Sister of Mercy Wendy Flannery’s recent election as the Australian Vice-President of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), is just another milestone in her long history of advocating for justice and peace both locally and internationally.

Wendy, who lives in Brisbane, has been a member of WILPF, the first International Women’s peace organisation, since 2013.

“I first found out about WILPF when I was helping set up the Sisters of Mercy presence at the United Nations in 1999,” she says.

“I managed to help secure an office across the road from the United Nations in New York, in a building owned by the United Methodist Women, in the same corridor as the WILPF office. I became very conscious of their work on getting the Women, Peace and Security agreement adopted by the United Nations Security Council.

“Some years later I ended up getting one of WILPF Queensland’s Peace Women Awards, and it was then that I decided to join”. WILPF women had collaborated in events for Harmony Day, the International Day of Peace and the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, which Wendy organised through ‘Believing Women for a Culture of Peace’, a Brisbane-based women’s multi-faith and multicultural association which Wendy initiated in 2003.

*Sr Wendy Flannery RSM at a G20 rally - part of her lifetime commitment to justice and peace. PHOTO: Institute of Sisters of Mercy of Australia and PNG.*

A seminal moment in Wendy’s life came in the late sixties when she was sent to Papua New Guinea, prior to making her final vows.

Sent to the Mercy Secondary School outside Wewak to teach secondary students, little did Wendy know that this appointment would shape the rest of her life, one where she would go on to work at an ecumenical Institute for Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, the Melanesian Institute, afterwards to set up a justice and development program for the Pacific Islands Bishops Conference based in Fiji, and then globally at what is now the Mercy Global Action Office at the United Nations.

“Influenced by the teachings of the Second Vatican Council, I arrived in Papua New Guinea with a strong sense that working to respect people’s cultures was part of working for justice,” she says.

During Wendy’s time in the Pacific she was asked to be one of the Vatican Delegates at a World Council of Churches convention in South Korea on ‘Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation’ in 1990. She had been involved with a small group of Pacific women organising preparatory women’s consultations in Tonga and the Marshall Islands. Without knowing it at the time, her attendance at the convention was merely an entrée into her future work for issues of justice at a global level.

“Establishing the Mercy Office at the United Nations was something that like most major events in my life I took on because I was appointed or invited,” she says.

More than 20 years of working in the Pacific Islands and ecumenically, had a profound influence on Wendy’s time in New York.

“I brought with me agendas that I just couldn’t drop such as environmental issues, racism and women’s rights”.

Moving forward to 2021, the seeds that were sown from both her time living in the Pacific and in New York has blossomed in Wendy who is still passionate and focussed on achieving climate justice for the Pacific.

“One of the major issues WILPF is focussed on is the new United Nations Treaty to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons, which includes a clause about compensating people who were victims of nuclear testing.

“We have been working with local councils in Australia to get them to endorse it.

“Ultimately the Australian Government would have to ratify the international treaty but we are trying to work through local government councils as part of a staged approach with all levels of government.

“To this end, we were recently successful in getting a resolution through the Australian Local Government Association calling on the Australian Government to endorse the treaty, which is a huge breakthrough”.

After many years of advocating for justice, when asked how she keeps going when some of the issues of injustice facing the world have become more dire, Wendy said that she still has hope that goodness will prevail.

“This the fundamental Gospel story,” she says.

“Our Creator has set the whole universe story in motion. We don’t know where it is heading. But our hope is based on our belief in Jesus’ central message about ‘life, life in all its fullness’. This provides us with a positive vision of our world and what we can be together.”

This article is an abridged form of an article published on the website of the Institute of Sisters of Mercy of Australia and Papua New Guinea. Read the full article here.