A calendar of other commemorations (with biographical notes)

August
8 Mary Helen MacKillop Christian pioneer
Mary Helen MacKillop became the first Australian to be officially recognised for ‘extraordinary holiness’ by the Roman Catholic church in October 2010. She pioneered a new form of religious community for women, working in twos and threes to respond to the the need for both education in faith and social outreach in colonial Australia, especially among the poor.
A plaque in the footpath in Brunswick St, Fitzroy marks the place where the MacKillops’ rented house stood and where Mary was born on 15 January 1842. She was the first of eight children of Alexander MacKillop and his wife Flora (MacDonald) who had migrated from Inverness, Scotland. She was educated mostly at home by her father. The family finances which were often precarious, and relied on Mary’s income from the time she was 14. She was a clerk in Sands and Kenny stationers (later Sands and MacDougal) for four years, and then teacher in Portland, Victoria before taking a position as governess to her aunt and uncle’s children (the Camerons) in Penola, South Australia.
In Penola she shared her hopes of religious life with the parish priest, Fr Julian Tenison-Woods, and together they developed plans to provide Catholic education to children especially in rural and poor areas. On 15 August 1867 she took vows as a religious sister within the new community dedicated to St Joseph and the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and adopted the name Mary of the Cross. The rule of life of the new community emphasised poverty, dependence on Divine Providence, no private ownership and the openness of the Sisters to go wherever they were needed. In November 1867 Mary’s sisters Annie and Lexie joined the new community, by the end of 1867 there were 10 members, and two years later 72 members running 21 schools as well as outreach and welfare centres.
However, misunderstanding dogged the work, and Mary learnt early to remain serene while being misrepresented and humiliated. The Sisters did not fit traditional European models of cloistered life, and Mary was famously excommunicated in Adelaide for nine months from September 1871 until the sentence was lifted in February 1872, and papal authority for the work confirmed in 1873. Nevertheless, the Sisters’ system of central government (under the director of their own superior rather than the local bishops) remained controversial. In 1883 in the midst of ongoing tensions, Mary transferred the administrative centre to Sydney. She suffered a stroke in 1901, and although mentally alert was an invalid until her death on 8 August1909.

The wideapread publicity around her canonisation in 2010 brought new interest in her life. As the Josephite Sisters continued to remind the public, the conviction that God is to be trusted, that Jesus really is the model of freedom, defined MacKillop’s commitments before anything else. See http://www.marymackillop.org.au/.

Mary modelled a commitment to 'above all get help in prayer'. Her letters (the bulk of her writing) were often preoccupied with business, but underpinned by faith. She was sustained by her conviction that the human dignity of each person was God-given. Her capacity to speak reverently and carefully even of those who had caused her great pain and damage inspired her Sisters. She was committed to drawing out the best in others, advising: in 1871: “Make no reserves with God. Reject no-one. You never know what grace can do.”

Katharine Massam
HYMN – written by Ross Mackinnon, based on some of Mary MacKillop’s sayings

Suggested tune: MARYTON (TiS 601)

Remember, we’re but travellers here,

urged on by Christ to take our cross.

When this feels hard at times, take heart.

Our courage rises; Christ is near.

And as we go, we trust in God,

in God who helps us in all things.

God gives us strength for what we need,

and courage to stay on the road.

And on the way, how must we choose?

We must let God’s great Spirit guide;

do all we can with what we have

and calmly leave the rest to God.

And on the track, when needs are seen,

We must not leave ‘til they are met,

for we must teach, more by our deeds

than by our words, as Christ has shown.

10 Laurence martyr

11 Christine Kilham Christian pioneer

12 Ann Griffiths person of prayer
Ann Griffiths (1776-1805) was a prominent Welsh poet and hymn-writer, and a Christian poet of international stature. Although she died at only 29 years of age, this farmer’s daughter from mid-Wales left poems and letters that are considered among the highlights of Welsh literature. Many scholars consider her to be the greatest of Welsh women poets and claim that her stanzas include some of the great Christian poetry of Europe.

