Founding Sisters
Founding Sisters 1911,
St Aloysius College Archives
Mother Cecilia Cunningham
1858 – 1945
Honoria Cunningham was born in Argentina on the 12 February 1858. Her Irish parents had migrated to South America and become very well established, her father and brothers becoming wealthy farmers and landowners. She was the second youngest member of the band of Sisters who were the Foundresses in South Australia.
She entered the Mercy Congregation in Buenos Aires in 1875 at the age of seventeen, and was professed in that city in 1878, prior to their departure from Buenos Aires. She took the religious name of Cecilia.
She was given leadership responsibilities, alongside Mothers Clare and Claver, only seven years after arriving in Adelaide. She later became Mistress of Novices, and for most of her life alternated between roles as Superior and Assistant, playing a key role in the early spiritual formation of the Sisters.
In the early 1920s, Carmel Bourke remembered Mother Cecilia as a small, cheerful, kindly woman who taught beginner music students. As a music teacher for most of her religious life, she took only a few pupils alongside her other duties, patient and kind to little pupils with stumbling fingers. Humble and gentle, she passed more advanced students to other teachers while continuing to teach new beginners.
Mother Cecilia had a deep devotion to the Blessed Sacrament and spent much of her later years in quiet prayer in the chapel. When she received a large inheritance in 1920, she left it to the Community to use for their works of Mercy, asking only that a beautiful chapel be built for worship. She was saddened on arriving from Buenos Aires, with its richly ornamented cathedral, churches and chapels, by the plain church-school buildings in Adelaide where Mass was often held.
She had a great spirit of poverty – she lived it in her own life, in all sorts of ways. She was a great teller-of-tales and would regale everyone with tales of their experiences in the Argentine, especially the last frightening year in Buenos Aires when the Sisters were in such danger. She would also tell of the long voyage from Buenos Aires to England and then to Port Adelaide, and of the early days of their settling into their new home in Adelaide. She obviously had had a very happy childhood and a deep love for her parents and her brothers and sisters and tended to lapse in Spanish – their childhood language – as she recalled their adventures at home on their big property.
In 1941, aged eighty-three, Mother Cecilia became the first Mother General of the reunited Adelaide and Mt Gambier communities. The last surviving member of the original Argentinian group, she was chosen to unite the two branches after nearly sixty years apart. Loved and respected by her Sisters, she was remembered for her wisdom, humility and quiet strength.
Mother Cecilia resigned her office as Mother General at the beginning of 1945. She was then an old lady, in her eighty-eighth year. She died on 2 August of the same year, much loved and revered by all the Sisters and cherished as the last member of the gallant twenty-four pioneer Sisters. She is buried in the West Terrace Cemetery, Adelaide.
Compiled by Sr Mary-Anne Duigan
Edited by Jacqui Jury, Deputy Principal (Teaching & Learning) 2024
References
Bourke, C. (1991). Some early recollections of Angas Street (from 1920 to 1954). St Aloysius College.
McLay, A. (Ed.). (1996). Women on the move: Mercy’s Triple Spiral. Sisters of Mercy, Adelaide.
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