When Mary MacKillop took her vows as a Catholic nun, she chose the name “Sister Mary of the Cross”.

Why should the cruel death by crucifixion of a wandering Jewish preacher 1800 hundred years earlier be significant to this intelligent young Australian woman?

(And why should the day of his execution be called “Good Friday”. What is “good” about a teacher of love and justice being flogged almost to death, nailed to a gallows, exposed to the mockery of a hooting crowd and left to the attentions of the flies and crows?)

It all depends on whether he really was God Incarnate — God in the flesh — and whether he rose again from the dead, and whether his death somehow merits for us the forgiveness from God that we will never deserve but desperately need.

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On the day of her consecration, Mary lay face down before the altar while the account of Christ’s Passion was read from the gospel.

Then she knelt and made four vows — to poverty, to chastity, to obedience — plus a vow to promote devotion to the Passion of Christ.

Until that point in the ceremony she wore a wreath of flowers. Now a Crown of Thorns was placed on her head – and a Cross laid across her shoulders.

The priest, Father Woods, then recited: “Let the crosses following thy consecration to Jesus Christ be taken up by thee cheerfully, and remember that thou art thus helping Christ to bear his Cross. Love to be unknown, to be poor and despised, for thou art now bound by thy profession to the service of God in the Sisterhood of Saint Joseph . . . .”

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From that moment, devotion to Christ’s Cross dominated Mary’s life and thoughts.

In her meditations she used this prayer: “Oh, my crucified God, behold me, the guilty cause of Thy most cruel death. Oh, behold me now in true contrition of heart at the foot of Thy Cross.”

She wrote also of the Cross being “a sweet and dear instrument in the hands of a great and good Father, making his children all that such a Father has a right to expect his chosen children to be.”