Religion: South Pacific Saint

When pretty, well-born Suzanne balked at marrying the man her mother had picked out for her, she was packed off to the famed and saintly Curé d'Ars.* But instead of bringing Suzanne round to her mother's view of things, the curé said: "God has other things for you."

Last week, the sound of hammering and building rang across the windswept slopes above New Zealand's Island Bay. Workmen were busy on a tomb for the woman who may some day be canonized as the first woman saint of the South Pacific—Suzanne Aubert de Laye, known to the church as Mother Marie Joseph Aubert.

Test by Witch Doctor. The words of the Curé d'Ars had set young Suzanne training herself to be a missionary. She used family pull for permission to attend lectures at a medical school, where she hid behind a screen so that the other medical students would not know a female was present. She spent two years nursing soldiers in the filth of the Crimean War. Then, still in her early 20s, she met a French missionary bishop on his way back to New Zealand. Suzanne decided that the time had at last come to leave home.

Three months later, she was slogging her way alone through the New Zealand jungle. The swirling rivers had to be forded, the roads were often impassable, the fierce Maori tribes were fighting a series of bitter wars. Unscathed through it all moved Suzanne—preaching the Gospel in the Maori tongue, setting up dispensaries that grew into hospitals, organizing teaching centers that eventually became schools.

The suspicious Maoris sent their witch doctors time & again to test her, but Suzanne's work always went on.

Sisters of Compassion. One day in 1899, with three or four followers and the equivalent of 50¢ in her purse, she came to the capital city of Wellington. There she rented a house on credit, begging packing cases for furniture, and opened her doors to the city's orphans, homeless, aged and ill. Anyone who was hungry could come for a meal, which was passed through a sliding panel in the wall so the recipient's face need not be seen.

Mother Mary Aubert, as the English colony called her, spent her days begging for her "Home of Compassion," collecting food in a wicker baby carriage which she wheeled through Wellington's streets. More & more women came to join her in her work and she called them "Sisters of Our Lady of Compassion." When the women quietly began to dig the foundations for a hospital, New Zealand's governor himself led a working party that completed the job.

In 1926, at the age of 91, Mother Aubert died. In New Zealand today there are seven Homes of Compassion serving as hospitals, orphanages or homes for unmarried mothers. All are enthusiastically supported by both Protestant and Catholic New Zealanders. Last year her Sisters of Compassion were accorded papal approbation as an order of the Roman Catholic Church. And in New Zealand as in Rome, where the long process of her sainthood has just begun, they remember her words: "Never refuse the poor anything."