Catherine lives in a unit, surrounded by other Mercy nuns. I meander through the rose garden to reach her front door. One of the neighbouring nuns is pruning a rose bush in their shared garden. Above, the blue sky is streaked with white clouds. Catherine, who is tall and exudes an electric energy, greets me warmly. We sit by the sliding doors, overlooking her garden. Green apricots hang from the trees waiting patiently for the summer sun to ripen. Beside her are photos of her newly born great-nephew bundled in blankets in his mother’s arms.

When Catherine prepared to take her final vows, it was amid a period of profound change. It was the late 1960s. The euphoria of the Second Vatican Council, with all its promise for change, was palpable. Her desire to share the generosity of God’s love — which she believed was offered freely, to all, without judgement or expectation — felt like a fire raging beneath her skin. But days before she was to commit her life to the Church, an older nun, an introverted woman who spoke very few words, approached Catherine to ask whether she was sure of her decision. Catherine, young and excited about the options that now lay before her to engage with the suffering of the world, felt the words crash against her chest.

 “The nun thought that my extrovert nature was anti religious life,” Catherine says. “Other extrovert novices learnt to be more introverted, or at least appear to be so.” Catherine pauses. In the silence, I look toward the garden where sunlight shimmers though the trees. “I ignored the nun,” Catherine continues. “We have changed now; they were confined years. Convents are not like that anymore.”

Though Catherine was born in England, no trace of her British accent remains. Catherine’s parents met during World War II in England over the deathbed of her father’s relatives. Their lives, like that of so many others, were stolen by tuberculosis. Her mother, a nurse, served during the war, witnessing the surge in tuberculosis cases during this period. Her parents were married in 1940, the year Winston Churchill became prime minister. By the time Catherine was born the next year, her father, a motor mechanic, had left to fight in the war. She would meet him for the first time four years later. Her father spent these years stationed in the deserts of the Middle East, imagining his daughter taking her first steps, speaking her first words. When her father returned home in 1945, she no longer heard the frightening sounds of bombs falling from the British skies.

Catherine and her family migrated to Adelaide in 1958. With only one semester left before completing school, her parents sent her to a Catholic high school run by Sisters of Mercy. It was the first time she had ever met a nun. It was these women that inspired her to give up everything to enter a convent. “It is a strange sort of thing,” Catherine says, “I saw in the nuns a tremendous belief that an individual person can make a difference in the world.”

So in 1961, after graduating from the University of Adelaide, she joined the Sisters of Mercy, an order founded in Ireland by a woman dedicated to helping the poor, especially women. At the heart of Mercy spirituality is a combination of action and contemplation. Joyous nuns who laughed easily welcomed Catherine.

It took some time to adjust to her new life. There was not a lot of freedom at the convent. There was no television. If they were lucky, they would watch a borrowed real of film once or twice a year. There was also something else that Catherine was not expecting: personal friendships between nuns were forbidden. “We couldn't have one person in the convent who we were close to. They thought it could lead to something sexual,” Catherine says.

I ask whether sexual relationships between women did occur. They did, though rarely, and beneath a shroud of secrecy. “In those days the communities were large so it could be hidden better amongst nuns,” Catherine says, “but that was harder to hide when nuns lived in groups of two or three in the community.”

Sex was rarely discussed at convent. Catherine laughs as she tells me how, as novices, they were taught about sex education. “A lady was called in one day to ask if we knew about sex education. One evening in six years,” Catherine says. “There were four of us novices who were 21, others were younger, they were 16. In those days I don't think you even held a boy’s hand without feeling sinful. It was terrible. I was lucky to have parents who told us what we needed to know,” Catherine says. There was no discussion of emotion, only that sex was sinful and led to pregnancy. There was no mention of the oral contraception pill that had been introduced in Australia in 1961, changing the lives of many women.

During her second year at the convent — in 1962 — the nuns began to receive letters from the secretary to Archbishop James Gleeson, who was in Rome attending the Second Vatican Council. The letters, which would take weeks to arrive, gave them a glimpse of the discussions taking place in the grandeur of the Vatican, where more than 2000 bishops had gathered. Though thousands of miles away, the nuns sensed the euphoria in the handwritten letters. As a young novice, Catherine was excited at the prospect of change. By the time the Second Vatican Council ended in 1965, a series of documents had been produced that set the Church’s course for the future. It was a period of radical renewal for the Church as it embraced new ways to engage with the modern world.

The years immediately following the Council, Catherine witnessed dramatic changes at the convent. “The hems went up and the veils came off,” Catherine says referring to the nuns’ habits, which would eventually be abandoned.  The Mercy nuns, like all other religious orders, were invited to rediscover the vision of their founder: were they being true to Sister Catherine McAuley’s mission, to what had inspired her to create the order more than 100 years earlier? “We went quite fast in the Mercy order as we had fantastic leadership,” Catherine says. “Monica, our leader at the time, was one of the best leaders we ever had.”

