Author and former GP, Kate Clinch, never expected a photograph at Saint Mary MacKillop’s tomb to change her life. In conversation with Mary MacKillop Today, she reflects on Eileen O’Connor, Australia’s second saint in waiting, and on the courage the Josephite story asks each of us to carry forward.
About 10 years ago, Kate Clinch stood at the tomb of Saint Mary MacKillop, took a photograph, and shared it on Facebook. An acquaintance saw it and sent a short message: if you love Mary, you should visit Eileen’s house. Kate had never heard of Eileen O’Connor. She had two days left in Sydney and every reason to let it go: the public transport to Coogee, the appointment she would need to make, the bother of fitting one more thing into a busy trip. Instead, she said yes. That yes would reshape the next decade of her life.
In a modest house in the Sydney suburb of Coogee, Kate found a small museum that consisted of a few glass cabinets, and a chapel that had once been a bedroom. Eileen O’Connor is buried beneath its floor. Sitting in the pews, on the very spot where the bed had stood, Kate felt something she still finds hard to put into words. She had not been raised Catholic, nor among the language of saints. But the certainty was unmistakable: she was in the presence of a saint. She went home with an armful of biographies and a single question that would not leave her alone: how on earth did you do what you did?
It is a fair question. Eileen O’Connor was born on 19 February 1892. Before the age of three, she contracted tuberculosis, which settled in the bones of her spine and never let go. She lived with chronic pain, partial paralysis and a spine so damaged that she grew to be just 115cm tall. She was so fragile that a handshake once broke her hand. And yet, in 1913, this same young woman co-founded Our Lady’s Nurses for the Poor, sending nurses into the poorest streets of Sydney to care, free of charge, for people who could not pay.
When the Spanish flu swept through and claimed the order’s matron, it was Eileen, often bedbound, often unconscious with pain, who stepped into the role. She directed her nurses, ran the fundraising that kept the doors open, took telephone calls, and wrote the paperwork that would allow the order to continue after her death, because she knew she would die first. When the work drew suspicion and scandal, and she was threatened with excommunication, the priest who had helped her, Father McGrath, was banished overseas. Still, Eileen did not give up. It is a pattern the Josephite family knows well: Mary MacKillop, too, was excommunicated for a time.
Eileen died in 1921, at just 28. Her undertaker spoke five words that have never quite faded: “I buried a saint today”. People had sensed it while she still lived, quietly gathering up the soil where she had sat as though it were sacred. Today she has been declared a Servant of God, and her cause is active in Rome. The subtitle of the novel Kate has written about her names her plainly: Australia’s second saint in waiting.
Why did this story take such hold of Kate? Part of the answer is professional. Born in England and living in Australia since she was six, Kate was a GP long before she was a novelist, and she understood clinically exactly the pain Eileen carried every day. Part of it is personal: partway through writing the book, Kate was diagnosed with cancer and faced chemotherapy and major surgery. Through that frightening season, she says, Eileen changed from a historical figure whose courage broke her heart, into a daily companion who helped her keep going. Tellingly, before she even knew she was ill, Kate had felt a strange compulsion to make rosaries by hand, giving them away to friends by the dozen. By the time the hard news came, she already knew how to pray.
The result of all this is Every Inch a Saint, a novel that weaves Eileen’s true story together with a fictional family a century later, set against a Sydney gripped by the First World War and the Spanish flu. It is not a dry biography. It is, in Kate’s own words, a spiritual love story, the kind of book she says she has always been writing, from the historical fiction she attempted as a 10-year-old to now.
For those of us at Mary MacKillop Today, it is what Kate says about legacy that lingers.
“We live in a world,” she reflects, “where you need only read two headlines to know how badly we need kindness, integrity and compassion and those qualities no longer belong behind convent walls.”
We’re in a relay now, and the baton is being offered to all of us to pick up.
What would we lose, if we let these women’s stories fade? Something, Kate believes, of our ability to bear the unbearable, because the strength and hope carried by women like Mary and Eileen can keep a person breathing when breathing itself is too hard.
This is precisely the work Mary MacKillop Today exists to carry forward: the Josephite charism turned into action, walking alongside communities in Australia, Timor-Leste, Fiji and Peru. Kate is one of the people helping to carry it. She supports our Community Grants Program, and the Sisters of Saint Joseph stream especially, as a quiet way, she says, of standing with the women whose courage built so much, and helping carry their mission forward. It is a time of transition, and she does not want the Sisters to feel they carry it alone.
If you are reading this, perhaps you feel that same instinct, the quiet pull to pick up the baton yourself. One way to answer it is to leave a gift in your Will to Mary MacKillop Today and become a Friend of Mary. In doing so, you help make sure this courage keeps running forward, long after your own race is run. That is no small thing. It is, in the truest sense, keeping a legacy alive.
We think you would love spending time with Eileen. Kate’s novel, Every Inch a Saint, is available online and through good bookstores, including at the Mary MacKillop Spirituality Centre, Adelaide. And if her story stirs something, a question, a memory, a miracle you wish to talk about, or a legacy you are shaping, we would be honoured to hear from you.
Kate never did stop asking Eileen her question: how did you do that? Perhaps the answer is the one she found in that Coogee chapel, that courage like this was never meant to end with one woman. It was meant to be passed, hand to hand, to the next person brave enough to say yes.
Become a Friend of Mary
Friends of Mary are people who have chosen to leave a gift in their Will to Mary MacKillop Today, carrying Saint Mary MacKillop’s courage forward for generations to come. A gift of any size opens doors, and you can still provide for the people you love.
For a confidential conversation, or to request our free Friends of Mary guide, phone (02) 8043 8700 or visit www.marymackilloptoday.org.au/how-you-can-help/leave-a-legacy.