Sr Elizabeth Young RSM. Photo supplied.

Sister of Mercy, Elizabeth Young, is at home with people on the margins. Whether it’s walking alongside men and women in prisons or detention centres or providing pastoral care and support to young or old, the call to serve those on the peripheries is at the heart of her mission, writes Fiona Basile.

Emerging from this work is a vision for the Catholic Church in Australia to explore, discuss and discern the diaconate, including the reinstatement of women as deacons. It’s a conversation that she hopes will be led and guided by the Holy Spirit.

Elizabeth Young RSM felt the call to permanent ordained ministry when she was seven years old.

It was a call that persistently recurred in her life thereafter, and which saw her become a Catholic during her primary school years. She’d grown up in a Protestant family on Boandik country in South Australia and was sent to the Catholic primary school in Penola established by St Mary of the Cross MacKillop in 1866. In Grade Two she received the sacraments of First Reconciliation and First Communion and became Catholic. Her mother and siblings soon followed.

Over the years, following the call in her heart to give her life in service to those in need, Elizabeth became a Sister of Mercy and undertook her final profession in 2016. She has studied an undergraduate degree in Circus Arts at Swinburne University in Melbourne, a Bachelor of Theology at Flinders University in Adelaide, a Graduate Diploma of Teaching and Learning at Charles Darwin University and completed her Master of Theology (Coursework) at the University of Divinity in Melbourne.

Elizabeth has spent much time and energy in ministry on the margins, and it’s where she feels most deeply called. She was in the Catholic Diocese of Port Pirie for six years, which included coordinating the youth and young adult ministry, as well as taking on a chaplaincy role in the prison in Port Augusta and detention centres. During holiday periods, she was chaplain at Curtin Detention Centre in Western Australia.

She has worked as a pastoral associate at All Saints Parish in Fitzroy, Victoria, where she served people from the housing trust flats, and newly arrived peoples. She also volunteered at Port Phillip Prison, a maximum-security prison in Melbourne one day a week, which she ‘loved’. She’s currently in the Catholic Diocese of Wilcannia-Forbes where she is serving as a pastoral worker and chaplain to the local secondary college.

“I am involved in a very wide variety of different ministries and roles, and the only way you can really describe it altogether is ‘like a deacon’,’ said Elizabeth. “What I do is like the work of a deacon, but without the ordination.”

*Sr Elizabeth leads a workshop for lay liturgical leaders at Trundle in central-western NSW.*

It was this ‘call to diaconal ministry’ that saw Elizabeth create a website in October 2021, Liturgy on the Margins, to participate in a nation-wide movement in the hope of generating “conversation, prayer and discernment”. Before the website was launched, an interested group of people had formed to share this initiative, under the name of ‘Australian Catholics Exploring the Diaconate’. Since then, Elizabeth has been listening to the stories of many people engaged in diaconal ministry – deacons, priests, pastoral workers, chaplains, and Sisters. A few, like her, feel called to have this ministry authorised in a more permanent way.

“I think that we can have this conversation together with the institutional Church, with the people in the pews, with the people who are on the margins, the current permanent deacons and others doing these ministries,” said Elizabeth. “It’s a conversation that can include everyone; everyone can consider and pray about this at a national level, but of course these sorts of things have to be discerned at the Vatican level, too.”

Elizabeth is very specific about not confusing the conversation about the reinstatement of women in the diaconate with the role of priesthood. That is not the case. “Pope John Paul II and Benedict XVI opened a possibility for the reinstatement of women in the diaconate by their change in the Canon Law, which made quite a clear distinction between the priesthood and the diaconate,” explained Elizabeth. “They’re quite different and we are just focusing on the diaconate.

“And for me, the focus is not on women and what they can and can’t do, rather, the focus is on the people on the margins and specifically, the liturgical needs of those people. Anyone can offer pastoral care – that’s not an issue – but the issue is how we can serve people in liturgy and sacrament, which is such a special and different aspect of God’s mission that is offered.

“As Catholics, we believe in the sacraments and in the power of the liturgy and how important that is to our faith. There are people, particularly in rural and remote areas, in prison and detention, and many other settings, that are in need of liturgical ministry, and their needs are not being addressed. And yet, there are people willing and able to address them.

“And it’s not about changing what we’re doing or taking anyone’s jobs at all. It’s about recognising that the Spirit is calling people to this as a vocation and that it’s an option for young people as a permanent calling. I think that’s an important thing – it’s really about the future generations and it’s about those on the margins who are not being served.”

This article was written by freelance writer and photographer, Fiona Basile.