The Ark

A young woman of immense faith she founded Our Lady's Nurses for the Poor, a nursing order for the destitute & is now ranked alongside Mary MacKillop.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Born in Melbourne in 1892, Eileen O'Connor would live a short but eventful life, despite her severe disability.

THEME

Rachael Kohn: Pope Benedict XV looked at the tiny lady before him, and was told through a translator that she was from Australia, and she had a request.

Hello. On The Ark today we find out how a young woman realised her dream despite tremendous adversity. I'm Rachael Kohn.

Eileen O'Connor was born in 1892 in Melbourne. Her parents moved to Sydney, and there, despite her small frame and infirm body, she founded Our Lady's Nurses for the Poor in the seaside suburb of Coogee. Almost until her death in 1920, she led her group of women with a profound faith, but without the Church's approval. John Hosie is her biographer.

John Hosie: She was the most unlikely person to be doing anything of the kind, because she was largely paralysed at this time of her life, but through a priest friend of hers, Father Ted McGrath, a Sacred Heart father, they had decided between themselves to start a group of women who would work among people who had no possibility of getting any kind of medical help or medicines or that sort of thing, and do that work for free.

When that became known, a quite wealthy Catholic priest called Father Edward Gell, who was the parish priest out at Ryde, offered to buy this house for them, a home here in Dudley Street in Coogee and gave it to them as a gift a few months after they'd begun.

Rachael Kohn: Well Eileen O'Connor, as you say, was paralysed. How did that happen actually?

John Hosie: It was the result of an accident that occurred when she was a child. She was about three years old and she and a baby sister were being wheeled along in a pram and it was a rutted area, and the pram was knocked over and she fell to the ground, and both of them did of course.

The parents thought that both of them were unhurt, but two or three years later a doctor diagnosed that because of intense pain that she was suffering all the time, was a broken back, and it only later turned out that she had had a tubercular osteomylitis which caused a weakening in the spine at that particular point.

Rachael Kohn: And she remained a pretty frail, tiny person. But Father McGrath who you mentioned, was really devoted to her. How would you describe their relationship?

John Hosie: They were in some ways perhaps one of the first words that comes to mind is naïve. They naively believed that they could just go out there and do something really powerful to help people. She saw herself as being able -she was literally in bed all the time paralysed - saw herself as being able through him to reach out to people who had needs which were similar to those that her own family had experienced, particularly after the death of her father.

Rachael Kohn: Well, she seems to have had the gift of making people happy, in fact I think she offered her pain to Father McGrath as a way of helping him in his life.

John Hosie: Yes, that was a kind of spirituality which seems a long way from our point of views today. But at the time people, because of so many being in poverty and so forth, very often thought that if they could offer up pain or suffering, then their spiritual lives would be enhanced, that they would be able to do good, that they could do good for other people.

Rachael Kohn: Well they managed to get things off the ground, but unfortunately Father McGrath's order, the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart, were not very happy with his involvement, or the work. Why?

John Hosie: It's a little bit more complex than that.

They were his original greatest supporters, but what happened was that the Sacred Heart order had been expanding rapidly in Australia at the time, and a number of corners had been cut and so there were financial difficulties which are far too complex to go into, but included the fact that Australia was the centre responsible for Sacred Heart Missions in New Guinea and northern Australia and out in the Pacific Islands, and a Visitor-General, as it was called, was sent out, a Father Hubert Linckens, to Australia, in order to deal with the problems.

When he arrived, he found what he considered with a strong Germanic background, although he was originally Dutch, to be quite unacceptable, lack of control by the superiors and so forth, it was a very Australian situation, and much of this came out of a complete misunderstanding of the Australian character and the way that Australians needed to be dealt with. But he decided that one way to get obedience was to make an example of a couple of people, and he chose two, and one of them was Father Ted McGrath.

Rachael Kohn: Father Linckens reacted to Father Ted McGrath in a very severe way. I mean he virtually threatened expulsion, didn't he?

John Hosie: He more than threatened, he literally had the provincial council to issue a decree expelling him from the order and from the priesthood. And so immediately he was unable to say daily mass and he was no longer wearing priestly dress, and had to act as a lay person at once.

Rachael Kohn: Well there were certainly a lot of rumours going around, of Father Ted spending too much time with Eileen, and she being a woman, and of course having a group of women around her as well.

John Hosie: Well that was the situation, and that was what the work that they had founded required. There's not the slightest evidence of any impropriety between them, and it was actually used as a charge against Father McGrath and eventually it was recognised that that was the situation in Rome, that there had not ever been any involvement of a sexual kind of that kind of thing.

But the way in which the common attitude spread was that because Father McGrath had been punished so severely, there must be something behind it, and that caused an enormous amount of difficulty for the young nurses. They went through a great deal of pain and suffering because of this. On one instance, spitting on the ground in front of them. They would get onto the tram, and a couple of people who were sitting in that section of the tram would get off and move to another.

Rachael Kohn: Well despite Eileen's paralysis, she wouldn't take this lying down. She followed Ted McGrath to Rome and argued his case.

