MARY MACKILLOP NOW A SAINT: Cardinal Pell’s comment and a comment on Cardinal Pell’s comment.
Cardinal George Pell of Sydney is quoted in yesterday’s Herald Sun saying how Mary MacKillop’s canonisation is “important for Australian Catholics . . . also important for Australia as a nation . . . Catholics are now part of the mainstream.”
Was that a typo?
Getting one letter wrong can be serious.
Did he intend to say that “Catholics are not part of the mainstream”?
That would make more sense.
Being a Catholic is a deliberate step away from the ways of the mainstream.
There is no middle path . . . .
* * *
The Cardinal also said that, “All Australians, Christians and non-Christians, feel they are entitled to express their opinions on controversial Catholic teachings . . . we welcome this as a small price for belonging.”
Ouch!
Jesus Christ, founder of the Catholic Church, didn’t teach “belonging”.
Quite the reverse. He told his disciples they must be “in the world but not of it”.
Christianity means a conscious decision to cease belonging to this world — and to start belonging to God.
Literally.
No middle path . . . .
* * *
Three concrete examples:
(1) Mary MacKillop had a non-Catholic friend, Joanna Smith, who donated generously to the Sisters’ work.
In a letter to her mother, Mary wrote, “Both she and her husband know that my earnest desire is for her conversion . . . pray for her to return to us as a Catholic.”
No middle path . . . .
(2) The original Josephites would not accept government aid because Australia’s government wasn’t Catholic. In her 1873 Petition to the Pope, Mother Mary explained that a non-Catholic government will “always, sooner or later, interfere with the Catholic system of the schools — St Joseph’s schools are purely Catholic ones, and it is the desire of the Sisters . . . to be entirely dependent upon St Joseph’s protection for all the aid they require to carry on . . . .”
No middle path . . . .
(3) Jesus himself, in his final words to his disciples, said:
“Go, therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.”
No middle path . . . .
