Sister Angela Mary Doyle wrote in a diary entry the day she arrived in Brisbane, June 25, 1947, that she was “suddenly experiencing a sense of real terror at the prospect ahead”, reports The Catholic Leader.
The 21-year-old Irish Mercy Sister had left her family and everything she knew behind setting sail from Southhampton, England, for Sydney.
Sr Angela Mary Doyle RSM celebrates her 100th birthday. PHOTO: Catholic Leader.
Seven decades on and Sr Doyle could still feel the churning waters of the Bay of Biscay beneath her feet.
They were a group of 15 young religious sisters and girls huddled among a ship full of soldiers returning from the European theatre of the Second World War.
Rich, poor, men, women – she said they were all equal in their seasickness at the side of the ship.
After five miserable weeks, she arrived in Sydney and immediately boarded a train for Brisbane where the windows blocked nearly the entire view of outside.
“Is this what a vocation to religious life means – uncertainty, smallness, even unwillingness to go on with it when the going is hard? At this moment, I feel very miserable,” she wrote in her diary.
She put down her diary to go and look out the train, seeing green shoots along the train line and it brought her some comfort, thoughts of new growth and possibility.
She returned to her seat to say the rosary only to find “my rosary beads and a squashed banana had become inextricably one and that’s how I am going to arrive at South Brisbane Railway Station”.
“It’s these details that stick in your mind,” she said, recalling the same story more than 70 years later ahead of her 100th birthday in August.
“I am grateful to God that I came to Australia – I’ve loved Australia, I’ve loved Australians and they have loved me,” the Queensland great and pioneering healthcare leader said.
Sr Doyle said she “didn’t feel” like she was 100.
Regular walks and an active prayer life kept her young.
Most of all, she loved the combination of the two, especially down by a holiday destination in Tugun where she could walk along the seaside where nobody recognised her and she could pray her rosary – preferably without a banana.
She said as life went on, “I’ve grown to love God more, to know him closely”.
Sr Angela Mary Doyle with nurses at the old convent which is now part of the Mater Hospital in Brisbane. PHOTO: Mater Communications via The Catholic Leader.
Sr Doyle still has a crystal-clear memory of the day God called her to religious life.
Her family, in which she was one of nine children, lived in County Clare on a medium-sized farm at 23 hectares.
She assured 23 hectares was medium-sized for Ireland despite what some Australian cattle farms might reach in size.
“Every square inch of it was fertile,” she said.
“Cows, pigs and chickens and we grew all the vegetables we needed.”
They also had a horse, who did all the work.
One day, when she was about 16 years old, she was walking along the road, looking back at the field where the family horse stood.
She “loved that horse” and went up to rub his nose affectionately.
Without any warning or prior thought about a religious vocation, a clear message “came into that side of my head,” asking her – “Why don’t you give your life to God?”
“It was as clear to me then as it is now,” she said.
Her mother’s initial reaction to the idea was to laugh and say, “You’d never stay… you like dancing too much.”
Despite her mum’s initial disbelief, the subject came up again about 12 months later.
Her parents decided to “give her a chance,” with her mother reasoning that if she did not like it, she could always come back.
She initially tried to join two convents, but they would not accept her because she had not completed secondary school.
Eventually, she heard about a convent in Cork.
The sisters had returned from Australia and were looking for Irish girls to go back with them as teachers or nurses.
She wrote a letter, and “they accepted me sight unseen”.
She left Ireland believing she would never see home again but went anyway.
Travel was horrendous and her first days in Australia brought terrible doubts.
Finally in Brisbane, she was sent to teach at St Joseph’s Convent, Kangaroo Point.
Once she stood at the front of her new classroom and looked out at the room full of young faces looking back at her, every challenge and doubt she had felt up to that point melted away.
“I loved those children, absolutely loved them – I can still see them and enjoy them in my mind,” she said.
Her time teaching was short-lived.
When education appointments went up at Christmas time for the next year, she could not find her name among them.
Then, someone told her, she was “going to the hospital”.
“But I’m not sick,” she remembered saying.
Sr Doyle had been told she would become a nurse, which brought its own set of doubts.
She found once she was in the role, she thrived and loved it.
She would eventually end up spending more than a dozen years in the operating theatre before stepping into leadership in 1966.
Sr Angela Mary with St Pope John Paul II
She went on to be Mater’s Sister Administrator for 21 years, during which time she oversaw huge growth in Mater’s adult, children’s and mothers’ hospitals.
Her contribution to Queensland has been recognised by receiving the Order of Australia, a Centenary Medal and honorary degrees.
One of her well-known contributions was to the care of homosexual men during the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.
She said then-Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen directed a fear campaign on the virus, arguing “nobody must help these men because their illness is a direct punishment from God”.
Sr Doyle remembered thinking, “I don’t know what God you know”.
Mr Bjelke-Petersen refused about $100,000 in federal funding for medical care for men suffering from AIDS, money that Sr Doyle secretly accepted and funnelled through the Mater to the Queensland AIDS Council.
Under the cover of darkness, Sr Doyle departed her convent and headed down the hill to Stanley Street where many AIDS sufferers congregated.
She would meet with them in their houses and hear what they needed, before returning to the convent to organise delivery of care.
She remembered how afraid she was of being discovered by the Queensland authorities and the many advocates who worked in secret to help care for AIDS sufferers.
Then-Federal Health Ministor Dr Neal Blewett later said the Sisters of Mercy were “the most altruistic of money launderers”.
Sr Doyle stepped back from leadership positions in the 2000s but never stepped away from her beloved Mater, where she continues to play an active role with visits and championing causes.
She said at 100 years, she was often asked about her secret to a long life.
“All I can think of is I’m always interested in somebody out there that I could help more than interested in myself,” she said.
“There is nothing I desire more than my closeness to God; my closeness to God is everything to me.
“It’s everything.”
This article by Joe Higgins was published in The Catholic Leader, the publication of the Archdiocese of Brisbane.