What need have we for saints?

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.