However, not everyone embraced the changes with such enthusiasm. Many nuns – both novices still in their teens and professed nuns who had taken their final vows decades earlier — left the convent. Some struggled with the changes, perhaps with all they had to leave behind.

Catherine spent her first two decades as a nun teaching in schools and working in parishes. In the early 1980s, she spent a year studying theology in the heart of London. The country she had left behind as a teenager just after World War II was now in the hands of  Margaret Thatcher, the first woman to become prime minister of Britain. Thatcher would become the longest serving British prime minister for 150 years and the most dominant and divisive force in British politics in the second half of the 20th century. When Catherine arrived in the UK, the number of people out of work had risen to over three million for the first time since the 1930s.

The year passed quickly. In between attending lectures and writing papers on theology, she spent time with family and her childhood friends. Her friends’ teenage children, on the verge of adulthood, were already making decisions that would shape the rest of their lives. Although now in her early 40s, Catherine remembered what it felt like to be so young, to see your future stretched out ahead like a blank canvas. Catherine enjoyed London, its busy streets, the mingling accents. She even enjoyed the rain.

After returning to Australia, Catherine could never have guessed what was coming next. Len Faulkner, the seventh Archbishop of Adelaide (1985-2001) appointed her to lead a parish, a position she would hold for twelve years. Faulkner, Catherine explains, was an Archbishop like no other. She looks at me intently, her eyes shining. She makes no attempt to hide her admiration for Faulkner.

“There were a few of us women in leadership,” she says. “Len Faulkner was not a young bishop, but he was very progressive.” Faulkner established Adelaide’s Diocesan Pastoral Team which gave lay women a role in governance. The Diocesan Pastoral Team was an innovative move which consisted of bishop, priest, religious and lay person sharing leadership together.

I ask how the priests and community reacted to her assuming a leadership role. “The community welcomed me with open arms as a female leader as did the priests in the Western region,” Catherine says. Nor was there any opposition from the Vatican. “My leadership,” Catherine says, “was within canon law as it states that a lay person can lead a parish. In the United States, there are hundreds of nuns leading parishes.”

Despite this, Archbishop Faulkner was criticised. “Faulkner continued to appoint me, but he was not popular with the other bishops of Australia. They criticised him for having women on his leadership team,” Catherine says. I ask how Archbishop Faulkner reacted to the criticism. Without hesitation, Catherine answers, “He believed that this is what was asked from us from the Second Vatican Council: to listen to the people of God, and for leadership to be equal.”

Catherine tells me that her twelve years in leadership were the happiest in her life. She worked with three different priests during this time and forged a friendship with them that lasted for more than four decades. While the priests celebrated the weekend Masses, Catherine managed the pastoral care of the community. “The community loved our leadership. We had creative liturgies which community members from other parishes came to as they did not have this in their parish. It was not about telling people what to do from up high,” Catherine says.

The parish served a community where multiple languages were spoken, from Vietnamese and Polish to Khmer. Catherine and the priests worked with many families who had arrived in Australia having fled the horrors of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia. In power from 1975-1979, Pol Pot conducted a rule of terror that led to the deaths of nearly a quarter of Cambodia's seven million people. Cambodian refugees began arriving in Australia after 1975, with numbers peaking in the 1980s. Catherine now visits the grandchildren of these families she has known for over 30 years.

Catherine called the priests by their first name and encouraged community members to do the same. The use of ‘father’ as a term of respect for all ordained priests can serve to foster clericalism, giving priests an exalted status and infantilise the laity. The three priests she worked with never practiced clericalism. “If the priest models no clericalism, then the community reacts to them differently and they will not give the priest power. Priests should not have this power,” Catherine says. Years later, Pope Francis would repeatedly warn against the dangers of clericalism and call on bishops and priests to be humble servants rather than princes.

Watching Catherine speak, it is easy to imagine her in leadership. She has a commanding presence. I ask about the likelihood of women being allowed to ordain as priests in the future.  “We are a long way from this,” Catherine says. “Priests will likely be allowed to marry before women become priests.”

Catherine steps into the kitchen to make coffee. While the coffee brews, she gives me a tour of her garden. Her summers are busy making jams from her abundant fruit trees. In the corner of the garden where once chickens roamed, a wheelbarrow has been transformed into a planter and is now teeming with purple flowers. A sparrow flies above us as we walk back to the house.

