Years of service - Rosie Hoban

In December last year, the last Josephite serving in the South Australian country town of Jamestown, Sr Eunice Barry, left for further work in the city. Rosie Hoban talks with her.

Sr Eunice Barry describes herself as an ‘ordinary Josephite, doing ordinary things’. One suspects there are thousands of people scattered throughout South Australia who would disagree. They have been on the receiving end of her hospitality, sat in her classrooms, supped with her over tea and scones or welcomed her into their homes on one of her many regular visits. Sr Eunice may ‘just’ be doing what foundress Mary MacKillop asked of her, but it isn’t ordinary, in fact it’s almost counter-culture.

The presence of women religious, like Sr Eunice, will be greatly missed in small towns and communities around Australia. Just ask the folks at Jamestown in South Australia, where Sr Eunice lived and taught at the local Catholic primary school for the past 16 years. In December, at the age of 84, she retired as a teacher from the school and withdrew, with sadness, from the community. For the past ten years she has been the only sister in Jamestown, but has certainly not been lonely. Instead, she became ‘part of the place’, surrounded and embraced by the families of her students and those touched by her hospitality, her beautiful flowers and her homely cooking.

Now, she has moved to Adelaide to live in community with other sisters and to begin her new work at Flora McDonald Lodge, a nursing home run by the Josephites. She will visit the sick and elderly and offer the hand of friendship that so many have held in the past 60-plus years.

Sr Eunice left Jamestown with a heavy heart—16 years is a long time and many great friendships have been forged. But she was warned!  Back in the 1940s when this young girl from the fruit growing area of Monash in South Australia told her family that she wanted to follow her older sister into religious life, her mother warned her that the future would be ‘made up of many partings’.

Her mother was right and since her profession in 1944 Sr Eunice has served the people of Norwood, Penola, Thebarton, Terowie, Port Lincoln, Port Augusta, Rosewater, Peterborough, Nangwarry, Sydney, Pinnaroo, Yorketown and Jamestown. She may not have always been keen, but she was always ready when her province leaders asked her to move to a place of greater need.

‘It has been challenging at times, but God has never ever let me down and it always turned out for the best. God has been with me every step of the way’, Sr Eunice says. ‘And as you get older and a bit wiser you understand that it is right to let go. You can’t go on worrying about a decision once it is made.’

It hasn’t always been smooth sailing either, but Sr Eunice has taken on some pretty tough assignments with grace. Back in the 1970s she was appointed the school principal in Nangwarry after having been out of the primary classroom for 15 years. But she soon grew to love the work, the children and their families.

It was during her time at Nangwarry that the tragic Ash Wednesday fires hit and she felt the force of the fearful fires. The grief that followed that tragedy in 1983 demanded much of her as she walked closely with the families.

‘The dreadful bushfires left us devastated. A miracle change of wind saved us. And the loss of friends in the fire welded us into a very close community which I was sad to leave’, Sr Eunice says.

Not long after leaving the blackened Nangwarry, she was asked to go to Pinnaroo in 1985. There she helped school families come to terms with the closure of their beloved primary school, which had become unviable with only 20 students. In the early 1990s at Yorketown she was part of the handing over to laity. It was, she reflected, ‘time to drop the reins’.

Not surprisingly, one of the highlights of the many years in the classroom has been preparing children for the sacraments, which she began during her first appointment as a young teacher in Norwood in 1946.

‘It has been a great joy and a privilege. If children can be given a good grounding when preparing for the sacraments, it helps nourish their faith as they establish their relationship with Jesus. That relationship can become real, not just something they learn. I always say that faith is caught, not taught.’

Sr Eunice had a good teacher when it came to the sacraments. Her own mother, Minnie, a convert, prepared the first four of her eight children for the sacraments, as well as other Catholic children in the district on Sunday afternoons, and instilled in them a great love of God and a faith that has lasted a lifetime. In 1936 four Sisters of St Joseph opened a primary school in Berri and the Barry children were then able to ride their bikes from Monash to Berri.

That faith in God’s will has demanded more of Sr Eunice than new beginnings and sad endings. It has also called her to hand over the mission of the Josephites to lay people. She was reluctant at first, but has ‘grown into an understanding and acceptance’ of partnership as the number of Josephite sisters has diminished. She soon began to recognise the great possibilities of working in partnership with lay people.

‘I believe that the Holy Spirit is working in people’, she says, ‘even if we don’t see it, and sometimes even in spite of ourselves. There are so many wonderful lay people in the community willing and able to do things, and we have to be open to handing over to them.’ Certainly that handing over has happened in Jamestown where about 30 Josephite Associates have made a commitment to the charism of the Josephites and to continue the work in their own lives and their own way.

‘It makes me sad that there will no longer be a Josephite sister in Jamestown and the many other places where we once served the people. But the Aasociates will fill my absence. It will be in a different way, but they will maintain the Josephite spirit in their own way’, she says.

‘It is a leap of faith and we as church need to make the leap and be willing to share leadership with lay people because the Holy Spirit works in all of us. We must have hope for the future and faith that the Holy Spirit is guiding us.’

Sr Eunice’s other great constant love throughout her decades of teaching has been the love of children. Not having her own children was a sorrow she faced in the early days of her novitiate and as always, God was the answer.

‘I can remember quite vividly one evening during Holy Hour facing the prospect of never having my own children—that it was part of the sacrifice I was willing to make so that I could give my whole heart and life to God. And it’s been a sacrifice so richly rewarded, for I have been a ‘mother’ in a different sense of the word to hundreds of children.’

Sr Eunice has tried to be a model to her students and their families and to help ‘bring Jesus to them’. She hopes people have been touched by the Josephite spirit wherever she has been.

‘I hope that the Josephite spirit reveals itself as loving people, being of service to people and of friendship. That’s what I hope I have left behind.’