A look at four more unsung heroes from the Australian continent, including the great Frank Sheed!
In the previous essay in this series, we focused on two heroic Australian Catholics who witnessed to the Faith in their defense of the dignity of the human person. In this chapter, we will celebrate four other Australians whose heroism was made manifest in multifarious ways. Each is radically different in the gifts they received from the Lord and the gift of themselves which they offered to others. What they have in common, however, and as we shall see, is the self-sacrificial love of God and neighbor which animated their very different lives and apostolates.
Eileen O’Connor (1892-1921) achieved great things during her short life, in spite of suffering from a severe disability—a curvature of the spine which is now known to have been spinal tuberculosis and transverse myelitis (severe inflammation of the spinal cord). She was often in excruciating pain and claimed to have received a Marian visitation in which the Blessed Virgin encouraged her to offer her own suffering for the good of others. Along with Fr. Ted McGrath, she founded a religious order, the Society of Our Lady’s Nurses for the Poor, popularly known as the Brown Nurses.
Confined to a wheelchair and never able to walk, she was only 3 feet, 9 inches tall and lived for only 29 years. Yet such was her sanctity and achievement that the Archbishop of Sydney, Anthony Fisher, published his edict to petition the cause for her beatification in October 2019. Four months later, in February 2020, the Mass to officially open the cause for beatification was held at St. Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney.
Mary Glowrey (1887-1957) is another Australian religious sister whose cause for beatification is under way. A member of the Congregation of Jesus Mary Joseph, whose religious name was Mary of the Sacred Heart, she is thought to be the first religious sister to practice as a doctor.
Having graduated in 1919 as a Doctor of Medicine in obstetrics, gynecology, and ophthalmology, Glowrey discerned the religious vocation. Then, inspired by the life of Agnes McLaren, a pioneering Scottish missionary doctor who had given medical assistance to women in India, she felt called to follow in McLaren’s footsteps and to serve as a medical missionary doctor there. Leaving Melbourne in early 1920, she never returned to Australia. For the next 25 years, she provided medical care for hundreds of thousands of patients, mostly marginalized women. In addition, she trained local women to dispense medicine and to become midwives and nurses.
In 1943, Glowrey founded the Catholic Hospitals’ Association, now known as the Catholic Health Association of India, which currently has more than 3,500 members overseeing the care of over 21 million patients annually. She died in Bangalore from cancer in May 1957, a few weeks short of her 70th birthday. She was declared a Servant of God in 2013 as part of the cause for her beatification.
Fr. Austin Woodbury (1899-1979) is an Australian whose heroism was of an entirely different sort to that of Eileen O’Connor and Mary Glowrey. He was the sixth of 11 children of a devout Catholic family. Four of his sisters joined religious orders. Following a religious vocation himself, Woodbury entered the Society of Mary, popularly known as the Marist Fathers, in 1918. A gifted scholar, he studied in Rome at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas, popularly known as the Angelicum, under the famous and influential Dominican theologian Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange.
In 1945, Fr. Woodbury founded the Aquinas Academy in Sydney, a school of philosophy and theology open to the laity, which, as the name suggests, emphasized the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas. From 1945 to 1974, Fr. Woodbury taught courses in both philosophy and theology, teaching around 600 students each year. His legacy as a popular promoter of Thomistic theology and philosophy resonates to this day. New Catholic colleges, such as Campion College and Hartford College in Sydney, and St. John Henry Newman College in Brisbane, are following in Fr. Woodbury’s footsteps.
The fourth and final Australian hero of Christendom to be singled out for praise is Frank Sheed (1897-1981). As the co-founder of the Sheed and Ward publishing house, he played a significant role in the Catholic cultural revival in the Anglophone world in the middle decades of the last century. As perhaps the most prominent and important Catholic publisher of the time, Sheed and Ward published books by many of the Catholic eminenti and illustrissimi, including Karl Adam, Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, Christopher Dawson, Ronald Knox, and Evelyn Waugh.
Aside from his importance as a publisher, Frank Sheed was a formidable writer and apologist in his own right. His works include Communism and Man (1938), Theology and Sanity (1946), Society and Sanity (1953), and Theology for Beginners (1957). His autobiography, The Church and I (1974), is one of the most important historical accounts of the Catholic revival of which Sheed was himself such an important and integral part.
Eileen O’Connor, Mary Glowrey, Austin Woodbury, and Frank Sheed would seem to have very little in common. O’Connor and Woodbury stayed in Australia. One served the bodily needs of the sick; the other nourished the life of the mind. Glowrey and Sheed departed their native land to pursue vocations in far-flung corners of the world. One served the bodily needs of the poor and sick in India; the other nourished the life of the mind throughout the whole English-speaking world through the publishing of books. They couldn’t have been more different, yet they each laid down their lives for the love of God and neighbor, witnessing to the truths of the Gospel and the teachings of the Church. Each had unique gifts, but each offered those gifts self-sacrificially. Each gave back to the Giver of the gifts the fruits of the gifts given. It is this that makes them heroes of Christendom.
Republished with gracious permission from Crisis Magazine (July 2025).
This essay is part of a series, Unsung Heroes of Christendom.
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