Sydney Sojourn

We enjoyed our brief spell of Sydney's delightful "winter" before the tropic heat. Our days were spent exploring the graceful city's many sights and sounds, and we learned two remarkable stories.



Sunday morning we set off for Mass at Sydney's St. Mary's Cathedral. The lofty Gothic towers of the cathedral, built of Sydney's distinctive golden sandstone, stand guard at the top of Sydney's ceremonial center, Macquarie Street.



The liturgy at St. Mary's is as lofty and Gothcs as its towers, with a men's choir singing most of the Mass in Latin chant and polyphony. Cardinal Pell presided, looking much more haggard and stooped than he did two years ago at World Youth Day.



This statue of Mary, Help of Christians, was carved by one of the early Benedictine monks of the cathedral. When the first church was destroyed by fire in the 1850s, it found its way to a private garden and has only recently returned home.

After Mass we took the train across the Harbour Bridge to the shrine of Australia's first and only saint, Mary MacKillop. She will be canonized in October, and her story is at once uniquely Australian and universal in the best Catholic tradition. Mary was born to a poor but pious immigrant family in Melbourne in 1842. As a young teenager she was sent to serve first as a governess and then as a teacher to support her family. Mary felt the call of religious life, desiring to devote herself to God and the service of the poor. After several religious orders rejected her because of her poverty and lack of education, her confessor suggested that they form a new religious congregation. In 1866, at the age of 24 Mary became Mother Mary of the Cross, the foundress and superior of the Sisters of St. Joseph of the Sacred Heart. Many young women joined her, and the sisters in their coarse brown habits were soon setting out to the roughest edges of the rough-and-tumble colony. Like the disciples, the sisters set out with just the shoes on their feet and their faith in God. "Never see a need without doing something about it" was Mary's motto, and the sisters organized schools, orphangages, job training centers, clinics, shelters and every sort of good work. A woman of strong will as well as strong faith, Mary soon ran into trouble with local pastors and bishops. Impatient to serve the poor, Mary and the sisters often neglected to seek appropriate ecclesiatical permissions or to wait for "proper" convents to be built. The Sisters often arrived in a new settlement months or even years before a parish priest would arrive. Their charity and energy are still legendary in Australia, and Mary's "roll up your sleeves and get to work attitude," influenced a generations of Australia's newly arriving immigrants.

Blessed Mary MacKillop, Mother Mary of the Cross, will be canonized in October 2010, the first Australian-born saint.

In 1871 Mary and her sisiters were excommunicated, but after a short while the bishop regretted his action and reversed the decision on his death-bed. Mary had to make three separate journeys to Rome (45 days aboard a ship each way!) before she obtained the approval of Pope Pius for her order and its governance. Still the Sisters were expelled from two dioceses before they were welcomed in North Sydney where Mary died in 1909 and the sisters' motherhouse is still located.

In 1891 on thge 25th anniversary of their foundation the Sisters numbered almost 500 and their work extended to the furthest reaches of Australia and new Zealand. It can truly be said that Mary's vision and charism laid the groundwork for both the church and school system in Australia.

Bro. Tim and Fr. Tom with Sister Lucy and her nephew Damien at the Mary MacKillop shrine.

Mary died in 1909 after a long illness, and the chapel that was built around her tomb soon became a place of pilgrimage for people from all over Australia. Three popes-- Paul VI, John Paul II and Benedict XVI have come to pray at her tomb. On the afternoon that we visited a steady stream of pilgrims of all ages and nationalities came to "visit Mary," as the Sisters say.

In the museum that adjoins the chapel we met two of the Sisters of St. Joseph who told us many stories of Mary and the work of the Sisters over the years. They even gave us each a relic to take with us on our mission to the Solomons. We left both inspired by Mary's story and marvelling over the way that the Holy Spirit can work through just one person.

When Pope John Paul II beatified Mary in 1995 (at Randwick Raceway where the Closing Mass of Sydney's 2008 World Youth Day was held) he summarized her virtues:

Genuine openness to others,

Hospitality to strangers

Generosity to the needy,

Justice to those unfairly treated,

Perseverance in the face of adversity,

Kindness and support to the suffering.

Virtues for all of us to cultivate at any time and in any hemisphere!

St. Mary's Cathedral illuminated as part of the MacquarieVisions celebration.

We learned the second story when we came out of the cathedral again after solemn vespers in the evening. The whole facade of the cathedral was vividly illuminated as part of a celebration of the 200th anniversary of the arrival of Governor Lachlan Macquarie as the fifth governor of Australia. Macquarie was ent to serve as warden to the convicts transported to the furthest reach of the British empire and to help wring as much profit from the apparnetly dismal continent as he could for the Crown and its investors. Macquarie and his wife had other plans. He was the first to imagine the possibility of Australia as something more than a dumping place for imperial riffraff and of Sydney as a great city that would rival a European capital.

In his ten years as governor from 1810 to 1820 Lachlan and Elizabeth Macquarie transformed the city and the colony. They sponsored 268 visionary projects from building roads and establishing towns to laying out the Botanical Gardens and organizing a conservatory of music. The basic plan of Sydney as a city opening itself to its incomprable harbor came from Macquarie's imagination. The town he entered was hunkered down around the heavily fortified Government House.

Most enlightened was Macquarie's attitude his "citizens," the transported convicts of England and Ireland and the native people of Australia. Macquarie believed in a "fair go" for all. He ordered that soldiers respect the rights of the native peoples and that as much as possible their names be used for to name rivers and landforms (hence the mouthful Sydney suburb of Wooloomooloo). Convict showing exceptional talent and enterprise were emancipated. Macquarie appointed ex-convicts as the chief architect and poet laureate of the colony. A dozen of the buildings erected by the talented Francis Greenway still line Macquarie Street in Sydney. A staunch Scots Presbyterian, Macqurie nevertheless laid the cornerstone for the first Catholic chapel (where St. Mary's now stands) so that the Irish could enjoy the benefits and encouragements of their faith. When he had Greenway build a substantial barracks for the convicts so that "decent living might make decent men," some of his fellow Englishmen could take no more and complained to the King. Macqurie was recalled to England to be investigated. He died a broken man in 1824. His wife died in poverty two years later.

200 years later the Sydney they could never have imagined in their wildest dreams but which is actually the fulfillment of their vision is celebrating the MacquarieVision. From St. Mary's all the way down to the harbor, the buildings Macquarie built or inspired are illuminated with light and sound projections that tell the story of this remarkable pioneer couple. Walking along Macquarie Street with us as we watched and listened to this story unfold were hundreds of families speaking what seemed like a dozen languages, proof that Sydney has indeed become the welcoming, elegant multicultural city that Macquarie imagined so long ago.

Not bad for one day!

Small World Note #1: When we were having breakfast on Monday morning at the Circular Quay overlooking the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge, we got into a conversation with our waitress about how people who live in a city never visit "attractions" that draw tourists. When we mentioned NYC, she asked where we lived. We said "Long Island," and she asked where.When I answered "Mineola," she broke into a great laugh. She had served as an au-pair for a year in Garden City ten years ago. One of her charges, Tom Bruno CHS class of 2005 0r 6!