I was reading on the CWN website this morning about a “controversy” involving Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd who is scheduled for a private audience with the pope. He has let it be known that he plans to bring up the subject of the canonization of Australia’s Blessed Mary MacKillop whom the faithful down under would like to see declared a saint. Good for him. Nevertheless some Jesuit ethicist is a bit ruffled about the protocol — you know, separation of Church and State and all that. That may even be a new sin for liberal theologians, this mixing of religion and politics. However, that story is not what I want to post for you today. Rather, I want to re-publish a brief Did You Know That clip from a 1984 Housetops about another Aussie, Caroline Chisholm, a holy laywoman and contemporary of Blessed Mary MacKillop.
Did you know that on the front of the Australian five-dollar bill is the pleasant face of a saintly Catholic convert and humanitarian, Caroline Chisholm. Caroline was born in England in 1808 to an Anglican family and was converted to Catholicism when she met and subsequently married Captain Archibald Chisholm of the East India Company. All her life she had manifested a zeal for helping the less fortunate, but after her conversion, and two-year stay in India, that zeal increased even more.
In 1838, the Chisholms settled in Sidney, Australia. Here Caroline turned her main concern upon the plight of the unmarried women, which on the southern continent was particularly deplorable. Bad marriages were more common than good ones, due to the fact that Australia drew a large number of derelicts and runaway convicts who hoped to escape justice in a land of anonymity. Hardly anyone of worth was anxious to attempt a business venture in this newly-settled far away place.
Mrs. Chisholm set out to help these poor women by establishing for them a hotel in which to live safely until they could get a job. Next, she came upon the idea of encouraging and facilitating immigration of single women of strong character, of good men, good families, and of bringing over the wives and children of resident immigrants who had been left behind in the homeland. To achieve this she established in 1849 the very successful Family Colonization Loan Society in London. As a result of her efforts, five thousand new settlers came to Australia to relieve the unhealthy situation that eventually could have ruined many hundreds of poor stranded victims of impoverishment.
On her tombstone is engraved this epitaph in her memory,
THE EMIGRANTS’ FRIEND
A writer named M. Kiddle has written a book about her.