Ann Griffiths was born Ann Thomas in Montgomeryshire the daughter of a prosperous farmer, a devout Anglican. In her youth she was known to seek the society of others and enjoyed dancing, a little too much perhaps. In 1796, two years after the death of her mother, Ann was converted by the preaching of a Congregational minister Benjamin Jones. Later, with her family she came under the influence of Thomas Charles a Calvinist Methodist who made a great impression on the young woman’s mind and heart.

Calvinistic Methodism was a movement which placed great emphasis not only on the orthodox beliefs of the Christian faith, but on the personal experience of those beliefs, on feeling the truths of the Faith. Until 1811 Welsh Calvinistic Methodism was officially a movement within the Established Church and not a separate denomination. Members of the movement would meet together in local groups called seiadau (singular seiat, from the English word ‘society’), where they would discuss and examine their religious experiences and receive help and instruction on their spiritual journey. In addition, there was a network of monthly meetings and quarterly association meetings (or sasiynau; singular sasiwn) to superintend the work.

Ann, then, was considered a person whose spiritual experiences were remarkable even at a time of powerful religious awakening. The examples of Ann’s work that have been preserved for us are both the fruit of those intense spiritual experiences and an expression of them. The sum total of her surviving work is small: eight letters and just over 70 stanzas, and only one letter and one stanza in her own hand.

Ann Griffith’s poems would probably be called “hymns” but they are not ‘congregational’ hymns. They are more “praise poems” written by Ann as a kind of spiritual journal entry when there was ‘something in particular on her mind.’

The Bible was central to Ann’s life and work and the key to forming and interpreting her experience of God whom she knew through the person of Jesus Christ. The hymns she wrote were centered on the figure of Christ crucified but including imagery from both Testaments. They exhibit an extraordinary emotional fervor and a critical knowledge of the Bible with a combination of intellect and devotion that is remarkable in a woman of her time.

At the same time Ann’s experience of God included having visions of Jesus and she admitted to “visitations”, seeing Christ waiting for her among the myrtles. Sent into the potato shed to collect potatoes she might be found hours later in a trance. This has given rise to the tendency to call her “a mystic.”

Ann Griffiths died aged 29 after giving birth to her only child who also died and was buried two weeks before her.

13 Florence Nightingale & Edith Cavell renewers of society
Florence Nightingale

At seventy, Florence Nightingale wrote, “When many years ago, I planned a future, my one idea was not organizing a hospital but organizing a religion”. History remembered the woman who cared for wounded British soldiers in the Crimean War and is credited with founding modern nursing, but few know of her fifty years of amazing accomplishments after Crimea.  

Florence was born in 1820 into a wealthy Unitarian family and raised Church of England. Her father educated her ‘like a son’ he didn’t have - in history, science, languages and philosophy. Brilliant and religiously absorbed, Florence was frustrated with her privileged life in Victorian England, with its divinely ordained class system of rich and poor, rulers and workers. She spent much of her childhood helping poor villagers around her family’s estates.

At seventeen, she received an audible call to serve God, but her family thwarted any attempt to follow this call. In 1849, she visited a Deaconess training center in Germany and discovered her dream - women training to serve the poor. Florence finally left home at thirty-three to become volunteer superintendent of a home for destitute governesses in London and left for the Crimea from there. When she returned twenty-two months later, she avoided public acclaim and retreated from public life. A grateful nation had established the Nightingale Fund in her honor, but she did not start the proposed nursing school. Haunted by dead soldiers, reforming army medical services was a more pressing task. When the Nightingale Training School for Nurses opened in 1860, Florence submitted proposals for its administration, but her focus was army reform.

