JOSEPHITE Sisters buried in Queensland, some with personal connections to Blessed Mary MacKillop, will be honoured in a memorial ritual at Nudgee Cemetery in Brisbane on the afternoon of July 5.
Sisters who are buried in other places in Queensland will also be remembered through the unveiling of a special plaque during the ritual, which starts at 2.30pm.
Included in this group are Sr Gertrude Byrne (deceased 1873) and Sr Augustine Keogh (deceased 1875) who both died in Maryborough and are buried there.
Member of the Josephites’ Queensland provincial leadership team Sr Monica Cav-anagh said these Sisters “would have known Mary MacKillop personally”.
Sr Cavanagh said the memorial ritual “would honour and remember all our Sisters buried in Queensland”.
“These women now rejoice with Mary MacKillop (co-founder of the Sisters of St Joseph),” she said.
“On this memorial day we will be giving thanks for their contribution to Mary Mac-Killop’s journey to canonisation through their faithful living out of the Gospel in her spirit.”
Also remembered is Sr Evelyn Pickering who for years worked on Mary MacKillop’s cause and was responsible for providing resources from the founder’s writings and for typing up a great number of her letters.
Sr Pickering died in May 2007 and is buried in Nudgee Cemetery.
Sr Cavanagh said the many Sisters who entered the Josephites from Queensland and served in other provinces would also be remembered.
“This includes Mary MacKillop’s successor, Mother Baptista Molloy, the only other Josephite buried in North Sydney’s Mary MacKillop chapel,” she said.
“It was during Mother Molloy’s time as mother general that the Mary MacKillop Memorial Chapel was built and Mary MacKillop’s body was brought from the Gore Hill cemetery to be reinterred in the chapel.”
The other Sisters to be remembered will be those who came from other provinces to serve in Queensland for a period of time and are now buried elsewhere.
These include Mother Lawrence O’Brien who at 20 left South Australia and went with three other Sisters to live in the community at Copperfield in Queensland’s central west from 1873-1877.
Mother O’Brien was the mother general when the process for Mary MacKillop’s canonisation began in Sydney in 1925.
She collected the Sisters’ memories which have now been published in a book Memories of Mary by those who knew her: Sisters of St Joseph 1925-1926/compiled by the Sisters of St Joseph.
Sr Cavanagh said Sisters, relatives and friends of the Josephites were all invited to attend the memorial ritual.
