SAINTLY AUSTRALIAN SR. MARY GLOWREY- MISSIONARY- MEDICAL DOCTOR (Part 2), By Anna Krohn
Her firsts continued. She may have been the first lay Catholic bioethicist (although this term had not been invented in her time) to write and research the social, theological and moral issues of medical procedures as early as 1907, when she penned a booklet against infanticide in the name of Archbishop Thomas Carr of Melbourne. She continued to intervene from India, contributing academic papers resisting the rise of eugenics, euthanasia and coercive population control in the European medical culture throughout the 1930s and ’40s.
She was the world’s first religious sister to be permitted to practise medicine, she established the first ward for incurables in India and she inspired the building of India’s first Catholic medical college. During the famine, violence and disruption of World War II, she founded the first Indian Catholic Health Association in 1943.
As her Indian biographer, Florence Swaminkannu writes, Mary was a pioneer of “tremendous zeal and ‘fight’ as opposed to passivity” and had from her earliest professional years a “forthright” though “unassuming candour and practicality”. Holiness typically unifies paradoxical opposites creating a new and marvellous whole.
How did an intelligent but reticent young woman born into a simple but devoted Victorian Western District Irish Catholic family (on 23 June 1887) – at a time when Catholics and women had to struggle – find the way to such an extraordinary life and how did she understand her vocation?
Perhaps the most powerful insights into this come from Mary’s own simple reflections related on the type-written sheets of her incomplete autobiographical sketch, which she entitled: God’s Good for Nothing.
Perhaps the most powerful insights into this come from Mary’s own simple reflections related on the type-written sheets of her incomplete autobiographical sketch, which she entitled: God’s Good for Nothing.
Listening in on her thoughts, we can see how God called her to his love through what Blessed Edith Stein describes as a woman’s holiness (the feminine genius): “a vivid empathy” for both the goodness of all created life and a burning desire to “want to be there for another human being”.
(to be continued)
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