Honoria Cunningham was born in Argentina on the 12 February, 1858. Her Irish parents had migrated to South America and become very well established, her father and brothers becoming wealthy farmers and land-owners. She was the second youngest member (by one month) of the band of Sisters who were the Foundresses in South Australia.
She was only 21 years old when the Sisters left Buenos Aires in 1880, bound for Adelaide, and only two years professed. It must not have been an easy parting for her, to leave the security of the Argentine and her family, at such a young age, to face an unknown and very insecure future, for she had known a very secure and well-cared-for life with her family.
She entered the Mercy Congregation in Buenos Aires in 1875 at the age of 17 years, and was Professed in that city in 1878, prior to their departure from Buenos Aires. She took the Religious Name of Cecilia. She died in Angas Street, Adelaide in 1945, at the age of 87 years, much loved and revered by all the Sisters and cherished as the last member of the gallant 24 pioneer Sisters.
She was given responsibility of government, with Mother Clare and Mother Claver, her South American compatriots, only 7 years after arriving in Adelaide. She was elected Mistress of Novices, but alternating periods as Superior or Assistant, for most of the rest of her life. She was largely responsible for the spiritual formation of all the Sisters in the earlier period of our Congregational history.
When Carmel Bourke knew Mother Cecilia in the early 1920s, she remembers her as a short, rather rotund little lady, cheerful and kindly, who taught some music pupils – ‘beginners’, as they were called, in the early stages of their tuition. She had been a music teacher during most of her religious life, taking only a few pupils that she could fit in between her duties in the Noviceship. Bourke thinks she was not, probably, very talented, but very patient and kind to little pupils with stumbling fingers. She was very humble, in this as in all aspects of her life, and as soon as her pupils were a little more proficient, she would hand them on to one of the other music teaching Sisters, while she would patiently take on yet another bunch of ‘Beginners.’
Carmel Bourke got to know Mother Cecilia Cunningham in 1931, when she entered the Novitiate as a Postulant and remained. By temperament she was placid and mild and very kindly, though by this time she was in her late seventies and it was felt she was slightly out-moded in her ideas of formation. She was cheerful and not easily aroused but could be very angry when the occasion called for it!
Mother Cecilia had tremendous devotion to the Blessed Sacrament, and in her later years spent hours sitting quietly in the Chapel. When her great inheritance became available in 1920, she left the Community great freedom to dispose of the money in whatever way they saw fitting to advance the works of Mercy. She made only one request, that a truly beautiful Chapel be built, where the Lord could be more fittingly housed. She had commented that when they came first from Buenos Aires, with its richly ornamented cathedral, churches and chapels, all in the elaborate Spanish style, what she found most distressing were the poor little church-schools and halls in which Mass had to be celebrated in so many places in Adelaide.
She was a truly humble person, at ease with her own self and her limitations and her gifts, and quietly lived apart from the Community, to dedicate her whole life to her Novices, never seeking public notice as the ‘great heiress’, but simply slipping away from any sort of fame.
She had a great spirit of poverty – she lived it in her own life, in all sorts of ways. She was a great teller-of-tales, and as she darned she would regale everyone with tales of their experiences in the Argentine, especially the last frightening year in Buenos Aires, when the Sisters were in such danger. She would also tell the sisters of the long voyage from Buenos Aires to England, and then to Port Adelaide, and of the early days of their settling in to their new home in Adelaide. She obviously had had a very happy childhood and a deep love for her parents and her brothers and sisters, and tended to lapse in Spanish – their childhood language – as she recalled their adventures at home on their big property.
Cecilia was 83 years old when she became, in 1941, the first Mother General of the reunited Adelaide and Mt Gambier communities. By then, she was the last survivor of the Argentinian group in Australia and was holding the post of Reverend Mother of Adelaide. With long experience of leadership, she was seen as a fitting symbol of unity, an appropriate person to bring about the harmonious uniting of the two groups which, though stemming from a common origin, had had separate existences for nearly sixty years. Her selection was welcomed by her sisters with much affection. She had been Novice Mistress to many of them, and her deep wisdom and her personal goodness were appreciated by all. She was seen as a woman of great peace and modesty, yet of indomitable strength.
Cecilia resigned her office as Mother General at the beginning of 1945. She was then an old lady, in her 88th year. She died on 2 August of the same year, and she is buried in the West Terrace Cemetery, Adelaide.
By Sr Mary-Anne Duigan and edited by Jacqui Jury, 2024
References
1996, Women on the move: Mercy’s Triple Spiral, Sisters of Mercy, Adelaide.