Catholic women leaders – Sister Clare Nolan rsc

As part of a new series, Catholic Health Australia interviews female leaders in the health and aged care sector. Up until March of this year, Sister Clare Nolan rsc was the Congregational Leader of the Sisters of Charity. She recently joined the CHA Board and has returned to her native Queensland to live in the Mount Olivet Convent where she describes her ministry as “miscellaneous good works”. This is a repost of an article that appeared earlier this year.

Sister Clare Nolan, the Congregational Leader of the Sisters of Charity, holds a unique position in the Catholic health firmament. As the leader of her order, she is responsible for 66 sisters (average age 81.8 years) but she is also the member of Mary Aikenhead Ministries, which in turn is the owner of St Vincent’s Health Australia, Australia’s largest not-for-profit health and aged care provider and the thirteenth-largest privately held company in Australia. It also counts the eponymous school in Sydney’s east among its dominions and together it employs more than 20,000 staff and is responsible for assets worth billions.

In the lay world, someone like Sister Clare would be labelled a heavy hitter, a corporate heavyweight, or some such other cliché but in the Catholic world it falls to her to carry the flame for an order that is the oldest in Australia and for 182 years has been ministering to the poor and sick.

Now in her sixth and final year in the role, Sister Clare is reflecting on the changes that her sector has undergone. Some things have changed immeasurably, such as the co-operation across the sector.

“My heart jumps for joy to hear that all the CEOs are working together to meet the needs of the people. It’s a wonderful healing ministry that we can offer,” says Sister Clare, fresh from hosting a Zoom call for her congregation (“we thought zoom was a noise after a motorbike until recently”).

It wasn’t always that way. When she first entered nursing 50 years ago as a young nurse and novitiate from Queensland to work in St Vincent’s Private Hospital in Sydney’s Darlinghurst, the Sisters of Mercy didn’t talk much to the Sisters of Charity who didn’t have much to do with the Little Company of Mary.

“I’ve loved every minute of my role as Sister of Charity, but I’m delighted to see now how Australia-wide – that you’re all working together,” says Clare.

The structure and governance of the religious orders have also changed to a degree that has not always been appreciated by the laity who have been invited to become the stewards of those health and education assets that were once the sole preserve of the orders.

She is part of a generation of older nuns who realised about 25 years ago that they no longer had the skills to run significant corporate interests nor sometimes the inclination given that such responsibilities inevitably took them further from the frontline of ministry.

“The congregation said, “We can’t continue doing things the way we’re doing them. We either have sisters who want to be really out there with the poor, and we’re asking them to be leaders of schools or hospitals or social work activities. Or we’ve got people who are not suitable to do it, but we’re putting them into these roles, and that’s not the way forward.

“Don’t get me wrong. We were never ever perfect, and we never ever ran a perfect health organization. We’re just human beings, but we were totally committed to ensuring that the mission continued.”

Much has changed since the early days of her nursing when at the end of each working day before they knelt in prayer and said the rosary they made sure all the wheels of the beds in the wards (there were no single rooms) were facing in the same direction, and they were always ready to hand the doctor a towel to dry his hands with. The gender divide and hierarchies were as stiff and starched as the nurses’ uniforms.

Sister Clare has herself had a ringside seat to the changes that the ministry of health have undergone as she moved through and up the organisation to take on more senior nursing roles across Australia before finally ending up in what can only be described as “management”.

“Some of us have found it very, very hard because it was all about our identity. Who I am if I’m not Clare Nolan running a hospital or Mary Jane running a school?,” she asks rhetorically.

As ministerial public juridic persons became more prevalent (Mary Aikenhead celebrated its tenth-anniversary last year) Sister Clare believes more consolidation is needed to ensure the different bodies continue to work together through organisations like Catholic Health Australia and Catholic Religious Australia.

If part of her role has been to oversee the smooth transition of the order’s ministry from the clerical to the lay then she can claim some success. She has helped pick the individuals who sit as trustees on Mary Aikenhead. She says that those candidates must understand Catholic social teaching, understand the healing ministry, and, yes, they have to be Catholic.

Unsurprisingly for a nun she wears her Catholicity with pride and feels that those organisations that are ministering to the sick should do so more emphatically. In short, we should not shy away from it, even if society itself moves inexorably towards secularism.

“What disappoints me most, instead of celebrating Catholic healthcare, people look at it the things that you can’t you have in Catholic healthcare. Instead of celebrating the riches of Catholic healthcare, teaching, research, pastoral care, mission and all of that…. [instead they say] because you can’t have euthanasia or because you can’t have whatever, that you shouldn’t go to that Catholic hospital.

“I believe over the years, that people, because of the energies that have been put into Catholic healthcare and because of incorporation and PJPs and the concentration that everybody’s putting into Catholic healthcare, I believe people of no faith and people of all faiths are welcoming of Catholic healthcare. And it’s how they wish to be treated if they’re very, very sick.”

Throughout our conversation she never wavers in her devotion and focus on the sick, the poor and needy, even when the discussion turns to dollars and cents, balance sheets, and property portfolios. The modern machinery and sophisticated technology that is at the heart of a modern hospital might be a far cry from the Sisters of Mercy 50 years ago when she was learning the ropes in Toowoomba but the mission remains the same, now more than ever.

“Patient care hasn’t changed. It’s more sophisticated but every patient wants you to be there for them, to listen to them, to talk to their families, to be able to explain to them what is happening and to be able to listen to them.”

She ends with a tale told her by one of her counterparts that neatly encapsulates that quest for balance between the healing ministry and the business of modern health that has been the backdrop to her career and those of other congregational leaders, especially in recent years.

An unnamed hospital – now in the hands of a PJP – was considering buying an expensive large MRI machine that was going to cost millions of dollars. As the board was talking about it the narrator of this tale piped up with the question: “And if we buy this machine who is going to feel the pinch, what are the poor going to miss out on?”

Had she been faced with a similar scenario Sister Clare would have asked the same question, or what would Mary Aikenhead do?

And what happened to the machine, what did the board do? “They didn’t approve it. They didn’t go ahead,” she says. “She was asking the question that perhaps no one had asked… is this what we stand for, is this our mission?”