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Rome Newsroom, Dec 7, 2020 / 09:30 am (CNA).- Australia is celebrating the 10th anniversary this year of the canonization of the country’s first and only saint, St. Mary MacKillop.

The pioneering religious sister founded the Josephite sisters who brought schools and orphanages to the Australian outback in the 19th century despite facing numerous challenges.

“What she stood for really encapsulates the values and spirit of Australia, and this is why her appeal goes much beyond just that of the Catholic community,” the Australian Ambassador to the Holy See Chiara Porro told EWTN News.

The Australian ambassador hosted a webinar to celebrate the life of St. Mary MacKillop on Dec. 4. She said that the Australian saint provides lessons in leadership for women leaders in the Church today.

“Mary MacKillop used to say: ‘Never see a need without doing something about it.’ And that was really what inspired her life. She went out of her way to work with those on the margins of society and set up schools for the poor, for the indigenous population who at the time were very desolate and had no hope,” Porro said.

“I think for me what it shows is the role of these women, religious women, in addressing some of the most important needs of society today and particularly during times of crisis where the poorest always suffer the most.”

MacKillop was the first of eight children born of Scottish immigrants in what is now Melbourne in 1842 at a time when the European settlement in Australia had been established for a little more than 50 years. Her father had studied for the priesthood in Rome for seven years before migrating to Australia where he met her mother who had arrived from Scotland less than two years earlier.

The family faced continuous economic difficulties and had to move frequently. The postulator of MacKillop’s cause for sainthood, Sr. Maria Casey, described the conditions at the time:

“Poverty was rife especially in country areas, religious discrimination was widespread, the plight of the aboriginal people was deplorable, unemployment was common-place and communication was difficult in the extreme. … The Church had few priests to serve its people who were scattered around rural areas and, as a rule, were experiencing poverty. Education was limited and virtually non-existent in rural areas,” Casey said at the webinar.

“From a young age, Saint Mary had increasingly felt the call to live as a religious sister but she still had the obligation to care for her family, a burden she undertook from when she was 16 to 25.”

Mary dreamed of the possibility of offering free education for Australia’s Catholic rural poor, and with the help of her spiritual director and mentor she developed a plan for a congregation of sisters to aid those in need in Australia’s vast rural areas.

She began the order’s work with a school in a stable in the small town of Penola, Australia in 1866. Taking the religious name St. Mary of the Cross, MacKillop founded what would go on to be the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph of the Sacred Heart.

Her sisters went on to establish many schools and orphanages across Australia, including in the “bush” areas where hardship was common.

“Travel over any distance was for the fearless and tough. Roads were merely tracks through the bush, travel by steamer was not for the faint-hearted and trains were rare. Mary used all means to visit her sisters,” Sr. Casey said.

As an innovator and as a woman in the 19th century, MacKillop encountered many challenges, including from inside the Church.

“Mary envisaged the sisters being governed centrally by one superior and being free to go wherever there was a need anywhere in the colonies. … The system of governance was contrary to that experienced in most European religious congregations of the time and was the cause of disputes with some of the bishops as the fledgling Institute expanded,” her postulator said.

“A complex set of circumstances led to the Bishop of Adelaide, who was once her friend and benefactor, excommunicating Mary in September 22, 1871 for supposed disobedience. This excommunication was invalid and unjustified in the light of later information. Mary accepted the excommunication and the dismissal of many of her sisters with serenity and peace. The Bishop revoked the sentence before his death less than six months later.”

By the time of MacKillop’s death in 1909 there were 650 sisters in her congregation ministering in all Australian states and in New Zealand.

Today, the “Josephites” have extended their ministry to Ireland, Peru, East Timor, Scotland and Brazil.

St. Mary Mackillop was remembered at an event in Rome co-hosted by the Australian and U.K. Embassies to the Holy See, which also honored another innovative female Catholic leader, Blessed Mary Ward, who founded the Congregation of Jesus and the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary in England in the early 17th century.

The undersecretary of Vatican Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, Sr. Carmen Ros Nortes, said at the webinar that both Catholic women founded religious institutes that were “born from an inspiration of the Spirit that seeks to renew the Church.”

“If we ask from where Mary MacKillop and Mary Ward received this vision of the future and the inner strength to realize it, we can only say that the Spirit blows where it wills, and that God has his time for everything,” Sr. Carmen said.

“There are men and women designated as instruments of Providence in times of great historical crisis.”

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Manila, Philippines, Jul 12, 2019 / 06:22 pm (CNA).- The UN Human Rights Council has approved a resolution to launch an investigation into the violent war on drugs taking place in the Philippines under President Rodrigo Duterte.

Approved Thursday by a… […]

CNA Staff, Jun 18, 2020 / 03:01 pm (CNA).- The US Commission on International Religious Freedom issued a report Tuesday recommending a “binding agreement” between the United States and Pakistan, with the goal of encouraging Pakistan to improve its treatment of religious minorities.

