Fr Frank Brennan’s Homily: 21st Sunday in Ordinary Time 2025

In today’s first reading from Isaiah, the Lord says: ‘I come to gather nations of every language; they shall come and see my glory.  I will set a sign among them; from them I will send fugitives to the nations’. During the week, we have had many celebrations in Brisbane for the 100th birthday of Sister of Mercy, Angela Mary Doyle, the legendary longtime administrator of the Mater Hospital.  On Friday we celebrated the Eucharist with her companion Sisters of Mercy in company with 13 members of her family who came from Ireland for the occasion. On Saturday, the Lord Mayor hosted an event in City Hall with 700 people.  She told us: ‘I know you all; you have helped me; and I love you all’.  And it was true.  The Irish ambassador read a message from the President of Ireland. The lord mayor presented her with the keys of the city.

With her gentle Irish lilt and the glint in the eye, Angela Mary recalled coming to Australia in 1947 as one of 8 Irish sisters who travelled on an Australian troop ship.  ‘It was not luxurious, but we were all equal.  We were all vomiting over the side of the ship, in the huge seas.’  The troops got to know the sisters, and the sisters got to know the troops.  When inviting me to the festivities, Angela Mary recalled her trepidation when disembarking the train at South Brisbane station all those years ago, aged 22 years.  She thought she was to become a teacher and for a short time she taught 52 Grade 2 children.  But then she was transferred to the Mater Hospital where she spent her entire apostolic life, first training as a nurse and then being thrown in the deep end as administrator of the hospital.  Her sister Nuala also came from Ireland.  On Saturday, Angela Mary told us that many people kept reminding them of the joys of Ireland so she and her sister decided: ‘We are going to love Australia.  And we have.  And Australia has been so good to us.’

The Australian public last saw Angela on their national TV screens when she spoke at the funeral of the late governor general Bill Hayden.  She had accompanied him during his late-in-life conversion to Catholicism.  When he was minister for social security, she was instrumental in assisting him with the introduction of Medicare.  While other hospital systems and medical personnel were wary of socialised medicine, Angela Mary immediately had her hospital co-operate with the Medicare initiative so as to provide

healthcare for the poorest of the poor.  Similarly, she opened the doors of the Mater during the HIV/AIDS crisis happily channeling Commonwealth funds when the Bjelke-Petersen was declining any financial assistance to counter the pandemic. The Commonwealth Health Minister described Sr Angela and her fellow Mercies as ‘the most altruistic money launderers’ he’d ever known’.

In today’s gospel from Luke, Jesus proclaims that ‘people will come from the east and the west and from the north and the south and will recline at table in the kingdom of God.  For behold, some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last.’

During the week I had cause to reflect on another missionary who had come to our shores from the other side of the world.  150 years ago next month Fr Duncan McNab arrived in Queensland.  He was a Scottish priest who worked in poor parishes back in Scotland.  Many of his parishioners were Irish.  Like many Scots, he did not have a great liking for Irish who were poor and ill-educated.  He was a relation of Mary MacKillop, our one Australian canonised saint.  He had a great desire to come down under and minister amongst Aboriginal people.  He thought the First Australians should be able to recline at table in the kingdom of God.  He worked in Queensland for five years – from 1875 until 1880.

When McNab arrived in Brisbane, he found it difficult to convince the Irish bishop James Quinn to provide any resources for Aboriginal ministry.  Like most senior Irish clerics who came to these shores in the nineteenth century, Quinn was anxious to dedicate his limited resources to pulling the poor illiterate Irish parishioners up by their bootstraps.  I being a Brennan and my mother an O’Hara benefited from that episcopal preference, as did many of us from long established Catholic families in Australia.

McNab undertook something of a personal crusade.  While acknowledging the Aboriginal communal sense of perpetual land ownership, he saw a need for Aboriginal individuals and families, just like any other individuals and families, to have access and use of land for residence and business enterprises, including farming and cattle breeding.

After a year getting around the colony, he wrote to John Douglas, Minister for Lands and soon to be premier.  The Crown Lands Alienation Act of l868 permitted individuals to apply for grazing homestead leases on payment of a minimal rent.  McNab thought Aboriginal persons should be eligible, at least on the same terms as other applicants, or preferably, without payment of the annual rent.  He submitted applications for leases on behalf of three named Aboriginals.  In his letter to Douglas he stated:

I am convinced that the Aborigines have a perfect right, both in equity and law, to what they ask. To comply with the conditions required in the forms supplied would be a renunciation of that right. They conceive and maintain that because they and their ancestors, from time immemorial, have occupied and possessed those lands and their appurtenances for their use and benefit, especially of residence, hunting, fishing, and of otherwise providing for the necessaries of life, and also had always the right of tillage and pasturage, they ought to be acknowledged, without expense, the rightful owners of the specified homesteads.

He argued that ‘compliance with their request will prove a common benefit to the colonists and the aborigines’.  Needless to say, the three applications were rejected even though each applicant attested in accordance with the Act: ‘I did not arrive in this colony after the first of March, 1868, at the public expense, either wholly or in part, within three years ; and I further declare, that I have not entered into any agreement to sell, demise, or mortgage the said portion.’

McNab wrote at length to Douglas on 2 September 1876.  He urged that ‘the aborigines be treated as men, and not merely shot down as vermin’.  He outlined a necessary policy for government: ‘Chastise alike, the blacks for killing or maiming the cattle of the colonists, and the latter for destroying the game of the former till they are otherwise provided for.  Finally, let their right to live, and to land for their maintenance, be acknowledged; and, in reparation for the damage they have sustained by the advent of the whites into their country, let assistance be rendered them to be civilized and settled, and I doubt not that peace can be secured.’  McNab kept petitioning parliament, government and church authorities, but to no avail.

Today we thank God for those who heeded the call from the other side of the world so those gathered from every language and nation might come and see the Lord’s glory coming from the east and the west and from the north and the south to recline at table in the kingdom of God.  We thank God for those like Duncan McNab 150 years ago and Angela Mary Doyle this past 100 years who have put the last first, presenting us with tangible signs of the kingdom to come.  I remain convinced that NcNab would have formed a better opinion of the Irish if he had met those like Sr Angela Mary Doyle RSM.