Catherine has fallen in love a few times, once with a Jesuit priest. They wrote letters to each other daily, divulging the secrets of their inner worlds. The feelings, consuming and overwhelming, were contrary to a celibate life. “This priest eventually left the Church and married someone else. I knew I was not going to leave, and he knew that too,” Catherine says.

For months she lived with a pain in her heart, as did the priest, which subsided with the passing seasons. It made her wonder about the unlived lives we all carry within us, those mapped with choices we decided against. “I never considered leaving over a man. But when you fall in love you think, my God, what would it be like?” Catherine says.

In moments of difficulty, like in the moments of falling in love, Catherine returns to God with the question: What are you wanting from me? And are you going to give me the strength to get through this? I ask about hearing to the voice of God, is it always clear? Catherine hesitates and looks out at the garden. A sole pomegranate, almost red, hangs alone from the tree. “The voice of God is not always clear,” she says. One thing that helps though is friendship. For the past 30 years, the nuns in her inner-city suburb meet each month. They meet at one of their homes to talk about their lives, the decisions they need to take, how God is calling to them. The nuns share their fears, disappointments, hopes. They help each other to understand how they are being called so they may find their own map to God; their collective support strengthens their reserves and each person’s sense of God. For most of her life, Catherine has come home after work to an empty house, yet she has never felt isolated; these friendships formed over decades, where the intimacies of each life is shared in delicate tenderness, do not allow loneliness to flourish. Her life is abundant with many forms of love — loving friendships and family — and it is here, in this abundance, that Catherine lives and breathes.

Catherine believes the old church needs to die so a new Church, one that Jesus would recognise, can be resurrected. “Jesus would not recognise the Church as it is now: the hierarchical Church where there is evil and real sin and crime has been ignored,” Catherine says. That children were sexually abused in Catholic institutions is “shocking,” Catherine says. “I am disgusted and we nuns are demanding change. It has turned a lot of people away from the church.”

In Australia, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse handed down its final report in 2017, after a five-year inquiry. It contains over 400 recommendations which aim to make institutions safer for children. One of the recommendations is that the Australian Catholic Church request permission from the Vatican to introduce voluntary celibacy for diocesan clergy; it also calls on the Catholic Church to improve their processes of selection, screening and training of candidates for the clergy and religious life, and their processes of ongoing formation, support and supervision of clergy and religious.

Catherine worries that seminary training can foster a disconnect between emotions and the intellect, leaving priests emotionally immature. “The training focuses only on the intellect. It is like the training has chopped part of their being off,” she says.

Of course, this is not true of all priests. During the twelve years when she led a parish, she worked with priests who were warm, and had loving, affectionate families that kept them grounded. “Their families hugged the priests and paid no attention to the no touching part,” she says. These priests spoke about a tender God rather than a punitive, judgmental God: “They talked about God’s love, not about sin and punishment,” she says. “The business of being afraid of sin is in opposition to a loving, merciful God who would never ever refuse forgiveness.”

Catherine wants celibacy to be voluntary rather than imposed. “I don't think celibacy is possible without the power of the Holy Spirit,” she says. This echoes the words of Richard Rohr, Franciscan priest, writer and teacher, who believes that only someone who has an “alive and warm inner experience of God is capable of celibacy at all.”

Despite the significant challenges ahead for the Catholic Church, Catherine is hopeful.  The same sense of excitement about change that she felt as a young novice in the 1960s during the Second Vatican Council, she feels again now: Pope Francis is calling for ‘a listening Church’ and this offers hope that things can change. For Catherine, it comes down to listening and leadership: Bishops need to listen to the Royal Commission, to women, to the LGBTQI community, to young people.

She also hopes individuals can be encouraged to find their own ways of knowing God. The Church needs to allow space for people to express their spirituality in different ways, rather than to focus on whether someone is attending Church. People need to be empowered to pray at home — an idea that “so many people in the congregation would be shocked by,” Catherine says.

At 80, Catherine has no plans to retire. She now devotes herself fulltime to outreach work through the charity, St. Vincent de Paul. She visits parents who are struggling to pay the rent as they watch, heartbroken and desperate, as their children’s lives are ravaged by addictions. She visits families who cannot afford to buy food and live through cold winters without heating. As she visits homes filled with loneliness rather than friends and family, she offers friendship as much as practical support offered through the program. People will more likely reach out if they need help in the gentleness of friendship, Catherine says.

For the past 60 years, Catherine has served as a nun, while the world and the Church has changed dramatically around her. Have our souls caught up with the vastness and pace of these changes, she wonders. Her life has always been busy, especially when she was in leadership. Her spiritual director, a Mercy nun, is calling her to slow down, to practice being rather than doing. So now, she begins the day siting in her armchair which overlooks her garden, filled with trees teeming with apricots, and watches as the birds somersault in the birdbath, allowing her soul the time to catch up.