Sharing Christ s Merciful Yoke of Solidarity. You don t need to read much of the life of Catherine McAuley or many of her

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1 3/26/13 Australia: Perth and Sydney Afternoon: April 6 and April 13, 2013 Sharing Christ s Merciful Yoke of Solidarity 1. Yoke-Sharing with Christ: You don t need to read much of the life of Catherine McAuley or many of her writings to know that the words and example of Jesus Christ were the main motivation of her entire adult life. As we saw this morning, all the early biographical manuscripts speak of her desire to resemble Jesus Christ which was her daily resolution, and the lesson she constantly repeated. In the Practical Sayings, Clare Moore tells us that Catherine repeatedly said: The study of a Religious should be the life and maxims of Jesus Christ; this Divine Model should be in her regard like a book continually open before her.... We find those who can enumerate very particularly all that Jesus Christ said and did, but what does He care for that? He said and did so, not that we should recount it in words, but shew Him in our lives, in our daily practice. (PS, 23-4, 25) One statement that Catherine found central to Jesus life and mission is in the gospel of Matthew, where Jesus says to all those who follow him, to the downtrodden and to the disciples: Come to me, all you who toil and are burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly of heart, and you will find rest for your souls. My yoke is easy and my burden light. (Matt. 11:28-30) In Clare Moore s biographical manuscript on Catherine, we read:

2 2 Our Reverend Mother, when instructing the Sisters, loved to dwell on those words of our Divine Lord: Learn of me because I am meek and humble of heart, saying, If His blessed words ought to be reverenced by all, with what loving devotion ought the Religious impress them on her memory, and try to reduce them to practice. (Bermondsey Annals, in CMcATM, 111) In the Practical Sayings, Clare tells us that Catherine spoke often of the yoke of Christ, and of his desire that we take this yoke upon ourselves, and share its burden with him. We seem to forget [Catherine would say] that God calls upon us to take up our cross.... it is to those who deny themselves He has declared that His yoke is sweet and His burden light ; but then this is a conditional promise, it is not made to those who drag the cross after them, who almost push it from them. No! it is to those who take it up that He will make the bitter things sweet and the sweet things bitter. (PS, 14-15) For centuries following the late first-century letter of Clement of Rome (d. 95) to the Corinthians, the expression yoke of Christ was generally taken to mean obedience to religious and ecclesial superiors, to those in authority. Catherine McAuley probably encountered such language in the spiritual books she read. But according to the German biblical scholar Klaus Wengst, this is not the view of humility expressed in the Hebrew Bible or in Jesus teachings or among the earliest Christians, as expressed in the Pauline writings. Wengst has argued, I think convincingly, that in inviting us to share his yoke Jesus is not precisely talking about learning subservience (or pseudo humility) towards those in authority, but about learning from him how to be in close solidarity with the humiliated, with the oppressed, with poor laborers who are under the yoke, unjustly treated by the dominant culture, and burdened by those who control politics and the economy, as well as by the scribes and Pharisees.

3 3 Jesus says that he is one with the burdened and he invites his followers, and us, to come to him and to take this yoke of solidarity with the oppressed upon ourselves as well. If we share the yoke of Jesus Christ, in honest solidarity with the lowly, if we renounce being great, if we take upon our own shoulders the burdens of the poor and outcast, then, Jesus says, we will live in the Reign of God where the hungry will be full and those who weep will laugh (Luke 6:20f). But for now, The greatest among you will be your servants (Matt. 23:10), and we must become the burden-carriers and burden-sharers, as Jesus is, and as he calls his disciples to be. I have placed before you what I fondly regard as Catherine McAuley s black shawl. This shawl does not have to be black, but it must be a generously large covering. The shawl can be for us an image of Catherine s mercifulness, a tangible representation of the merciful yokesharing, the outstretched shoulder-embracing of Catherine s life, and a tangible call to our own fidelity to the Great Shawl of God s Mercy, the Great Yoke of God s own loving yoke-sharing in Christ. Human mercifulness, unlike God s self-emptying in Christ, is not an action between unequals. It is not an act of bountiful condescension towards one who appears to be less or even least. It is an act of burden-sharing between those who have equal dignity and worth as created images of God. Look at Catherine McAuley in May 1832: A devastating epidemic of cholera had struck Dublin. During its peak hundreds died each day, within hours of being stricken. For seven months the Sisters of Mercy worked in four-hour shifts at a makeshift cholera hospital set up on Townsend Street, in a slum area. Catherine herself was there all day. Late one night, she carried home in her arms the newborn baby of a poor young woman

