The Society of the Sacred Heart
Australia-Aotearoa
New Zealand ,
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The Society of the Sacred Heart
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It is not what you are nor what you have been that God sees with
all merciful eyes,
There is something wanting in education where a child has not had its share of leisure, to be rapt in silence and alone… Janet Stuart rscJ
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Janet Erskine Stuart [1857-1914]
Janet Erskine Stuart
is one of the great
spiritual and educational leaders of the Society of the Sacred Heart. She had a
profound impact on both the spiritual character of the Society and the schools
and Colleges it established, and her influence hugely outlasted her rather short
lifetime. She was the sixth Superior General of the Society and the first to
have not known Madeleine Sophie Barat in person. She was also the first leader of the Society to travel to our Province of Australia/New Zealand which she did in 1913, determined to know in detail and intimately the sisters she was leading and the schools they were leading. Stuartholme in Brisbane bears her name. Janet Stuart, was an unlikely individual to become a Catholic nun. Born in 1857, she was the daughter of an Anglican rector, the youngest of his thirteen children. Her mother died shortly before she turned three and though she was much loved within her family particularly by her father and her much older sister Dody who acted in every way as mother to her, the early loss of her mother had a deep effect on her. One gets a sense of a highly intelligent, spiritual and precocious child from the story she tells of herself “I remember thinking seriously on the subject of death at three years old. My brother Douglas, aged six, who was my great resource for theological questions, had explained to me what death meant and exhorted me to prepare for it.” By the age of six herself, Janet was well acquainted with Bible stories and particularly loved the tale of Lazarus. Believing in miracles Janet ran one day to the graveyard where her mother was buried and called out “Mama, come forth!” There is great poignancy in the image of a small solitary girl left standing in that graveyard. She wrote much later “The disappointment was very great.” At a very early age Janet was embarked on a life long journey which held faith and questioning in a dynamic and creative tension. The England of her youth was very religiously divided. However some cousins who lived near had been converted to Catholicism and Janet’s first acquaintance with the Catholic faith came from them. When her much loved Dody died, Janet was sent to London on a holiday and it was whilst in London that her religious questing became the central pursuit of her life. Hers was both a strongly intellectual and deeply prayerful exploration which took place whilst deliberately opening herself to a new and challenging urban environment. In her journal about this time she noted “Events are sacraments of the will of God.” This is one example from the thousands of wonderfully grounded insights that Janet Stuart has left us. The urgency to be in right relationship with her God led Janet Stuart on a very tough journey. As she became increasingly convinced that it was the Catholic Church which would allow the most natural expression of her spirituality, she ached at what making that decision would involve. Her relationship with her father was strong and loving and to turn away from the Church of England would cost her that relationship. Her father even put her in touch with the eminent politician Lord Gladstone who warned Janet that to turn her back on the faith of her birth would be the “grave sin of moral suicide.” One can imagine the emotional anguish Janet endured over many months. Yet she did convert to Catholicism in March of 1879 and bid goodbye to her home, her siblings and father. She never stayed at the rectory again, and we have no record of what passed between Janet and her father, only her comment that “There was no anger, only cruel sorrow.” It was three more years before Janet entered the Society of the Sacred Heart at Roehampton, years in which she travelled and opened herself up at close range to the social injustices and problems of her society, taught Sunday school and advocated for poor tenant farmers. This movement outward beyond the containment of her early life prepared her well for the life of leadership which lay ahead. Whilst in some ways traditional, Janet Stuart was at the same time a highly innovative and seminal thinker whose educational philosophy was focused on the development of the whole person, something entirely new at this time. A related and enduring theme of her spiritual and educational advice is the importance of being oneself. Maree Hamilton
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Society
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