Over the next fifty years, Florence was involved in reforming colonial policy and sanitation in India, work house reform, hospital design and location, preventative medicine and village health education. She developed hospital record forms to analyze patient information, introduced trained nurses to poorhouses, advised on indigenous health in British colonies and drafted the British delegation’s recommendations to the Geneva Convention. She helped change laws that restricted women’s rights to their children, property and divorce, and worked for paid employment for women, accomplishing all this through politicians who came to her home for advice and guided the reforms through Parliament.
Florence can only be fully understood by taking seriously her divine calls as the inspiration for her life and work. She once thought of founding a religious order and visited a Paris convent to learn the disciplines she followed through her life. Her secluded, disciplined lifestyle after Crimea created her own monastic structure. Florence wrote an eight hundred-page manuscript offering a new religion for the poor, challenging the belief that poverty was God’s will. The Divine Spirit is in each of us, she said, guiding us, with the help of “saviours”, beyond any predetermined destiny - she saw herself as a “saviour” for her time. Her theological ideas reflected the later disciplines of liberation theology, process theology, feminist theology and contextual theology, exploring topics like the concept of God, universal law, God’s will, sin and evil, family life, spiritual life and life after death. Her conclusions were in dialogue with the Church of England Broad Church movement whose Essays and Reviews challenged the church in the 1860’s. Florence’s writings are one of the British Library’s largest collections. She died in 1910.
Reference: Val Webb, Florence Nightingale: the making of a radical theologian (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2002.
Val Webb
Edith Cavell - Nurse, Humanitarian and Spy
Edith Cavell was born in Swardeston, near Norwich. Her father was a priest in the Anglican church. The religious faith that she was brought up with, was to provide an important influence on her life. In 1900, she trained to be a nurse at the London hospital. In 1907, she was recruited to be the matron of a new nursing school in Brussels. This was a period of growth in the prestige and importance of nursing; a period which began with Florence Nightingale during the Crimean War.
In 1910, Miss Cavell began one of the first nursing journals, L’infirmiere, which documented good nursing practises and basic standards. She became a teacher of nurses in different hospitals throughout Belgium and sought to improve standards of nursing.
In the Nursing Mirror, Edith Cavell writes:

“The probationers wear blue dresses with white aprons and white collars. The contrast which they present to the nuns, in their heavy stiff robes, and to the lay nurses, in their grimy apparel, is the contrast of the unhygienic past with the enlightened present.”

In 1914, the First World War broke out. At the time, Miss Cavell was in England, but she moved back to Belgium to her hospital which was later taken over by the Red Cross. As part of the German Schlieffen plan, the Germans invaded Belgium and in late 1914, Brussels was under a very strict German military occupation.
Many British soldiers had been left behind in the withdrawal of the Allied forces and were stuck in Brussels. Miss Cavell decided to aid the British servicemen, hiding them in the hospital and safe houses around Belgium. From these safe houses, some 200 British servicemen were able to escape to neutral Holland. At the same time, she continued to act as nurse and treated wounded soldiers from both the German and Allied side. The occupying German army threatened strict punishments for anyone who was found to be ‘aiding and abetting the enemy’. Yet, despite the military rule, Miss Cavell continued to help. Edith wrote: “Nothing but physical impossibility, lack of space and money would make me close my doors to Allied refugees.” 
In mid-1915, nurse Edith Cavell came under suspicion for helping allied servicemen to escape; this was not helped by her outspoken views on her perceived injustice of the occupation. In August 1915, she was arrested and held in St Gilles prison. After her arrest, she did not try to defend herself but only said in her defence that she felt compelled to help the people in need.
After a short trial, the German military tribunal found her guilty of treason and sentenced her to execution. This surprised many observers as it seemed harsh given her honesty and fact she had saved many lives both Allied and German.
For two weeks prior to her execution, Miss Cavell, was kept in solitary confinement, except for a few brief visits. On the night before her execution, she was visited by the Reverend Stirling Gahan, an Anglican chaplain. He recorded her final conversation. He records that Miss Cavell said: ‘Patriotism is not enough, I must have no hatred or bitterness to anyone.” She is also recorded as having said: “I have seen death so often that it is not strange or fearful to me.”
On her last night, she wrote to her fellow nurses, saying: “I have told you that devotion will give you real happiness, and the thought that you have done, before God and yourselves, your whole duty and with a good heart will be your greatest support in the hard moments of life and in the face of death.”
Though diplomats from the neutral governments of the United States and Spain fought to commute her sentence, their efforts were ultimately in vain. After her execution, the fate of Edith Cavell was widely publicised in the British and American media. It was shown as more evidence of German brutality and injustice. Edith Cavell was portrayed as a heroic and innocent figure who remained steadfast in her Christian faith and willingness to die for her country.
Tejvan Pettinger