4 4 who had just died of cholera. Catherine had such compassion on the infant that she brought it home under her [black woolen] shawl and put it to sleep in a little bed in her own room. Since no one at Baggot could nurse the baby, the little one cried all night, so the next day Catherine found a wet-nurse who could take proper care of it. (CMcATM, 97-98) To share one s shawl is to reach out, side by side, and embrace the shoulders and the life and needs of another. It is to extend to others the love with which Christ has loved them and us. It is to extend to them the Mercy of the God who has chosen in and through Christ to share our lot and carry our burden. For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life (John 3.16) Jesus himself is pretty straightforward and clear about the sharing of shawls or coats: Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none (Luke 3.11); Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone (Matt 5.42). Catherine McAuley s founding zeal her renunciations for the sake of more and more deeds of mercifulness grew out of and was grounded in that kind of humility, in such yokesharing with Christ and with the so-called lowly, with those whom the dominant culture ignored and set aside. When the wonderfully pastoral Bishop Edward Nolan of Carlow died of typhus a man whom she deeply admired and the sisters in Carlow were personally saddened, Catherine told them it was not right to regard it as their own individual sorrow for it was equally the affliction of many.... Our portion of it may well be lost in the lamentations of his poor and destitute people (Letter 55, in CCMcA, 100).

5 5 And when in 1837 and 1838 the sacramental needs of the poor girls in the school on Baggot Street and the women in the House of Mercy were unmet because Father Walter Meyler, the vicar general, refused to assign them a regular, full-time chaplain, Catherine told John Hamilton, the archbishop s priest-secretary: for ourselves we ask for nothing but [for] our poor young women who now have to go into the city for Mass, and are not yet strong enough to resist the city s alluring solicitations. She grieved that they are still about the streets, taking advantage of the irregularity which has been [unjustly] introduced among them (Letter 66, CCMcA, 112). And this was the woman who could have refused to bear the yoke of the poor, who could have declined to found the Sisters of Mercy, who could have ignored needed works of mercy, who could have said she was too old to venture such things, who could have turned down new foundations because, as she said, We are very near a Stop... a full Stop feet and hands are numerous enough, but the heads are nearly gone (Letter 94, in CCMcA, 151). This was the woman who could easily have avoided volunteering to nurse for seven straight months during the cholera epidemic of 1832 on the grounds that there were only ten, mostly young, women in the Baggot Street community at that time, and they were already running a school for hundreds of poor girls and a House of Mercy for at least thirty homeless women. But no, Catherine McAuley and the first Sisters of Mercy, our foremothers, heard and took to heart the words of Jesus: Take my Yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly of heart. I am in solidarity with the humiliated; I share their yoke and carry their burdens with them.

