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Caroline Chisholm is undoubtedly an Australian heroine. Most Australians are familiar with her work assisting young unmarried women arriving in the colony of New South Wales, often with no contacts, and having to find their way in the world. She did much, much more than that. The fact that still surprises many is that she was a Catholic and that her work arose from strong religious conviction. Her extraordinary contribution to the wellbeing of others has not escaped the notice of the Anglican or Uniting Churches, and even the Jewish community, but still appears to elude official recognition from the church to which she gave her allegiance.1
There are some who remember various efforts to have Mrs Chisholm recognized as a saint. Recently I mentioned Caroline Chisholm while speaking to a gathering in a Melbourne parish and a gentleman who revealed himself to be 83 years of age announced that 'In my day, there was talk of making her a saint. I thought she would have been Australia's first saint.' I have previously outlined the history of various moves for the beatification of Caroline Chisholm so I will not give that history here.2 Rather what I propose here is to place Caroline Chisholm in the context of a prophetic figure-a prophet of the laity. She was a woman ahead of her time in both the secular and the religious sphere. The social justice principles, which informed her work as a laywoman, in India, Australia, and England, in the middle of the nineteenth century, were articulated by the Church in the encyclical Rerum Novarum, published fourteen years after her death. The description of the role of the laity from the documents of the second Vatican Council could have been written with her in mind, as could the postsynodal apostolic exhortation of John Paul II, Christifideles Laici. In this latter document I have identified eight areas, which John Paul II suggests are means by which lay people are called to 'live the gospel [by] serving the person and society' (n36).3 I doubt that he envisaged a single person addressing themselves to all eight, but here is evidence that Mrs Chisholm did just that.
A summary of her work4
Caroline Chisholm was born in Northampton on 31...