John Hosie: It was in some ways I think over her concern about what was happening that she began to walk again, and it was she who said to Father Ted McGrath, You are not going to find justice in Sydney. If you want justice, you have to go to Rome and argue your case over there. And she travelled with him, with her nurse, as she always needed, but also as a chaperone, and Father Gell and his sister provided the money for them to travel over to Rome for the case in which the3y argued for Father McGrath's reinstatement, which was eventually given.

Rachael Kohn: Well unfortunately that only added to the rumours, because of course them both being in Rome at the same time raised further suspicions, but she also went there to fight against her own defamation.

John Hosie: Yes, because of that previous rumour going around that she had been in some way involved with him, she believed that the only way in which she could get justice was by taking first the Sacred Heart order, which had punished Father McGrath, in all public estimation because of his relationship with her, and in order to sue the order for this, she believed she had to get permission from Archbishop Kelly, and Archbishop Kelly gave no support at all. And so she went to Rome to take cases out also against Archbishop Kelly, her own Archbishop, and the Sacred Heart order.

Rachael Kohn: Well it doesn't seem she was very successful in that regard.

John Hosie: I think a woman in 1915 in a world of men where all the rules were made by men, and where the people hearing the case were all men, it's remarkable that she got as far as she did.

Rachael Kohn: But eventually the nurses did gain recognition by the church; how did that happen?

John Hosie: That happened very gradually and slowly, and by a number of steps.

The first step that they wanted was to have Eileen be able to be buried. She died very young, at the age of 28, and she was buried originally in Randwick cemetery, and then they had wanted right from the start her to be able to be buried in their own grounds, the place where she'd lived and died, and eventually they received that permission after some ten or so years after her death.

Then in later years, in about the 1950s, Cardinal Gilroy, who was always a great admirer of the nurses and the work they did, he really believed in their work, and he said to them, 'You need to be accepted as a religious order', and so he set in motion and succeeded in having them recognised as a religious order.

Rachael Kohn: And that came I think finally in 1953, didn't it?

John Hosie: That's right, yes.

Rachael Kohn: Well I understand John, that there are efforts now to beatify her. What was the miracle at the centre of it?

John Hosie: It's a long way from beatification even at this stage. What the sisters are hoping is that Eileen had attracted people enormously, people who came to visit her, because of this cult, if you like, the sisters thought it might be worth inquiring whether a permission could be given for the cause to proceed. That's the technical phrasing that is used.

Rachael Kohn: But there was a miracle, wasn't there, when her body was exhumed?

John Hosie: Well that was never claimed as a miracle, but it was one of those remarkable things. Because they had buried her with the possibility of disinterring and taking the body to the Dudley Street home, when they disinterred it and it was all done officially and with the Randwick Council approval and a policeman was there and so forth, and they opened the casket, Eileen's body just looked the same as it was when they'd buried her.

Many of them who were there had been at her burial and they said things like, 'Look at the little darling, isn't she beautiful?'

Rachael Kohn: John, Our Lady's Nurses for the Poor still seem to be going, but perhaps in a more spruced up style than they had originally. Can you give us a good idea the kind of work those original nurses would have been doing?

John Hosie: It's very similar to the work they're still doing today. At the time, and we have to look back at Australia in the early years of the century, which was a time of far more widespread poverty than today, people didn't receive anything by way of government support in the way that people do today.

Medical needs and so forth were very much on Eileen's mind, that had been her life experience, she'd had operation after operation when she was a child, it had beggared her family, the expense of those things. And her interest in that was paramount. So she came up with the idea, or she and Father McGrath between them, of being able to go to people's homes and care for them there. But they didn't just do that, they also looked after them.

If there were children, they'd make sure they had their food if the mother was ill and hadn't been able to do things. They would wash their clothes or clean the place out and so forth. And they did that wherever around Sydney, they were very quickly travelling great distances to do it. And the Sisters today are still doing this type of work, it's changed a little bit in that it isn't without any government support these days, but what they're doing works at a very personal level for people.

I was talking to two of the sisters yesterday and one of them was talking about that they get a great many referrals from mental health, and so for example, she was mentioning two schizophrenic men whom she had visited and found that they were too timid to just do ordinary things, and so she took them shopping once a week on a Tuesday, and then she got them to a point where they felt that they were OK. It wasn't a case of just a sort of do-gooder type of approach.

They're very realistic ladies, and they help people out in a very personal kind of way. And often the work they're doing among say elderly people, are things that the available help in the community, the good work that's done by community nurses or others, doesn't reach. And so that's the sort of help that's happening right today, and that's in places where they are in Sydney, in Newcastle, in Brisbane, Wollongong, they're scattered around quite widely and doing great work.

Rachael Kohn: John Hosie is the author of Eileen: The Life of Eileen O'Connor, Foundress of Our Lady's Nurses for the Poor. Published by St Paul's Press.

Next week we continue the focus on Catholic sisters, when we look at the history of the habit. It wasn't just a uniform.

That's The Ark, next week, with me, Rachael Kohn.

THEME

Guests

John Hosie
was a Marist Father for 42 years, with pastoral ministry in the inner city of Sydney.

Publications

Title: Eileen: The Life of Eileen O'Connor
Author : John Hosie
Publisher: St Pauls Publications, 2004