6 6 If you come to me, if you follow me, and join with me, my yoke is easy and my burden light. 2. Three Early Mercy Founders: Perhaps we could look briefly at three of the early Sisters of Mercy, three great Mercy founders who in countless ways joined Catherine in merciful yoke-sharing with Christ and with those who were poor and heavily burdened. The three are Mary Vincent Whitty, Mary Clare Moore, and Mary Francis Creedon. Mary Vincent Whitty was 42 years old when she led the foundation to Brisbane, Australia in Clare Moore was 25 years old, when she went to Bermondsey, London in Mary Francis Creedon was 30 years old when she went to Newfoundland in To give you a glimpse of the generous yoke-sharing of each of these good women, and what each of them did for Christ s poor and suffering people, let me share a few highlights: 1. Mary Vincent Whitty was (as you recall) 22 years old when she nursed the dying Catherine McAuley: at Baggot Street in 1844 she became mistress of novices for five years, helping to form dozens of other Mercy women; when Cecilia Marmion died of typhus in 1849, Mary Vincent became superior for six years; in 1851 she purchased land and planned the building of Mater Misericordiae Hospital in Dublin, which is still one of the most advanced and praised hospitals in Ireland;

7 7 after another period as assistant superior and mistress of novices she pleaded to be allowed to go to Brisbane to found a Mercy community there; they set out in early December 1860, arriving in Brisbane in May 1861 after a five-month sea voyage; in Brisbane, Mary Vincent established sometimes with Bishop James Quinn s help and sometimes without it Catholic education throughout Queensland. Her primary and secondary schools survived when government aid was removed, and when diocesan help failed. They served the children of poor Irish immigrants, whether Catholic or Protestant; and she opened orphanages, Houses of Mercy, and boarding schools for the children of poor families who lived too far away to commute daily. But she also endured great suffering at the hands of the severely controlling Bishop Quinn about which she was completely silent in her correspondence, saying only that he was not over sweet in words (Hetherington and Smoothy, Correspondence, 173): he took over aspects of the governance of the community, in violation of the Mercy Rule and some provisions of canon law; he made himself, in effect, the Mercy master of novices; he required enclosure of the community and restricted their travel and communication with laity; at one point he made himself the sole confessor of the community, and required the sisters to approach him for confession. If a sister refused, he blamed Mary Vincent for not compelling her to do so and told her to command the sister in virtue of... obedience (O Donoghue 91) something she refused to do;

8 8 in 1865 he removed Mary Vincent from the office of superior and publicly forbade her for one year to vote or speak on the affairs of the congregation (O Donoghue, 95), and he deprived others in the community of the same rights at chapter (96); he then appointed another sister as superior (Mary Benedicta McDermott), but forbade her to alter any of his arrangements (O Donoghue 96); in 1869, before he went to Rome for Vatican Council I, Bishop Quinn appointed as superior a sister (M. Bridget Conlan) who once said The Bishop is my Rule (O Donoghue 103); he then sent Mary Vincent to Ireland and England to recruit more sisters for Queensland (despite the rumors about his behavior circulating there), and while she was abroad, appointed her as assistant to the superior (1872). Back in Brisbane, after the Council, he continued to assert undue control, over the Sisters of Mercy as well as over priests in the diocese; all this continued until Bishop Quinn died in Though other religious orders had by now left Queensland, the Sisters of Mercy had remained, largely because of Mary Vincent Whitty s yoke-sharing solidarity with the needs of the people they served, whatever the undue episcopal control and tensions she suffered from James Quinn. She remained mother assistant until her death in 1892, charged with two tasks: visiting all the Queensland houses to strengthen the spiritual life of these communities, and constant fund-raising to support their ministries, at both of which she was very successful.

9 9 During her thirty years in Australia, Mary Vincent Whitty was the most widely influential and beloved Sister of Mercy in Queensland except, perhaps, by Bishop Quinn and the few people who either defended his autocratic ways or blamed her for not more successfully resisting his demands. 2. Clare Moore came permanently to Baggot Street in 1830, at age 16, and professed her vows there at age 18; she nursed for seven months in the cholera epidemic of 1832, and later assisted Catherine McAuley in making, by hand, copies of the original Rule for each of the Houses and for submission to Rome; at age 23, she became the superior of the new foundation in Cork; at age 25, she became temporary superior of the Bermondsey, London foundation; in 1841, as planned, she returned to Cork. But when the new superior, Mary Clare Agnew, nearly ruined the Bermondsey community by trying to make them a purely contemplative congregation Bishop Thomas Griffiths of London wisely asked Clare Moore to return to London as superior. She did so, and served in that role, except for 15 months, until her death in December 1874; in 1847 she nursed the now blind and dying Bishop Griffiths at night for two weeks before his death; she founded poor schools, infant schools, adult education programs, and a hospital; she visited poor families stricken with small pox and typhus, poor people in work houses, and poor patients in two London hospitals;

