CATH NEWS REPORT: Maureen Elliott was the youngest child in a Catholic family of three children. She grew up attending Catholic schools on Sydney’s North Shore. In Form 1 at Our Lady of Dolours, Chatswood – where she had received a scholarship – she and three of her friends would meet after school calling themselves ‘Our Lady’s Helpers’. They would make sacrifices and say prayers, reports Catholic Mission Australia.
As a teenager Maureen recalls walking into church one Sunday at Haymarket in Sydney when a strange thought popped into her head: she could become a nun. She laughed out loud. It seemed preposterous. But then she thought about it and concluded … why not? She realised she didn’t have an excuse.
Her mother was horrified and begged her not to enter the convent. Initially she told her mother that she wouldn’t enter, to keep the peace, but the calling continued to burn inside her.
In primary school she was taught by the Brigidine Sisters, and during high school with the Mercy Sisters, came into contact with the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary. In the end it was the FMM sisters that appealed to her with their down-to-earth attitudes, missionary spirit, and Eucharistic adoration.
She then attended teacher training at the Catholic College of Education at North Sydney and was then a secondary school teacher in science, maths and religion in Sydney and Canberra for seven years.
During school holidays, she initially worked in retail and after school in her father’s accountancy business, but at 18 she went to Mittagong, NSW, for her postulancy (six months) and novitiate (two years).
In 1974 her dreams came true when she was asked to go to Papua New Guinea.
There she worked at Benedicts Teachers’ College, a Christian Brothers college, in Wewak. Here she trained primary-school teachers.
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