• If you can, visit her tomb at Mary MacKillop Place, North Sydney, or make the pilgrimage in spirit from wherever you are.
• Make her motto your own this week: “Never see a need without doing something about it” (1871).
• Tell her story to your children and grandchildren. Australia has a saint; they should know her name.

A prayer for the feast

O God, source of all goodness, who have shown us in Saint Mary a woman of faith living by the power of the Cross, teach us, we pray, by her example to live the gospel in changing times and to respect and defend the human dignity of all in our land. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Saint Mary of the Cross, pray for us.

Our Lady Help of Christians, patroness of Australia, pray for us.

References

Saint Mary of the Cross MacKillop, Mary MacKillop Place (marymackillopplace.org.au)

Homily of Pope Benedict XVI, Canonisation Mass, 17 October 2010 (vatican.va)

Homily of Pope John Paul II, Beatification Mass, Sydney, 19 January 1995

Quotations from the letters of St Mary MacKillop, as published by the Sisters of St Joseph (dates as given)

Last updated: 7 August 2026 05:07

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