10 10 she nursed in Turkey during the Crimean War, and became, until her death, a close spiritual friend and confidante of Florence Nightingale; she founded 8 additional foundations in England, and counseled one in Scotland; and from 1850 to 1870, the year he died, she was also a secretary and close collaborator of Thomas Grant, the first bishop of Southwark, the diocese in which Bermondsey was then located. But my favorite Clare Moore story is related to a town south of London. In late September 1874 the British government, through the new bishop of Southwark, asked Clare and the Bermondsey sisters to take charge of a very badly mismanaged industrial school for juvenile delinquent girls in Eltham. A week later, Clare established a branch community, of two sisters, at the reformatory in Eltham. She stayed there herself for over a week, and then went to Eltham by train many times over the next six weeks. Her letters during these weeks reveal the desperate condition of the girls, and the generous yoke-sharing of Clare and the Bermondsey sisters: in Eltham they found only bare walls, the previous superintendent having carried away most of the furniture except 25 bed frames; the place was dirty and dusty beyond belief; at first there were twenty-five young girls, all in a state of severe neglect, with hardly a change of clothing. Soon the number of girls the government assigned to the school increased to sixty; Clare had to beg or buy chairs, tables, [and] bedsteads, but as, she casually said, we can share our beds and blankets ;

11 11 she had to purchase food, clothing, and other supplies on credit at shops in Eltham ; the whole situation cost the Bermondsey community one quarter of their barely sufficient annual income; yet Clare herself remained unbelievably cheerful, teaching the sisters in Eltham how to make cocoa for the girls out of cocoa nibs, and promising the girls a large library with very nice books to read on Sundays. She wrote directly to My very dear Children, telling them: You could write me a few letters to tell me what you would like (Letter to My very dear Children, November 14, 1874). But Eltham took a great toll on Clare s health. On November 30, she had a bad cold which soon turned into violent pleurisy, a serious condition of the pleural cavity and chest in the era before antibiotics. She died on December 14, 1874, at age sixty. 3. Mary Francis Creedon s life was much shorter: she went to St. John s, Newfoundland in 1842 as part of the founding group. Ursula Frayne and Mary Rose Lynch accompanied her from Baggot Street, but Michael Fleming, the bishop of the colony, on his own, then transferred into the Mercy community a Presentation Sister, Mary Francis Creedon s sister-in-law (a woman without any previous Mercy formation) and treated her as a professed Sister of Mercy. Ursula Frayne tried but failed to convince him that these arrangements were contrary to provisions of the Mercy Rule; finally Ursula and Rose decided to return to Dublin in November That left Mary Francis Creedon and Mary Joseph Nugent as the sole members of the Mercy community in Newfoundland. Francis, at age 32, was finally regarded as

12 12 the Newfoundland superior, Mary Rose Lynch having served in that role for at least six months before she departed for Dublin; Francis and Mary Joseph Nugent opened a school in 1843, and by 1844 it was flourishing; they also visited the sick in slum areas of St. John s, after school hours and on weekends, and gave private music lessons to raise funds to support themselves and provide food and coal for the poor; the cold, snow, and sleet of the severe Newfoundland winters did not stop their constant visitation of sick and poor families and visitation of the sick poor became a main characteristic of the Newfoundland Sisters of Mercy; but on June 3, 1847, Mary Joseph Nugent collapsed, a victim of the typhus fever epidemic then raging in St. John s. She died two weeks later; this left Mary Francis Creedon as the only Sister of Mercy in Newfoundland; many Sisters of Mercy elsewhere urged her to return to Dublin or to go to the Mercy community in New York City in effect, to give up the Mercy mission in Newfoundland; but she chose to stay on in St. John s, and was alone there for the next ten long months; in 1848 her niece, Agnes Nugent, joined her, and within a year others began to join; by late 1850 there were four in the Mercy community, all trained by Francis Creedon in the hours after teaching in the school, giving music lessons, and visiting the sick and poor;

