Mary Glowrey and her priest brother

[s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level2)]Peter Matheson (Editor, The Swag)

We are all probably aware that Dr Sr Mary Glowrey, servant of God, is on the path to becoming Australia’s second saint. What perhaps is less known is that she had a younger brother, Edward, who was a priest of the Ballarat diocese.

Mary was born on 23 June 1887 in the small town of Birregurra, near Colac, in the western district of Victoria. Her father ran the general store. Mary was the third of nine children born into the Glowrey family. Six survived to adulthood. Edward was born five years after Mary on the 26 August 1892 in Garvoc after the family had moved further west, closer to Warrnambool. Mr Glowrey was now the proprietor of the local hotel. But soon after Edward’s birth they were on the move again to Watchem in the Mallee district where the weather was warmer and drier for Mr Glowrey’s health. Mary’s autobiography reveals that her father left all his financial assets in the hands of a local banker who he thought was a friend. He turned out to be a thief and by the time Edward Glowrey (snr) sought to recover his assets they were all gone and the family was in debt.

My interest in the Glowrey story is that Fr Edward Glowrey was the first priest I ever met. Dean Glowrey, as he was known to us in the late forties, was parish priest of St Arnaud. My father was the school teacher at the Coonooer Bridge State School, a small farming community about 14 kilometres north of St Arnaud. About twenty children attended the school from Prep to Year 8, a number coming to school each day riding bicycles, or on their horses, riding bareback.

Dean Glowrey used to regularly visit his flock, and I remember him coming out to drop in on the Matheson’s a few times during our couple of years at Coonooer Bridge. He always had a small bag of lollies for us pre-school kids. Needless to say, we loved his visits. Lollies were rare treats for many in those post-War years.

Dr Samantha Fabry, the Ballarat Diocesan archivist, has passed on as much information as she could find in the records about Fr Glowrey, namely, “he was born in Garvoc in August 1892, ordained in Ballarat 25 May 1918 and died in Melbourne 29 December 1950. He was appointed the Administrator to the Ballarat Parish on 19 September 1942 and was also appointed the Diocesan Consultor at the same time. He relinquished both these positions in May 1947. Dean Glowrey was also Parish Priest at St. Arnaud where he is buried.”

But the archivist also found a report of Dean Glowrey’s funeral in the Jan-Feb 1951 edition of the diocesan magazine, “Light.” The panegyric was preached by the bishop of Ballarat, Dr O’Collins, and the Mass was attended by Most Rev Justin Simonds, Co-Adjutor Archbishop of Melbourne, along with priests from Melbourne and Bendigo and nearly every parish of the Ballarat diocese. The choir gallery of St Arnaud’s Immaculate Conception church was filled with children, not only from St Arnaud but from Ballarat’s Loreto College, Convent of Mercy and Mary’s Mount. The report also mentioned that Dean Glowrey’s two brothers, Gerard and Harold were there, and his sister “Mrs T. P. Connellan.” This was Lucy. The report mentioned another sister “Elizabeth” who had predeceased Fr Edward (known to the family as Eddie). The other Glowrey child to reach adulthood was Mary who was absent in India. “Elizabeth” mentioned in the magazine report was actually a younger sister of Mary’s named Eliza by the family. Francis, Alicia and Joseph were the three children who died in infancy.

I was not at Dean Glowrey’s funeral. In December 1950 when he died, we were living down in Gippsland. Dad had moved to another small State School at Cloverlea.

Dr O’Collins’ panegyric noted: “All his life he was abstemious and self-disciplined. All his work was characterised by a close attention to detail, all eventualities were foreseen and provided for, all plans drawn up, and executed with extreme care.” These words suggest that Edward Glowrey possessed many of the organisational skills of his older sister.

In 1950 when Edward died, his sister Mary had been in India for 30 years. She had gone there as a fully qualified doctor and surgeon after studies at Melbourne University. With the help of different scholarships, she had graduated first in 1910 at the age of 23 with a Bachelor of Medicine and a Bachelor of Surgery, followed by a residency in Christchurch, New Zealand for a year, after which she returned to Melbourne to residencies in the Eye and Ear Hospital, St Vincent’s, and the Queen Victoria hospital. She graduated in 1919 with a Doctor of Medicine, in obstetrics, gynaecology and ophthalmology. While studying for the Doctor of Medicine during those years of the First World War she also had a private practice in Melbourne’s Collins Street. It seems that during those years she was also discerning a religious vocation. Inspired by a pamphlet about a Scottish doctor, Agnes McLaren, who raised the suffering of secluded Indian women, Mary in 1915 began to think of India. Her mind eventually set on a Dutch Order of Religious Women, the Sisters of Jesus, Mary and Joseph. They worked in India, mainly in education, but they also had involvement in health care.

So she sailed from Port Melbourne on 21 January 1920 never to return to Australia. After settling in Guntur in south-east India a few hundred kilometres north of Chennai (former Madras), and beginning her work in a small clinic, she was accepted into the Sisters of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, and took the name of Sr Mary of the Sacred Heart. As a religious, Mary was able to continue there as a practicing doctor.

The Archbishop of Madras had successfully appealed to Rome to allow Mary to function both as a religious and a doctor. She continued to devote her life to improving healthcare in India, where she expanded her small clinic into a full hospital that cared for 637,000 patients between 1927 and 1936. She went on to establish the Catholic Health Association of India in 1943 that now looks after more than 21 million people annually.

If Edward was somewhat like his older sister, it is no wonder that Dr O’Collins went on to say, “We could ill afford, in this diocese or in Australia, to lose a priest of his quality.” If Ballarat could ill afford to lose a priest like Edward Glowrey, India could ill afford to lose a doctor like Mary Glowrey.

The bishop went on to say of Edward: “He was saintly, a gentleman, a zealous pastor, and beyond these he was a wise counsellor, a comforter of the sick and a devoted, much loved friend of the children of his flock. Perhaps his outstanding quality was his gentleness and his profound humility.”

Humility must have run in the Glowrey family. When Mary was asked by her Indian superiors to write her autobiography when she began to decline, suffering from the cancer that was to kill her, she entitled her story “God’s Good for Nothing.” Her own story went unfinished. Bone cancer in her arms led to fractures that prevented her writing in the end. She died in Bangalore on the 5 May, 1957at the age of 69. Her brother, born five years after her, died six years before her, at the age of only 58.

Devotion to Our Lady was always practised in the Glowrey household. Each night the Rosary was said and with it a prayer for priests and doctors. Mary Glowrey, recalling that practice many years later, wrote in her autobiography: “When my brother and I were respectively priest and doctor, I sincerely hoped that many another mother added that ‘trimming’ to the Rosary.”  [/s2If]