14 Maximilian Kolbe martyr

15 Mary, mother of Jesus witness to Jesus

Mary first appears in narratives woven around Christ’s nativity. Mary, a vulnerable young woman faces God’s surprising, frightening action with humility, receptiveness, and joy, embodied in her great canticle of praise, the Magnificat: ‘My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my Spirit doth rejoice in God my saviour’. She is the humble and meek one exalted by God; as the genealogies of Christ make transparent, she is the one in whom God remembers his servant Israel, as he promised in the words of the prophets.

Mary’s openness to God’s Word is imagined in medieval depictions of the annunciation found in the prayer books of the late middle ages. Gabriel comes to Mary as she reads in a domestic interior – her open volume lies on a prayer desk. As her hands spread wide in surprise, she hears the angel’s ‘Hail’. The heavens open, and on beams of divine radiance, the Holy Spirit (or a naked Christ-child) wings its flight towards the Virgin. Often the Spirit flies not towards her womb, but towards her ear. In her faithful listening she concieves, her body full of grace.
In Latin, Gabriel’s ‘Hail’ is Ave: put this up to the spotless mirror of Mary, and you see the word Eva – Eve. To sing Ave Maria is to celebrate God’s entry into the world of human nakedness, to see Adam and Eve’s embarrased veiling of the flesh after their first disobedience reversed in the nakedness of a little child, the nakedness of a man born to die upon the tree.
According to the Gospels, Mary’s heart was pierced with sorrow at the foot of the cross. Mary’s closeness to her son in his suffering is powerfully imagined in Rogier van der Weyden’s famous Deposition, now in the Prado in Madrid. There, Mary faints in the arms of John and Mary Magdalene, her pallid body mirroring the form of Christ’s limp corpse.
Mary’s agony is the birth-pangs of the church. For at the foot of the cross, Mary is given a new son, John, and John a new mother, Mary, even as the water and blood of baptism and the eucharist flow from Christ’s wounded side. Here, in the midst of death, new life is given in the word spoken from the cross, a word that gives birth to a new family of adoption, the infant church.
In another Van der Weyden altarpiece – the Miraflores altar, now in Berlin – after the terrifying events of Good Friday, Mary sits, trying, perhaps, to seek solace again in the words she had once trusted to be true. The book is now closed. But in the end there is the beginning – the wounded Word, the alpha and the omega, surprises the faithful servant again, and Mary turns to see what she and the whole creation have always longed to see: her son, face to face.
Links to images:
Annunciation from the Hours of Jean de Boucicaut:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/19/Heures_de_Boucicaut_-_f53v_%28Annonciation%29.jpg
Rogier van der Weyden, Descent from the Cross:
https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection
Rogier van der Weyden, Miraflores Altarpiece:
http://www.smb-digital.de/eMuseumPlus?service=direct/1/ResultLightboxView/result.t1.collection_lightbox.$TspTitleImageLink.link&sp=10&sp=Scollection&sp=SfieldValue&sp=0&sp=0&sp=3&sp=Slightbox_3x4&sp=12&sp=Sdetail&sp=0&sp=F&sp=T&sp=17
Matthew Champion
18 Helena, mother of Constantine faithful servant
Flavia Iulia Helena (c.248-c.328) was probably born in Drepanum in Bithynia – later renamed Helenopolis in her honor – in humble circumstances. She was of low social origin and worked as a maid in an inn when she met Constantius. Out of their concubinage the later emperor Constantine the Great (306-337) was born in Naissus (modern Niš) c. 272/3. Constantius left her when he became member of the tetrarchy in 293. Constantine’s rise to power in 306 brought Helena to the imperial court where she gradually gained a prominent position. Coins and inscriptions mention her as Nobilissima Femina and from 324 until her death she held the title of Augusta, indicating that she was considered an important member of the imperial family. She may have lived at Constantine’s court in Trier until 312. After Constantine had defeated Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge (28 October 312), Helena probably came to live in Rome.