13 13 but now the bishop asked them to care for the orphaned children of victims of the typhus epidemic, so they constructed an orphanage attached to the convent and an infirmary attached to it; as if all this labor were not enough, in October 1854 a severe cholera epidemic struck, and 500 deaths were reported in St. John s; by the end of 1854 there were even more children in the orphanage, and the first native-born Newfoundland woman had joined the Mercy community. Now they were five; however, by July 1, 1855, Mary Francis Creedon was seriously ill, her health shattered by overwork for the poor and sick and by the hardships she had endured for thirteen years in Newfoundland; she died at 5:00 in the morning on July 15, She was only 43. (Kathrine Bellamy, Weavers of the Tapestry, ) [Break] 3. Three Founding and Re-Founding Attitudes: What sustained these early Sisters of Mercy Mary Vincent, Clare, and Francis in their sharing with Jesus Christ the yoke of solidarity with the poor and heavily burdened? I think it was three attitudes they had learned from Catherine McAuley, and had adopted as their own deepest convictions: the desire to resemble Jesus Christ in his unhesitating confidence in the unfailing Providence of God; a profound commitment to universal and merciful Union and Charity, with whatever self-denial this would entail;

14 14 and a willing acceptance of the Cross of Christ in whatever daily forms portions of that Cross were offered to them. You have heard all these attitudes attributed to Catherine McAuley before, but they were also the profound, interior attitudes of those who followed her in shouldering the heavy burdens of the poor. A. Confidence in God s Providence: As Catherine wrote toward the end of her life, to Mary Ann Doyle in Tullamore: It is not a disposition to bestow gifts, like benevolent persons in the world, that bespeaks generosity of mind for the religious state. It is bestowing ourselves most freely and relying with unhesitating confidence on the Providence of God. (CCMcA, 418) This confidence in God did not mean expecting or waiting for miracles. It did not mean leaving the whole burden on God. It was not an excuse for not doing one s utmost, for not making one s best efforts. As Catherine once said: While we place all our confidence in God, we must act as if all depended on our exertion (Correspondence, 323). Exertion meant sharing the yoke of Christ. It meant bestowing one s self most freely, and then trusting that, when one had tried his or her best, God would draw good out of all the difficulties. It meant that the yoke, the burden, was also on Christ s shoulders, in Christ s promises, and that somehow, something God treasured would come of it. As Catherine wrote in 1839: There has been a most marked Providential Guidance which the want [the lack] of prudence vigilance or judgment has not impeded and it is here that we can

15 15 most clearly see the designs of God. I could mark circumstances calculated to defeat it at once but nothing however injurious in itself has done any injury.... In short, it [the Institute] evidently was to go on and surmount all obstacles many of which were great indeed proceeding from causes within & without. (CCMcA, ) Because of their confidence not in themselves, but in the designs of God the early sisters firmly believed in the truth of what Catherine wrote in the Spirit of the Institute essay: [God] never calls any person to any state or for any end without giving the means and necessary help to carry them through all the difficulties of it.... when God institutes a religious order, [God] gives at the same time the Grace that is necessary for such an order, and for all those who are called to that order [or work with it].... a grace particularly adapted to the duties which they are called to perform. (CCMcA, 462) This faith in the merciful Providence of the yoke-sharing God was probably the most sustaining and helpful conviction of the early Mercy women. It allowed Mary Vincent Whitty to put up with Bishop Quinn, for the sake of the poor people the sisters taught and served. It allowed her to accept her demotion as superior in Brisbane, for that demotion did not prevent her or the others from serving the poor, the sick, and the uneducated. This trust in God s Providential Guidance allowed Clare Moore to give up, forever, living in her native Ireland; to put up with her life-long lung condition; to go to the Crimea for eighteen months, with only one change of clothes; to serve the wounded there under Florence Nightingale, a young woman who later admitted that she had far

