Vatican boosts bid for sainthood
AUSTRALIA’S push for a Sydney woman to be made a saint has received a significant boost from the Vatican.
Eileen O’Connor has been officially declared a ‘Servant of God’, the first major step towards sainthood.
It comes six months after Archbishop of Sydney Anthony Fisher began the formal process for the beatification of Eileen, who founded the religious order Our Lady’s Nurses of the Poor.
The order – also known as the “Brown Nuns” because of their distinctive brown cloaks and bonnets – was committed to caring for the sick and dying poor in their homes, inspired by Eileen’s own family’s financial struggles after her father’s death.
Born in inner Melbourne in 1892, Eileen was the eldest of four children to Irish-born parents, and moved to Sydney with her family aged 10. She died when she was just 28.
“Eileen’s was a life of immense suffering and judged by today’s standards many would have viewed it as lacking in dignity, value or hope,” the archbishop said in a statement yesterday.
“That she is on her way to possibly being our next saint shows even a short life, marked by incredible suffering, can be an inspiration to all and reminds us of the dignity of every human life.” Rome-based priest Father Anthony Robbie in March was appointed postulator – the person who guides the cause for beatification or canonisation through the Church’s processes for recognising a saint – for Eileen. The Catholic Church posthumously confers beatification, and later sainthood, on people considered so holy during their lives that they are now believed to be with God and can intercede with him to perform miracles. Mary MacKillop became Australia’s first saint in 2010.