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The Southern Cross : May 2011
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May 2011 Page 13 www.thesoutherncross.org.au The Southern Cross feature | She's extremely media shy, had never been overseas before visiting Rome last year and knew little of Mary MacKillop before "that" miracle. Cancer survivor Kathleen Evans tells Rebecca DiGirolamo what life is like post canonisation. In a 1997 Commodore station- wagon, towing a 33-year-old caravan, sit Kathleen and Barry Evans travelling south from New South Wales to Penola and then on to Adelaide. The Newcastle couple seem ordinary enough -- grey nomads on the open road. But theirs is a very special journey, one which both husband and wife had never planned but have fully embraced despite the many sacrifices they have had to make along the way. "I'm just a very ordinary person," says Kath. Her miracle cure in 1993 from untreatable and aggressive lung cancer, which had spread through to her glands and brain, is Mary MacKillop's story, not her own, says the 67-year-old grandmother. "I really was just that last piece of the jigsaw." Kathleen's dramatic recovery from cancer without medical treatment after praying for divine intercession through Mary MacKillop was the second miracle recognised by the Vatican in December 2009 and which delivered Australia its first saint. The first miracle attributed to Mary MacKillop was that of a woman cured of terminal leukaemia in 1961. Kath is now in Adelaide re-tracing the steps of Mary MacKillop in the very early years of the saint's pioneering establishment of the Sisters of Saint Joseph in South Australia. Kathleen and Barry want to share their experience of Mary MacKillop with as many people as possible. "We are just taking our story further afield and it is a good story," says Kathleen. "People want to hear good stories; they are looking for them and my story helps people because I'm just an ordinary person that they can relate to." The couple will be holding public sessions at the Sisters of St Joseph Province Centre, in Kensington in May following similar talks in parishes and schools in New South Wales and Victoria and most recently in Penola, where Mary MacKillop and Father Tenison Woods started the Jospehite order and their first school. "We really wanted to visit the places in South Australia where Mary has been and now it's turned into our ministry," says Kath. Kath was born in Merriwa, New South Wales, in 1943. She was schooled by the Dominicans at Mayfield and later by the Mercy Sisters at Hamilton. Kath and Barry had a business until Easter 1993 when Kath became ill and in July of that year was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. Kathleen was 49 years old when doctors told her to go home and die. Her youngest of five children was 13 years old. In August -- one month after the fatal diagnosis -- a novena was initiated on her behalf by her friends, family and the Sisters of St Joseph. At the time, all Kath knew of Mary MacKillop was that she had begun an order of Australian nuns and needed a second miracle to become Australia's first saint. By the end of the nine days of prayer, Kath says she felt stronger. And in April 1994 (less than one year after receiving the bad news) an x-ray found no trace of the cancer, only the tissue scarring where it had grown. An x-ray taken six months later could not even identify the scarring. All of it was gone. Unsure of how important a role she was to play, the couple contacted the Sisters of Saint Joseph with the documented medical evidence of her scientifically unexplainable cure in 2006. "We just thought that when we handed the (doctor's) reports over that would be the end of it," says Barry. What followed was a life on the road for the couple. For three- and-a-half years the pensioners, who had lost their take-away food business and their home due to Kath's illness, were criss- crossing across New South Wales, Queensland and the Northern Territory trying to keep a low profile while the Vatican made a decision on Kath's cure. "We had to dodge the media because if my story got out before the Pope had made a decision it would be quashed," recalls Kath. "It was Mary's time, not mine." Without money and at times stranded due to high petrol prices, the couple ended up at Lightning Ridge -- a black opal mining town 700km north-east of Sydney and close to the Queensland border. There they bunkered down, isolated from family awaiting for any scrap of news from Rome from Jospehite Sister Maria Casey -- the woman in charge of proving Mary MacKillop's case to the Vatican. "The hardest thing was that I really missed the kids," says Kath. "And parish life," adds Barry. But once news broke of the second miracle being accepted, Kath was able to return to Newcastle where she fronted the media for the first time in January 2010. It was at the same time her older sister Peg died of a brain tumour in Queensland. Despite the tragedy, and her innate fear of public speaking, Kath shared Mary's story with the rest of the world. For the next year, life was a whirlwind of preparation for the big day in Rome, where Kath presented His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI with the reliquary of Mary MacKillop -- a lock of the saint's hair in a cross fashioned from wood from Penola. She was watched by 50,000 pilgrims in St Peter's Square and millions more across the world. Kath was certain her role in the canonisation of Australia's first saint would end following the Roman ceremony. "It's quite exciting," she says of her life post canonisation. The pensioners, who have no house to return to, have no immediate plans other than to follow in Mary's footsteps, making their way through the Adelaide and Port Pirie dioceses to the remote communities where the pioneering nun and her sisters set up schools and served the local community. Barry says of the future: "I often think of Mary's mother, who said: 'God will provide', so we'll just have to wait and see." For more information on the public talk by Kathleen Evans phone 8130 5900. Spreading a good story A SAINT'S LEGACY: Cancer survivor Kathleen Evans at the chapel in Kensington erected by Mary MacKillop and opened in 1876. Photo: Stephen Gray
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