ONE OF THE VALIANT WOMEN

Bernadette Foster

Towards the end of her life, Berna Foster told her daughter that when she was at the supermarket she used to speak to people whom she recognised from Sunday Mass, even if they had not been introduced. 'We don't need to be introduced', she said, 'if we've given each other the Kiss of Peace.' Such confident Catholicism energised the whole of her long life.

Most of that life was spent in Melbourne's Holy Name parish at East Preston, where she lived from the early years of her marriage. Soon after the Foster family moved there, East Preston became a separate parish and the family would become an essential player in the developing life of the parish. Half a century later, as Dr Wendy Cahill was writing the parish history—a good book, by the way—she remarked that two names stood out in the archival material: the founding pastor and Berna Foster.

Berna (from Bernadette) was fortunate in finding such a parish priest, an alumnus of Maynoooth College in Ireland, Father Anthony Cleary. He was an inspirer of lay activity in Melbourne and an ecumenical activist who was also attuned to new Catholic thinking on the liturgy. When Berna came to him with a plan to start a women's group in the parish, he readily agreed, stipulating only that she should be its leader.

The Catholic Women's League, as the new group came to be called, became indispensable, doing the everyday things that keep a parish alive. They ran the school tuckshop and recycled school uniforms and tended the altar and raised money for good causes and helped at the local hospital and taught English to migrants and collected old newspapers and visited those in institutional care and celebrated the ordinations of parishioners and First Holy Communions.

Berna herself responded eagerly to Vatican II initiatives. Growing up, she had been saddened by the often cruel division between Catholics and Protestants, so she became an ecumenical pioneer in East Preston. As a member of the interchurch council she went door-knocking with the local Presbyterian minister, not for money or proselytism but to publicise services at all churches in the neighbourhood. She spoke at ecumenical services for women and in time became a Catholic representative on the state interchurch council of women.

Artwork at the new Holy Name Church, East Preston, where Bernadette Foster was one of the parish's foundation members.

Setting up a parish council, Father Cleary asked her to help write its constitution. Then he suggested that Berna be the one to speak about the parish council at Sunday Mass—a novelty, since up till then women had not entered the sanctuary of our churches, except as brides or cleaners. Next, she became a reader at Mass and then a eucharistic minister. She edited the parish paper and set up a parish library, making sure there were books to back up the challenging speakers she brought to women's meetings.

In these years the problems of migrant women came to the fore. Isolated at home and often with poor language skills, they were handicapped when they had to see a doctor or speak to their children's teachers, sometimes needing to employ those children as interpreters, an unsatisfactory arrangement. To meet this need, Berna became the regional coordinator of a 'home tutor' scheme which matched English-speaking women to migrant women in order to better their conversational skills.

An old friend drew Berna into this work, Joanna Waite of the Grail. When Berna was growing up she had encountered the Grail, a forward-looking Catholic women's movement from Holland, and it made her the confident Catholic she became. Above all, the Grail fostered in young women a personal responsibility for the mission of Christ and the church.

Throughout her life Berna acknowledged the continuing influence of the Grail's formation. Her daughter Judith, who has written her life (as yet unpublished), was named after one of the Australian founders.

A few years before she died, Berna was accorded a rare papal honour, the cross pro Ecclesia et Pontifice for her lifetime of service. Women who were at the ceremony in the Melbourne cathedral spoke of her influence on their lives. They said she had given them the courage to find and use talents they didn't know existed. Yes, she was a legendary organiser but, more than that, she had been their inspiration in life.

Most history is simply lost. One day, no doubt, Berna Foster—housewife, mother, inspirational parishioner—will be forgotten, remembered only on the list of those holding papal honours. The continuance of Catholicism as a people's religion, however, depends above all on such women always being there.