Thanks to all for your comments.

What Australian is I think, is a very open prospective. See the long standing Ozzies will like the many boat loads from all over, including my own connection in that far away land, and a lot of the new arrivals in the 1900 to lets say 1960,s were the wogs of this new land. Some of the Colonial Australians that had convict connections or there abouts, felt they were being in invaded by these new comers,

( Mary Mackillop did not see this indifference with race as some clearly do in this world )

and most of the cultural differences of the past were clearly seen with some resentment I might add.

I also know for my side of the family, that many Australian new borns where told by their parents to up-hold their connection to the home-land where their mums and dads came from, and as you will see in today's Australia, most still keep a little bit for their true homeland of old and is celebrated in the likes of Greek day or the Irish what ever, Welsh day and so on.

Even the indigenous have there day to celebrate and so they should, and the mixed feeling will continue until maybe another 2 to 300 years, and it will take that long before many of the old and out of date practices as you mentioned, gone and forgotten.

"I'm afraid this forum is NOT very representative of Australia's population. I get the impression that the vast majority of people here are white, middle to right wing and middle aged to older males with old fashioned out of date social attitudes.

You know Judy, I wonder if there is any Australian saints that can fall in the same fields as this Scottish lady?

And lets not forget the Scottish people again! that helped the Tasmanian indigenous people out when genocide was in full swing.

Multiculturalism In Australia is still filled with the aged and those distanced memories that are still as you said, fresh in the minds of the many.

TTM

THE CANONIZATION OF MARY MACKILLOP(Part 1)

Two or three nights ago, after a day of writing and reading, editing and posting on the internet, research and what I have come to call independent scholarship, I settled down with my after-midnight snack. I watch TV at that time to help turn my brain off and so get into alpha waves after what has been a busy day of ratiocinative activity. I chanced upon a movie entitled The Magdalene Sisters.(1) It was set in Dublin in 1964 and portayed the sexual, physical and emotional abuse by nuns, priests and others in church-run residential schools or asylums, incredibly horrific Dickensian institutions.

Part of the reason for making the film, wrote the director Peter Mullen, was the need for closure by the victims of these institutions. The film received the British Independent Film Award in 2003 and the Golden Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival in 2002. For my money, for my television and cinema tastes, this film deserved both awards.-Ron Price with thanks to (1) SBS1 TV, 14 October 12:05-2:15 a.m. and Sarah Lyall, “Report Details Abuses In Irish Reformatories,” The New York Times.com, 20 May 2009.

Part 2

Where will I start with my comment
on this moving account of fallen and
abused women needing redemption
for their so-called sins in old systems
of homes maintained by religious orders
in Ireland’s Roman Catholic Church?
How can believers reconcile their faith
with these historically oppressive facts?

Where will I start on this special day of
the canonization of Mary MacKillop?
The declaration of heroic virtue in 1992?(1)
Your beatification on 19 January 1995?(2)
The decree of 19 December 2009 by the
Congregation for the Causes of Saints who
issued the papal statement recognising that
second miracle: the complete and permanent
cure of a woman with lung and brain cancer?

Will I mention that by October 2010 your
official website was receiving an average of
9,000 visitors per day? I’ll have to see that
1994 film Mary, the 2008 play Her Holiness
and that musical of 2008 Mary MacKillop for
Australia’s first saint: what does it all mean?

Perhaps--that one can not use the words and
deeds of mortal-men as a standard for the true
understanding and recogniition of God & His
Prophets. It’s a very difficult lesson to learn
on life’s path of faith, eh Mary? Putting one’s
trust in God has never been easy, has it Mary?
I wish you well wherever you are leaping and
soaring, perhaps, in the land or ocean of light!!

1 This is a process internal to the church and conducted by some of its senior members.
2 Pope John Paul II performed this beatification. For the occasion the acclaimed Croatian-Australian artist Charles Billich was commissioned to paint the official commemorative portrait of Mary MacKillop.

Ron Price

I think there's a widespread desire to be different. I don't begrudge the Irish the right to call themselves Irish (even if they, nor anyone they have ever met, have spent so much as a day in Ireland). Nor do I begrudge the Scottish the right to call themselves Scottish, the Chinese the right to call themselves Chinese, and so on.

I do find it amusing that they take it upon themselves to take others with them. What did Mary Mackillop call herself? I'm not sure that we'll ever know for certain. The one thing we know is that she was born in Australia (or, more accurately at the time, in Victoria).

I'll reiterate as well. I knew of Mary Mackillop before the sainthood issue. I suspect the students of various schools named after her, the participants in various sporting houses named after her and many of the people who pray in the various Catholic facilities with statues and paintings of her did as well. So the sainthood issue isn't the ONLY reason people know of Mary Mackillop. It isn't the only reason anybody cares, either.

I have heard all that I need. Thank-you.

This is the greatest land, isn't?

Now I feel more human than ever before.

Smile.

TTm

Suzeonline,

Gee, you don't make a lot of sense here, Suze. For all your criticism of the Catholic Church and complaining about your Catholic upbringing that I've read - why did you send your child to a Catholic School?