Hidden In the Shadow of Love

Sydney, 1913: two young Catholics, Eileen O’Connor and Father Edward McGrath MSC, answer the call of Our Lady to establish a society of nursing sisters to care for the sick and dying poor in the city’s slums. But the fledgling society struggles from its earliest days: Fr McGrath is sent abroad; and Eileen dies just a few years later. The little band of foundation nurses finds itself adrift.

Into the helm steps Nurse Theresa McLaughlin. Grieving the loss of her beloved foundress, she continues the work begun in Our Lady’s name, and guides the Nurses through the ensuing difficult years. Her life, hidden and small, teaches us about being faithful in the little things, and about finding the extraordinary in the everyday.

Eileen O’Connor’s cause for beatification is now officially open. This is the story of her closest companion, and the first Superior of Our Lady’s Nurses for the Poor, Mother Theresa McLaughlin.