Cover-up held back Mary MacKillop's cause for decades

Not being a very religious man does not preclude me from admiring the work of this woman, though I do not believe in Saint's and such things I do believe that she deserves special recognition.
Though why she chose to stay with the Catholic church after such disgusting treatment is beyond me.


I wonder what she would think of the tide of pedophilia washing through the church in recent times considering her reaction to the same problem all those years ago.


MARY MacKillop's recognition as Australia's first saint might have come 20 years earlier if not for a delay that is still formally unexplained.


The hiatus from 1931 to 1951 in the pursuit of MacKillop's sainthood has been widely reported to be the result of an important document being "missing" when it was sought by her supporters in 1931.


The crucial document was not missing and never has been missing. It was just sitting there on a shelf, and the dates on the back of the bindings showed it had been there right from the start.

In 1871, Adelaide bishop Laurence Sheil declared that MacKillop was excommunicated from the church for supposed insubordination after she tried to defend the independence and future of her congregation.


She had been dragged into that row when an influential priest, Father Charles Horan, set out to destroy her order because some of MacKillop's nuns had exposed as a child abuser another priest who was his friend.


There was a deliberate attempt within the Vatican to suppress the truth about how MacKillop and the Sisters of St Joseph's order of nuns she founded were bullied and manipulated by priests and bishops who were supposed to be helping them.