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A gifted poet inspired ‘our Mother Teresa’
A CONVERSATION with Sr PAULINE FITZ-WALTER SGS, the ‘street angel of Sydney’
By BRIAN DAVIES
30/03/2008
It was January 1965 and Sr Francisca – the name
she had taken when she professed her vows – was in
the grounds of Mt St Benedict’s Pennant Hills. A
‘street’-type person walked in, a troubled young
man, clutching a book of poetry. He was “looking for
peace”, he said. “A lovely idea,” said the Good
Samaritan sister. “I’ve just absconded from a
Parramatta mental hospital,” the young man added,
“and my name is Frank Webb.” He said he needed
neither money nor food, but peace and where was
there a St Vinnies’ hostel?
It was Francis Webb, the poet, profoundly gifted and
devout Catholic, a ‘lion’ of Australian literature, but a
frail and lost person.
Sr Francisca dashed off to ask a visiting priest if he
could drive the mendicant into the city to a St
Vinnies hostel.
“The priest said to me: ‘There are no needy people in
the world today. He can get a ride on the road. And,
anyhow, how do I know he’s not a sex maniac?’
“And I said to him: ‘I don’t know what a sex maniac
looks like, Father, but he looks needy to me, like a
man who needs a lift.’ I don’t think the priest
expected a nun to argue with him.”
Sr Francisca had to tell Webb the priest had
declined. She watched as he walked to the convent
gates and away. “I had this inner vision of Christ
being sent away,” she says.
That evening, after she referred the incident to the
secretary-general of the order, frantic inquiries
discovered that Webb had got a lift to Orange, where
he’d signed in to Bloomfield mental hospital.
Webb and St Francisca were re-united a year or so
later when he unexpectedly appeared at St
Scholastica’s convent, Glebe. He’d absconded from
Bloomfield and in a shirt he’d ‘nicked’ he found a
return train ticket to Sydney. The Holy Spirit’s work,
he believed.
Sr Francisca organised overnight shelter at a Vinnies hostel for him, and renewed hospital care, and thereafter
visited him regularly.
FRIENDSHIP: Sr Pauline ‘had this inner vision of Christ being
sent away’.
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2. Their friendship was based on their love of language, verse and, above all, their faith.
Webb’s own spiritual stamina and Eucharistic devotion were formidable. He regarded her as a great gift of charity.
She regarded him as “simply brilliant”.
The mentally wounded, she concluded, were the most in need of love and companionship.
In 1968 the Good Samaritans sent her and another nun, Sr Diane, to Rome to study and she and Webb then
corresponded. The two nuns came home in 1972 with numerous distinctions, but with Sr Pauline, eventually a
Master of education, declining to go on to write a thesis for a PhD.
“That’s not why I became a nun,” she said. “I mean we’re not going to be judged on our degrees, but on love and
that’s what had taken possession of me.
“I’d say to ‘the boys’ in the homes I started: ‘You can’t take even a burnt matchstick with you, but you can take
your love, your peace and your joy’. That’s my consolation too, since I’ve lost and mislaid so many things from the
old days.”
That included some of Webb’s letters; others survive, however, and extracts appear in a recently published
biography of Sr Francisca.
Webb, who had a premonition of his death, was 47 when he died in Rydalmere mental hospital in 1972.
He’d started looking after those sicker than himself and had become a carer of the dying. Not long before his own
death, Sr Francisca and another of his friends had taken him on an outing – his last picnic, as it turned out – a
happy and funny afternoon.
Sr Francisca wrote of his death: “Faith for Frank … was a living vital force that drew a person into the mystery of
Christ (to become) a new creature ready for the new heavens and the new earth.”
She put her sadness into verse: “Your heart clasped at last the latch of eternity; you reached the Lord you had
loved and ciphered through all your ancient words.”
In the reforms that followed Vatican Two, she reverted to her baptismal name, Pauline Fitz-Walter, and became Sr
Pauline. Then 25 years after entering the Good Samaritans’ novitiate in 1948 at 25, she had experienced the
simple and the sublime: Rome and the Gregorian university in the vibrant intellectual environment of Vatican 2
and, when newly professed, taking novices and postulants for PE (physical education), something of an innovation,
but as a qualified State school teacher before entering the order her skills included PE training. The order’s rules,
however, required its members to wear corsets. “Physical education in corsets,” Sr Pauline recalls. “Somehow I had
to get around the rule. How did we get around it? Sister said we could remove all the whalebones from the
garments. “Religious life is now so different; gone to bits, people think. I don’t think so. It’s an evolution of how to
minister to people in a different society.”
“Just as people think when you’re over 80 you’ve got to forfeit what God gave you. But you don’t. You have to
keep using it – use it or lose it.”
“The world’s a strange place,” she reflects. “The other day I was driving behind a bus plastered with a meaningless
message: ‘If you get yourself in the fast lane, then you have a career.’ Fancy that I thought – all you have to do is
to get in the fast lane.”
In her own ‘career’ there was no issue more challenging than the establishment of her houses to shelter the
destitute and other drop-outs.
Something Francis Webb once said to her remained lodged in her mind: “If you ever change from training and
lecturing to looking after ‘no-hopers’ like me, would you please keep me a place…just one on a verandah would
do.”
Sr Pauline says: “It was a sort of unconscious battle. I felt here was a section of society most people passed by,
another apostolate, while the order kept saying ‘look this way’.
“I was back from Rome super-educated, and that was what the order wanted to use.”
The balance shifted late one night in 1975 when she was living at the Good Samaritan convent in Balmain and
there was a knock on the door. The rest of the convent was in bed. Sr Pauline was still up.
The visitors were two oddballs: Michael O’Sullivan and his mate Ernie, who had that day made his first holy
communion. But Ernie needed more instruction in the faith; could Sister help?
Unfortunately her only free time was Saturdays.
Perfect, said O’Sullivan. They’d be back next Saturday.
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