What need have we for saints?

Australia has its first Saint. The sentence is odd, for it claims on behalf of all of us a belief that few of us can sincerely hold. She was Australian, but her sanctity was not decided in the halls of our parliament; and if she is any more divine than you or I it is only in the minds of those who believe in the tenets of the Catholic Church.

Yet enthusiasm for Mary MacKillop’s recent canonisation seemingly extends beyond the quarter of Australians who at last census nominated Roman Catholicism as their religion. What are we to make of this?   

Undoubtedly the global status of the Catholic Church plays a part. A centuries-old institution that represents one of the great religious faiths naturally commands the attentions of the media and curious citizens, particularly when it elects to elevate one of our number to a position of excellence.

On such an analysis it seems as though that which is to be celebrated is less the good works carried out by one of our fellow citizens than the fact that a famous and longstanding ecclesiastical body has chosen to honour her. If it were merely the good works of the canonised that we felt proud of we would not wait for someone else to point them out to us, nor would we reserve our greatest jubilation for the occasion of this show of approval. We would praise them and be happy at that.

For Catholics there may be some truth to the logic of finding greatest satisfaction in the Vatican’s acknowledgment of MacKillop’s excellence. They would no doubt deny that it is solely out of pleasure at the Holy See’s approval that they celebrate her works; after all, it is only following the nomination of a Catholic by those of her community that she can be put forward for beatification, much less canonisation.

And it is true that she was an impressive woman deserving of recognition and respect for her moral courage, tenacity, and devotion to imparting dignity and opportunity to those members of her community least touched by good fortune. Yet at the same time, the very urge towards the process of canonisation indicates a belief in the ultimate authority of the Vatican in determining the worth of someone.

If the works themselves exhausted one’s praise one would not seek to have them embroidered with the judgements of some recognised hierarchy for still greater estimation. Such judgements can only really be meaningful to those who acknowledge the judges’ superior perspective, in this case a category confined entirely to Catholics.

To the rest of us, the judgment of the Church of Rome as to the rectitude of something can mean little, except in those moments of vicarious anger or, perhaps, at times approval, when we alternately castigate it for its corruption or congratulate it on its reforms.

In this light it is somewhat puzzling that many members of both the national press and the political class nominate the canonisation as a national achievement. For while it is indisputable that the social legacy of Mary MacKillop is something that we are "a better nation for having been part of" and that hers is a "life to be celebrated, and learned from", it is less clear why her canonisation represents any kind of "milestone" for Australia as a whole.

The metaphor, while perhaps dead in the Orwellian sense, deserves resurrection for what it implies about our willingness to put forward our own citizens as exemplars of both national and broader human virtues.

To reach a milestone is to have progressed to a point previously unreached and the nomination of an Australian as a Saint of the Catholic Church is undoubtedly unprecedented, but why should we feel compelled to withhold the kind of praise deserved by virtuous Australians until some tradition with a richer heritage than ours singles them out for good favour?

Comparisons with unsaintly Australians reveal the strangeness of a celebration that looks ultimately to foreign (and only putatively universal) authorities for permission to celebrate individual acts of historical resonance: one finds Mother MacKillop compared to Weary Dunlop and Caroline Chisolm and is left wondering why these fine people are to be denied a role in the edification of the Australian community so eagerly thrust upon the shoulders of Mother MacKillop?

Is it because they either lack the right religious affiliation or haven’t yet registered sufficient miraculous intercessions to warrant canonisation by their mother church? For if the most deserving part of Mary MacKillop’s story are her good works, then surely others of equivalent achievement ought to be honoured by non-Catholic Australians in the same way we seem to be honouring Mother MacKillop.

It cannot be that they have been denied similar elevation by virtue of her overwhelmingly superior claims, because if this were so we would not have waited for her canonisation to get around to praising her. No, there is something else going on in non-Catholic Australians’ embrace of her canonisation, something that goes beyond the respectful treatment of those whose beliefs differ from ours.

The answer may well lie in similarities between theories of the ways individuals experience religious and nationalistic communities. In neither case can any one member of the broader community possibly know and commune with every other member, and yet the integrity of each social formation depends on each individual member feeling as though he or she were intimately and absolutely involved in communion with either the divinity or nationality and all those who keep the faith with each.

William James’ definition of religion as "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men (sic) in their solitude so far as they stand in relation to whatever they may consider to be divine" is not overly different in terms of form to Benedict Anderson’s formulation of nationalism as the process of sustaining "imagined communities" that are imagined "because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion".

The object of one form of belief promises communion with the universal and carries with it the promise of an ecumenical confraternity, while the other confines itself to a community of kinship delimited by territory and citizenship, but in both instances an external relationship is nurtured and preserved in large part through the capacity of those who partake in it to give credence to its existence and perpetuation; with their beliefs they hold in place what they had almost always thought was always there.

The success of such a task would require herculean imaginations were it not for reliance on rituals of affirmation and renewal. One can cite the shared role of print-media in creating and perpetuating amongst and between geographically distant minds the idea of a shared community that is common to both religion and nationalism: the insistence of supposed heretics like Tyndale and Luther on Bibles in national (or, more accurately, local) languages constituted a means of radically reshaping Christian communities that finds its national analogues in the print media of the early nationalist era, through the reporting, opinion, and fiction of which politically distinct entities came to regard themselves as communities apart from the empires that founded or had subjugated them.

One can go beyond mere formal convergence and aver with Durkheim that religion is ultimately: "a system of ideas with which the individuals represent to themselves the society of which they are members". Following from this, all religious ceremony is an indispensable social, and not merely religious, adhesive.

"That is why we can rest assured in advance that the practices of the cult, whatever they may be, are something more than movements without importance and gestures without efficacy. By the mere fact that their apparent function is to strengthen the bonds attaching the believer to his god, they at the same time really strengthen the bonds attaching the individual to the society of which he is a member, since the god is only a figurative expression of the society."

This kind of one-to-one correspondence between society and God may have held more empirical truth in the kinds of primitive societies Durrkheim studied than Australian society today, but its fruitfulness to the present discussion lies in the fact that it seems to explain one reason why non-Catholic Australians might find value in the ceremony and occasion of the canonization of one of our own. This is that canonization, with its elevation of individuals to eternally heroic and exemplary status possesses attributes that the public rituals of Australian nationalism lack.

Anzac Day is an occasion for remembering our collective spirit. Australia day honours people of significant achievement whom many of us struggle to remember and whose achievements, rightly or wrongly, often go forgotten. Every historian has his or her list of eminent Australians but few of them enjoy the status in the minds of Australian households that George Washington and Napoleon no doubt enjoy in the United States and France, respectively.

Ned Kelly is perhaps the closest thing we have, but no one really regards him as exemplary.

Looked at this way it becomes apparent why Mother MacKillop’s canonisation enjoys such wide public support. It is as though we have fleetingly accomplished a rhetorical annexation of Vatican ritual for nationalist purposes. Either too truculently diffident or wisely modest to build our own equivalent to the French Pantheon, our notable Australians are denied a national sanctum, whereas Catholics are assured at the moment of canonisation that their saints have entered into an eternal heavenly congregation of their peers.

The pomp and ceremony of canonisation with its promise of universal recognition and eternal significance does something that we dare not come close to doing for any other individual, be they more or less deserving of our recognition and remembrance than Mother MacKillop, and for some people the opportunity to participate in a ritual which is of such profound consequence is something impossible to pass up. The eagerness to claim her as Australia’s Saint may ultimately stem from an unconscious yearning for the veneration of individual national heroes that we otherwise, perhaps wisely, deny ourselves.