Pope Beatifies Australian Nun, Again Rules Out Female Priests

SYDNEY, Australia —  Hailing her “radiant holiness,” Pope John Paul II beatified a maverick 19th-Century nun here Thursday and made plain--yet again--that there can never be female priests in the church he commands.

Nearing the end of a grueling four-nation Asian swing, the 74-year-old pontiff seemed weary as he dragged his right leg behind him in a round of morning ceremonies and at the long afternoon beatification at a sodden city racetrack.

The Pope begins the long ride home today with an 11-hour flight to Sri Lanka, where he will perform another beatification Saturday. Then it is 11 more flying hours to Rome.

Mother Mary MacKillop, a pioneer teacher, minister to the poor and founder of the Sisters of St. Joseph of the Sacred Heart, became Australia’s first blessed at a papal ceremony attended by the woman who church doctors say was miraculously cured of leukemia through the nun’s intercession. Although the cure occurred more than 30 years ago, the woman has never been publicly identified.

Commending “the radiant holiness of your foundress and intercessor,” John Paul told Josephite nuns that MacKillop “shines before us as an outstanding model of a woman who embraced the cross, not as a burden or a scandal, but as the most effective way of being united with the Lord her spouse.”

MacKillop has become a rallying symbol for feminist Australian Roman Catholics, but the Pope forcefully restated his church’s teaching that while men and women are equal, the most important role for a woman is motherhood.

“Women who seek a true Christian concept of femininity can look to the free and active role assumed by Mary of Nazareth, the Virgin Mother of God,” the Pope told the Josephite nuns--who were dressed in street clothes--in a greeting at St. Mary’s Cathedral here.

“It must be clear that the church stands firmly against every form of discrimination which in any way compromises the equal dignity of women and men,” John Paul said. “The complete equality of persons is, however, accompanied by a marvelous complementarity. This complementarity concerns not only the roles of men and women but also, and more deeply, their makeup and meaning as persons.”

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The Pope lamented what he called “a mistaken anthropology at the root of the failure of society to understand church teaching on the true role of women. That role is in no way diminished but is in fact enhanced by being related in a special way to motherhood--the source of new life--both physical and spiritual.”

Women cannot be priests, John Paul argues, because Christ chose only men as his apostles.

The children of Scottish immigrants to Australia, MacKillop is precisely the sort of heroic Catholic that John Paul likes to single out for recognition, particularly in young churches like Australia’s that lack other blesseds and saints.