GOLDEN JUBILEE

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 86, Issue 228, 28 September 1942, Page 4

GOLDEN JUBILEE

SISTERS OF COMPASSION Saturday was the golden jubilee of the foundation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Compassion. The Order was founded by the late Mother Mary Joseph Aubert, at Jerusalem, on the banks of the Wanganui River, on September 26, 1892. Before establishing her Order, Mother Aubert had lived up the Wanganui River for nine years and had undergone many hardships. The little community consisted of four Sisters professed, three novices and one postulant. In 1899 Mother Aubert went to Wellington and in 1900 the Home for Incurables was founded. She had no money for the great works she undertook: she had nothing but faith, but when she began the Home of Compassion at Island Bay, Wellington, for foundlings and incurable children, money poured in from people of all denominations. From that humble beginning hidden in obscurity the work of the Order has grown steadily down the years. In the span of fifty years there are seven communities of Sisters of Compassion, with more than 100 professed Sisters, twentv novices, and two postulants. In addition to the Maori Mission at Jerusalem, there are now several large institutions carrying on various charitable works in Wellington, Wanganui, Auckland and Broken Hill, Australia. In her homes, Mother Aubert’s principle of undenominational and gratuitous work for the poor Alone is carefully observed. Mother Aubert, in her youth, tended the wounded with the Irish Sisters of Charity in the Crimea War. She arrived in New Zealand in 1860 and went through the Maori Wars and walked from one end of the North Island to the other. Mother Aubert was in Europe during the last war and assisted in nursing. She died at the Home of Compassion, Island Bay, on October 1, 1926, and was accorded the largest funeral ever given a woman in New Zealand.