The fundus Laurentus in the south-east corner of Rome, which included the Palatium Sessorianum, a circus and public baths (later called Thermae Helenae), came into her possession. Several inscriptions (e.g. CIL, 6.1134, 1135, 1136) found in the area, are evidence for a close connection between Helena and the fundus Laurentus. So is her interest in the newly found basilica Ss. Marcellino e Pietro which was built in the area that belonged to the estate (Lib. Pont. I, 183); she was buried in a mausoleum attached to this basilica. Part of the Palatium Sessorianum was possibly shortly after her death transformed into a chapel, now known as the church of S. Croce in Gerusalemme.

Although it has been suggested that she was sympathetic towards the Christian faith from her childhood on, Helena most probably converted to Christianity following Constantine who after 312 began to protect and favour the Christian church.

At the end of her life she journeyed through the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire. This journey, which took place ca. 326-327, is elaborately described by the church father Eusebius in his Life of Constantine (VC 3.41-47). Because of Eusebius’ description – he is mainly concerned with her visit to Palestine, he describes her religious enthusiasm, her desire to pray at places where Christ had been, her care for the poor and needy – her journey is generally considered a pilgrimage. However, it is more likely that she travelled through the East for political purposes having to do with problems within the Constantinian family. Eusebius ascribes the foundation of the Constantinian churches in Bethlehem and on the Mount of Olives to her. He also connects her with the construction of the Church of Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

Shortly after her visit to the East she died at the age of about 80 in the presence of her son (Eus. VC 3.46) either late in 328 or the beginning of 329. Her porphyry sarcophagus is now in the Vatican Museums.
Her greatest fame Helena acquired by her alleged discovery of the True Cross. Her presence in Jerusalem and the description Eusebius presented of her stay in Palestine led ultimately to connecting Helena with the discovery of the Cross. The connection between the Cross, relics of which were present and venerated in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre since at least the 340s, is only first attested in the sources at the end of the fourth century. The legend of Helena's discovery of the Cross most probably originated in Jerusalem in the last quarter of the fourth century and rapidly spread over the whole Roman Empire. The story is told by prominent late antique Christian authors such as Ambrose, Paulinus of Nola, and the church historians Socrates, Sozomen and Theodoret. The legend is known in various versions of which the best known is the Judas Kyriakos legend. According to this version Helena found the Cross with the help of the Jew Judas who afterwards converted to Christianity and became bishop of Jerusalem. This version, known in particular from Jacobus de Voragine's Legenda Aurea (13th century), was wide-spread in the Middle Ages; it was translated into vernacular languages and a favorite subject for iconographic representation, of which Piero della Francesca's frescoes in Arezzo are the most famous.
Apart from Rome, Trier and Hautvillers, which claims to possess her remains, have a lively Helena folklore. So does Britain: according to a medieval tradition she was a native of England; it gave rise to various British Helena legends. She is often venerated together with her son Constantine, in particular in the Eastern Church. Her feast day in the Eastern Church is 21 May and in the Roman Catholic Church 18 August.
Jan Willem Drijvers (Dept. of History, University of Groningen)

Bibliography:

- Barbara Baert, A Heritage of Holy Wood. The Legend of the True Cross in Text and Image (Leiden 2004)

- Stephan Borgehammer, How the Holy Cross was Found: From Event to Medieval Legend (Stockholm 1991)

- Jan Willem Drijvers, Helena Augusta: The Mother of Constantine the Great and her Finding of the True Cross (Leiden 1992)

- Han J.W. Drijvers & Jan Willem Drijvers, The Finding of the True Cross. The Judas Kyriakos Legend in Syriac. Introduction Text and Translation, CSCO 565, Subs. 93 (Louvain 1997)

- Hans A. Pohlsander, Helena: Empress and Saint (Chicago 1996)