16 16 fewer virtues and talents for administering a complex nursing operation than Clare Moore herself did. And after years of such merciful yoke-sharing service, Clare s confidence in God s Providence allowed her to joyfully spend her last energies for the sixty neglected, humiliated girls in the reformatory in Eltham. And Francis Creedon s steadfast faith in God s Providence helped her to remain in Newfoundland, to endure the loneliness and uncertainty of the months when she was the only Sister of Mercy there, and to spend herself in all the works of mercy she could manage. To this day the Mercy congregation in Newfoundland attributes its survival and present flourishing to her trusting steadfastness. B. Another attitude that sustained the early Mercy founders was their belief in the absolute necessity of preserving Union and Charity amongst themselves. Before Catherine McAuley composed the Rule and Constitutions of the Sisters of Mercy and it was approved, they had only one short rule only the one chapter on Union and Charity in the Presentation Rule that Catherine had brought from George s Hill. On December 13, 1831, Archbishop Daniel Murray had pointed to this one chapter and said: If they observe that, it will suffice (CMcATM, 107 and 171), a remarkable and restrained insight on his part. You have, I trust, often read (or will often read) this great chapter on Union and Charity which Catherine copied almost verbatim into the Mercy Rule. It is the chapter that tells us that our love for one another and for all our burdened neighbors in this world is to be so largehearted as to resemble the love within the very mystery of God. It is to be like Christ s love for us and like the love Christ has for his Father. We are told that Catherine frequently used to say: Our mutual respect and charity is to be cordial; now cordial signifies something that revives, invigorates and warms; such should be the effects of

17 17 our love for each other. (PS, 5) Mary Vincent Whitty, Clare Moore, and Francis Creedon understood these words. It was their mutual respect and charity that revived, invigorated, and warmed these early Mercy founders, their communities, and those they served. It was their union and merciful charity that enabled them to share the yoke of Christ and his poor, and came to their aid in hard times. The Bermondsey Annals says that on her deathbed Clare Moore said to her sisters: I am so grateful, oh! so grateful for all your kindness to me, for all you have done for me, for all you have done for the poor. Dear Sisters, I have nothing new to say to you, but I repeat what I have so often said to you....be united & do not mind the difficulties which must come only go on faithfully. (Bermondsey Annals (1874) 2: [237]) C. Implicit in the lives of all the early Mercy women was something else Catherine McAuley had repeatedly taught them, by her words and her example: humble, willing acceptance of their portions of the Cross of Christ, cheerful acceptance of the yoke of Christ and the burdens of the poor. In her instructions to the first Sisters of Mercy and in her letters to them after the foundations began, Catherine McAuley constantly urged them to receive the crosses and difficulties that came their way, with patience, cheerfulness, and trust. They were not to drag these crosses after them, with gloomy faces! She told Frances Warde: Let us not think of the means [God] has employed to convey to us a portion of the Holy Cross, being ever mindful that it came from Himself.... if the entire cross upon which Christ died was sent to this House, how impatient would each