Laws against blasphemy in Muslim-majority Pakistan have led to death sentences for many religious minorities, and the extrajudicial killing by mobs of many more accused of blasphemy.

This includes Servant of God Shahbaz Bhatti, a Catholic politician from Pakistan who the Taliban killed in 2011.

The US State Department has designated Pakistan a “country of particular concern” since 2018 for its record on religious freedom violations.

CPC designations can carry sanctions under U.S. law, but in 2018 and 2019 the State Department granted waivers to Pakistan that exempt them from any meaningful actions related to the CPC designation, USCIRF says.

USCIRF— which makes policy recommendations but does not create laws— recommended that the US set defined, concrete benchmarks for Pakistan to provide “greater clarity to a path off the CPC list and help improve religious freedom conditions, especially for the country’s religious minorities.”

Such a “binding agreement” to encourage countries to take steps to get off the CPC list has been used only once, which the US entered into with Vietnam in 2005 and which led to Vietnam’s removal from the list. 

Pakistan’s state religion is Islam, and around 97 percent of the population is Muslim.

The country’s blasphemy laws, introduced in the 1980s, are reportedly used to settle scores or to persecute religious minorities; while non-Muslims constitute only 3 percent of the Pakistani population, 14 percent of blasphemy cases have been levied against them.

USCIRF urged the repeal of these laws.

The report also report recommended eliminating the practice of listing a person’s religion on their identification documents.The forced identification of a person’s religion on their ID has led to widespread discrimination and singling out of non-Muslims.

USCIRF urged Pakistan to begin an expedited review of all blasphemy cases, and to enforce proper handling of blasphemy cases according to existing due process rights. 

It also advocated that those accused of blasphemy be treated humanely, that those accused be allowed to post bail, and enforcing criminal penalties for people who give false evidence against someone accused of blasphemy.

USCIRF said Pakistan must remove material denigrating religious minorities from educational curricula and train teachers on the importance of religious tolerance, as well as establish and train a special police task force to protect religious minority communities and their houses of worship. 

In 2015, the Pakinstani government banned Ahmadiyya religious texts. Ahmadis consider themselves Muslims, but Pakistan’s constitution does not recognize the Ahmadis as such.

There are about 500,000 Ahmadis in Pakistan. Some observers estimate the Ahmadi population in Pakistan is higher, but persecution encourages Ahmadis to hide their identity. USCIRF recommended the ban on the texts be lifted.

There are at least 80 people currently imprisoned in Pakistan for their religious beliefs. Many of those accused of blasphemy are murdered, and advocates of changing the law are also targeted by violence.

A recent high-profile case involved a Catholic woman, Asia Bibi, whom authorities sentenced to death by hanging in 2010 for blasphemy. She spent nine years on death row, but left Pakistan for Canada in 2019 at the age of 53 after her death sentence was overturned in October 2018.

Though the Pakistani Supreme Court in January 2019 upheld the decision to overturn her conviction, the verdict and her subsequent release from prison sparked protests from Islamic hardliners who support strong blasphemy laws.

In 2009, a mob of Muslims looted and burned a Christian neighborhood, killing six Christians by burning them to death. The attacks took place in reaction to a rumor that the Quran was desecrated in a nearby village.

In Punjab province last year, a mob attacked a Christian community after a mosque broadcast over loudspeaker a claim that the Christians had insulted Islam. In another incident in Karachi, false blasphemy accusations against four Christian women prompted mob violence that forced nearly 200 Christian families to flee their homes, the USCIRF said.

In 2013 the then-governing party of Pakistan, the Pakistan Muslim League, promised a quota for jobs in the educational institutes and the public sector for members of religious minorities. The Pakistan Peoples Party discussed an Equality Commission to monitor job quotas in Sindh.

Both parties are now in the opposition in the national parliament, and the proposed safeguards have not been put into action.

In May, Pakistan established a long-delayed National Commission for Minorities, which the country’s Supreme Court had called for in 2014. Hard-line Islamist groups threatened to protest the commission, while Catholic leaders called the commission “toothless.”

Catholic and other religious leaders in the country have repeatedly spoken out against the country’s treatment of minorities.

In August 2019, a number of Pakistani religious leaders signed a joint resolution encouraging the Pakistani government to adopt policies to protect religious minorities.

The conference to sign the resolution, organized by Aid to the Church in Need – Italy and by local advocate Tabassum Yousaf, was attended by Fr. Saleh Diego, vicar general of the Archdiocese of Karachi, who represented Cardinal Joseph Coutts.

Representatives of the country’s Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, and Baha’i communities also were present and signed the resolution.

In a Jan. 21, 2020 letter written on behalf of Philadelphia’s Pakistani Catholic community, then-Archbishop of Philadelphia Charles Chaput encouraged Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan to shape a culture of religious freedom.

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