180th Anniversary of the Sisters of Mercy

Homily

Most Rev Timothy Costelloe SDB
Archbishop of Perth

Thursday 8 January, 2026
St Mary’s Cathedral, Perth

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As we look around this magnificent Cathedral and as we glance through the windows to take in the view of Mercedes College just across the road, it is probably hard for most of us to imagine what this place must have looked like 180 years ago, when the first Sisters of Mercy led by Ursula Frayne, arrived in Perth after their long journey from Ireland, to begin a ministry which would plant the charism of Catherine McCauley not just here in Perth or in Western Australia, but right across our country and beyond.

However, if we do cast a glance down Victoria Avenue to where the Pro-Cathedral stands in all its simplicity and poverty, and imagine it there with nothing much else around it, it is possible to catch something of that sense of surprise, concern, and perhaps even a certain fear as that first small group of women from Ireland came face-to-face with the reality that awaited them. 

There was, of course, more than surprise, concern and some trepidation in the hearts of those sisters. There must also have been the sense that they found themselves where they were through the strange workings of God‘s Providence.

Perhaps, like Mary in the story of the annunciation, their surprise, their concern, and their uncertainty about the future gave away to something deeper: a recognition that they were following in the footsteps of the Lord to whom they had consecrated their lives and who had promised always to be with them through the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit.

For some, this conviction may have come relatively easily, and for others only after something of a struggle, but like Mary they were, in their different ways, able to say: Here I am, here we are, servants of the Lord. Let God’s will be done in our lives.

We catch a glimpse of this in the words of Ursula Frayne which we heard in this morning’s introduction to this Eucharistic liturgy: we stood in the wilds of Australia on that Midsummer night, she writes, and we could truly say with our Divine Model, we have nowhere to rest our head”.

As we celebrate the arrival 180 years ago of those first Sisters of Mercy, and as we remember and acknowledge also the arrival of the Benedictine monks and the Spiritan Fathers and Brothers, Ursula Frayne has captured, in her simple words, something that lies at the heart of Catherine McCauley‘s charism: the recognition of Jesus Christ as the one whom she was called to follow, and as the one whom she invited her sisters to follow.

As Pope Francis reminded us some years ago, in Jesus Christ we see, and encounter, and experience the one who is the face of the Father’s Mercy. It was surely Catherine’s desire that the women who gathered around her and the women who would come later, including the sisters here this morning,  might in their following of Jesus also reflect the face of God‘s mercy, both to each other and to all whom they encountered, and still today encounter, in their lives of humble and dedicated service. 

To place the following of Christ at the centre of their lives is not unique to the Sisters of Mercy. Saint Benedict in his Rule will tell his monks that they should prefer nothing to Christ, while the Rule of Life of the Spiritan Brothers and Priests will tell us that “in the midst of God’s people, among the numerous and varied vocations which the Holy Spirit inspires, we Spiritans are called by the Father and “set apart” to follow Jesus and announce the Good News of the kingdom”.

The extraordinary variety and diversity of vocations in the Church and, in the context of today’s celebration, especially of vocations to the religious life, is a wonderful example of something which the recent Synod of Bishops in Rome has invited us to remember: that diversity is not an obstacle to unity but rather a way of manifesting the true nature of unity, as long as we remember what lies at the heart of our unity. Saint Paul expresses it well: there are no more distinctions between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female, but all of you are one in Christ Jesus (Gal 3:28). 

Within this unity in diversity, which is surely one of the marks of the Church of Jesus Christ, religious congregations have the special privilege, given to them through their founders and their founding charism, of being what we might call sacraments, living and effective signs, of a particular aspect of the great mystery of Jesus Christ and the great challenge of discipleship. In this light we might say that the Sisters of Mercy, in the spirit of Catherine McCauley, are called to be in a very particular and unmistakeable way living images of God‘s mercy as it is made known to us in the life, teachings and ministry of Jesus.

This is why it is so fitting - we might even say providential - that today’s liturgy offers us the passage from Luke’s Gospel which immediately follows the story of the temptations of Jesus in the desert. Although in the gospels of Mark and Matthew this story appears sometime after Jesus begins his public ministry, Luke places it at the very beginning of that ministry, almost as an invitation to his readers to understand everything that follows in the light of Jesus’s initial proclamation of his own understanding of his mission - and clearly, for Jesus, it is a mission centred on a new and final inbreaking of God’s mercy into the human story: a mission of mercy, a mission of liberation, a mission of healing and of the offer of life in its fullness. Jesus has come, he tells us, to give sight to the blind, to give freedom to the oppressed, to give liberation to those held captive, to proclaim that the time of the Lord’s favour has finally arrived. 

In saying all this, as the gospel passage makes clear, Jesus is reaching back to the prophet Isaiah. But then He boldly proclaims that this prophecy is fulfilled even as people listen to His words: that He Himself is the fulfilment of that promise. 

Because this is true, because in Jesus the promise made through Isaiah is now fulfilled, it is we, His disciples, the body of Christ with Christ as our head, who are the instruments, the living signs, of that fulfilled promise. This is the task of the whole Church as the community of Christ disciples. It is, as Pope Francis would say so often, a task for todos, todos, todos - for everybody.

Ever since their arrival in 1846, the Sisters of Mercy have sought to live among us as signs and bearers of God’s compassionate love and mercy, reminding us by their example and witness that this is the vocation given to us all.  In ways known only to God, they have touched and transformed the lives of countless people, allowing God to work through them to bring light to those in darkness, hope to those who despair, faith to those who have lost faith and freedom to those oppressed by poverty, by isolation, by rejection and by abandonment.

Today is a day for giving voice to our gratitude to God for the gift of the Mercy charism, for the gift of those women who in the past and still today make that gift real and tangible, and for the gift of all those with whom the sisters continue share their vision and who accept the challenge of carrying that vision forward in the changing circumstances of the present and the still-to-emerge challenges and opportunities of the future. 

We join the sisters today as they praise the God of love and tenderness; as they renew their faith in God; and as they commit themselves anew to responding to all that God is asking of them. May we learn from them to say, with them, “Here we are, the servants of the Lord. Let God’s will be done in our lives”.