Sr Mary O’Shannassy SGS OAM has been walking alongside men and women ‘as a messenger of compassion and hope’ in Victoria’s prisons for the past 27 years, reports Melbourne Catholic.
Sr Mary O’Shannassy SGS.
She says it's a ‘great privilege’ and in May of this year, Sr Mary was conferred with an honorary doctorate from Australian Catholic University in recognition of her service and leadership in chaplaincy for all prisoners in Victoria.
For two decades, Mary has managed Catholic Prison Ministry at CatholicCare, coordinating more than 10 chaplain volunteers, 70 support volunteers and the equivalent of six full-time paid staff, all of whom offer support and friendship to the growing number of residents in Victoria’s 16 prisons.
“Contrary to popular belief and what they tell you in the movies, on television or in the newspapers, prison is about people,” says Sr Mary. “From the outside you might see buildings and wire fences, or the bars and frames, but once you’re inside the walls, you just see the people. And each of those people is a unique human being.
“So, the role of chaplain is essentially to build a relationship and to engender hope in the lives of these people. As messengers of hope, even those in prison should feel accepted as people who have dignity. It’s really important that they understand that they have dignity as a person.”
Sr Mary acknowledges it can be difficult to recognise this inherent truth, particularly when the Victorian Government, fuelled by the media and a community ‘gripped with fear’, insists on taking ‘a tough stance on crime’.
“Some of the people in prison have committed atrocious crimes and are professional criminals and I don’t for one minute minimise that,” she says. “The majority of them need to, and do, address their offending behaviours, which is something that we as chaplains can help them to do as well.
“But so many of the people I meet in prison have come from broken lives—they’re broken people. Many have experienced sexual, psychological, emotional or physical abuse and have turned to drugs as a way of coping with the difficulties in life, which often leads to crime. They lack so many of the skills that many of us take for granted.”
The past two years have been particularly challenging for Sr Mary and her team who have been unable to visit residents at the prisons during COVID restrictions. While they have maintained connections with residents through video conferencing, telephone calls and written messages, they feel the pain of residents who have been deprived of family visits, support and education services, and religious services.
“When you’ve been doing this as long as I have, you get to know a lot of people,” Sr Mary says. “It really is a privilege to be able to journey with these people, and to encourage them to grow and to eventually move on.
“We’re there for these people during their time in prison, and we’re there for them when they get out,” says Sr Mary. “We offer encouragement for them to address the behaviour that’s brought them to prison so that they can have the courage to move on with belief in themselves as worthwhile people.”
This is an abridged form of an article first published by Melbourne Catholic in 2019 and republished online to mark Prison Sunday this month.