18 18 Sister be to carry it.... Far better... to receive with all your heart the cross which God will send you in any form or shape He pleases. (CCMcA, 401). When Catherine herself had to endure the humiliating Kingstown lawsuit and eviction because she had begged to have a school for the town s neglected girls, and could not pay the building debt then wrongfully assigned to her she wrote, The Kingstown business is a real portion of the Cross (CCMcA 164). When the chaplaincy controversy with Father Walter Meyler heated up and remained unresolved, despite her repeated efforts for over a year, Catherine said of this affliction: Thus we go on... flourishing in the very midst of the Cross more than a common share of which has latterly fallen to my lot.... I humbly trust it is the Cross of Christ. I endeavour to make it in some way like to His by silence (CCMcA, 136). This faith sustained Catherine McAuley and the Mercy women she inspired. They realized that actual historical sufferings, the crosses of human life and of merciful solidarity with those who are heavily burdened, are a yoke to be shared, a burden of mercifulness related to the self-emptying death and the resurrection of Jesus, and to the consequences of his mission of solidarity with the humiliated. It was his yoke and the reign of God s present and future kingdom they embraced, with whatever painful consequences might occur along the way. 4. Conclusion: Let us look again at Catherine McAuley s old worn-out black shawl. This shawl as ordinary and unadorned as it is can remain for us a visible image of her generous yoke-sharing with Christ and with the heavily-burdened, the afflicted, the humiliated whose load of present suffering Christ shares and wishes us to share.

19 19 Somehow within the folds of this tender out-stretched shawl are all the spiritual works of mercy that were, for Catherine, at the very heart of all the corporal works of mercy. All the counseling, welcoming, comforting, advocating, instructing, justice seeking, forgiving, visiting, patiently bearing, praying, helping, and consoling that were her daily efforts to take upon herself the yoke of Jesus Christ, in solidarity with the humiliated but beloved of this earth. So today as Sisters of Mercy, as small communities, and as our ministerial partners let us re-commit ourselves to Christ s call to renew our personal mercifulness. Let us adopt anew the perspective of God, and hear again, even more acutely, the call of Jesus that Catherine and the early sisters heard: the call to take upon our own shoulders his yoke of solidarity with the most humiliated and oppressed. Let us re-invigorate anew, in our present world and indeed in our church, this way of life and the actions of self-renouncing and self-bestowing yoke-sharing to which the Gospel has been calling us from the very beginning. Beyond all fears, all fatigue, and all worrying, beyond all contrary enticements, beyond and far more enduring than all the difficulties we may imagine or experience, the true call of God to us is Jesus repeated invitation, Learn of me and take my yoke upon you. In whatever new or deeper or more zealous ways are now personally and communally possible for us, let us stretch out our shawls to the humiliated and oppressed of our world, and share in the shoulder-toshoulder load-carrying of our merciful God. As Mary Baptist Russell, the founder of the Sisters of Mercy in San Francisco, once said: You must not now imagine all is done. On the contrary, you are only now beginning. (Doyle, Like a Tree, 273)

20 20 Perhaps each of us old and young may be helped to do this if we take more deeply to heart the moving example of Catherine McAuley and the first Sisters of Mercy: human beings like us who took the yoke upon their own shoulders for the sake of Christ s dear poor, and tho did so cheerfully. This will be my prayer for you and for myself as we all go forward. Thank you. Mary C. Sullivan, RSM

21 21 Works Cited Bellamy, Kathrine E. Weavers of the Tapestry. St. John s, NL: Flanker Press, Doyle, Mary Katherine. Like a Tree by Running Water: The Story of Mary Baptist Russell. Nevada City, Calif.: Blue Dolphin Publishing, Hetherington, Anne and Pauline Smoothy, eds. The Correspondence of Mother Vincent Whitty, St. Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, McAuley, Catherine. The Correspondence of Catherine McAuley, , ed. Mary C. Sullivan. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, Cited as CCMcA. Moore, Mary Clare, comp. The Practical Sayings of Catherine McAuley (London: Burns, Oates, 1868), ed. Mary C. Sullivan. Rochester, N.Y.: Lulu Press, Cited as PS. O Donoghue, Mary Xaverius (Frances). Mother Vincent Whitty: Woman and Educator in a Masculine Society. Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, Sullivan, Mary C. Catherine McAuley and the Tradition of Mercy. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995, Cited as CMcATM. Wengst, Klaus. Humility: Solidarity of the Humiliated. Trans. John Bowden. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988.