Mother Suzanne Aubert 1913 - 1920

Suzanne could not accept this. Maori were part of her life’s meaning since coming to New Zealand in 1860, as was the wider mission of Christian love to everybody, unquestioningly. For her, Christ was in everyone. So in August 1913, as other congregational leaders had done before, she set out to Rome to present her case. Only, in her case, she travelled alone from the opposite side of the world. Blessed Mary McKillop had also done this, from Australia in the 1870s, but Mary had been only thirty-one years old whereas Suzanne was seventy-eight and would be eighty-five before she managed to come home to New Zealand.

Her six years’ feat of endurance in Rome is a story in itself: the progress of the Sisters of Compassion’s cause slowed for several reasons: the disruption in process due to the papal succession from Pius X to Benedict XV; the total upheaval with the outbreak of World War One and New Zealand and Italy’s engagement in it; the shifting ground of support or opposition from the hierarchy of Auckland and Wellington dioceses; and the exceptional nature of the case – such a tiny congregation from so far yet with such wide-embracing aims.

The Vatican would have seen other congregational founder-leaders who were also strategically forward-thinking, dedicated and persevering. Yet in the final outcome, it was greatly due to the example of Suzanne herself, her intelligence, her sincerity and the simple, ascetic devotion of the way she lived her life in Rome, volunteering her nursing skills wholeheartedly through exhausting wartime years, which earned the admiration and awe of the Vatican congregations. Their respect for her case was confirmed by the Apostolic Delegate’s positive report on the sisters’ achievements, stability and well-being back home in New Zealand.

On 1 April 1917, Pope Benedict granted the Decree of Praise to the Daughters of Our Lady of Compassion, the only Catholic congregation born and growing to maturity in New Zealand, and the smallest congregation in the world ever to have attained this status. Benedictine Cardinal Aidan Gasquet, who became the new papal congregation’s first Cardinal Protector, told Suzanne that the discussion and voting in the council of the Congregation of Religious had been unusually short. The decision was unanimous.

The wording of the Decree held safe all the works Suzanne had started. Nothing was changed. It also gave her wide scope for new directions in health care and protected her unswerving resolution that the work of the Sisters of Compassion would be without distinction of race, sex or religion. It recognised Suzanne’s interpretation of New Zealand society and spirituality. It also recognised her French spiritual heritage and the vision bequeathed by the Curé d’Ars, her long-ago mentor Jean Vianney who was named among the patron saints even before his eventual canonisation in 1925.

The end of war saw Suzanne still blocked in Rome by disrupted shipping and her uncertain national status, given her many years away from France, and also by accident and illness, including a ‘touch of the pest’, as she put it – the frighteningly plague-like influenza pandemic of 1918. It was only in January 1920 that a frail Suzanne finally came home to her community in Island Bay, to be nursed back to health by the women who had all stayed dedicatedly and actively living out their calling during her absence.

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