Frances Fitzpatrick was 17 when she decided her life’s work would be as an educator and nun.

Born in the small NSW country town of Cootamundra to parents she describes as ‘very gifted educators’, Frances joined the Sisters of Mercy community in 1965 and embarked on a lifelong mission to educate children. 

Become a teaching sister was the answer, but she undertook much learning, soul-searching and affirming before she took her final vows 11 years after joining.

Another fifty years on, after helping shape the lives of tens of thousands of young people in a dozen-plus schools and gathering a notable clutch of higher education achievements along the way, Sister Frances is still going strong with the Religious Congregation that sustained her life’s work.

But she is shifting from an education focus – for the last decade working with teachers through Catholic Education Canberra and Goulburn - to an executive support role for her religious community in their Sydney office.

Looking back on her life, Sr Frances emphasises that she was only as good as the opportunities provided by her Congregation; that the team is bigger than the individual; and her strength as an educator was because of the strong support network that binds religious women with the communities within which they work.

“This life has given me so many opportunities that I might not otherwise have had,” she says. “They were opportunities only because I belong to a group of women that carry on the work of the Sisters of Mercy.”

Sr Frances was introduced to the community that would become her other family after she shifted from a single-classroom state primary school to the Mercy-run Our Lady of Mercy College in Goulburn, NSW. 

The Mercy sisters were education and humanitarian activists, and strenuous workers. In the mid-1870s in response to a clamour from Catholic parents for Catholic schooling, the Sisters started setting up schools across the Goulburn Archdiocese.

By 1962, they had impressively established eight primary and junior secondary schools in the Archdiocese. They’d also set up a string of schools in the Wagga Diocese, and miraculously found time to establish three acute-care hospitals and three refuges for at-risk young people.

In July 1962 it was a Mercy primary school in Goulburn which was the focus of Catholic demands for government funding to Catholic schools. The famous Goulburn Strike ensued with all the Goulburn Catholic schools closing their doors, and their students seeking enrolment in the government schools. Sr Frances, 14 years old and in third form, was one of the students that flooded into the state schools.

 Mercy Primary School Goulburn 1962 Class Photo: Sr Frances Fitzpatrick second student top right.

By the end of the week, the then-Menzies Government spectacularly intervened and Federal funding of Catholic education was born – initially infrastructure funding, which grew into the per capita grants funding schemes.

Generations of Catholic families since should offer prayers of thanks for the actions of the committed Mercy Sisters.

From 1965 - the year Frances joined the Mercy community – the sisters started handing over their schools to the Dioceses.  

The Mercy education model of ‘build and grow’ had been a stunning success, and Sr Frances was one of many in her religious community who worked tirelessly in the following decades to consolidate those efforts and hand schools to Dioceses.

During her long career Sr Frances was Principal of three co-educational secondary schools, and Deputy Principal twice. She’s always remained at the heart of the Mercy Sisters’ Australian regional centre of activity in the Canberra-Goulburn and Wagga Dioceses. The list of schools she’s led or worked in reads like a map of the area – West Wyalong, Goulburn, Cootamundra, Albury, Yass, Griffith. 

“The children in the schools have been my greatest joy,” she says simply. “The ones who through whatever tiny thing you’ve done, have managed to complete their education.

“The staff at the schools realised that what I would worry about as Principal was that - of course - we cared about children who were ok, but we also focussed on children that needed extra help”.

She has nothing but praise for lay teachers who increasingly populated Diocesan schools as the number of sisters dwindled. “That also gave me the greatest joy, to leave schools in the hands of the lay people who still had that spirit of care and concern…so that no student was excluded on the basis of disadvantage.”

What kept Sr Frances ticking along, achieving and influencing the lives of so many young people and families in our region?

“The ability for things to sit lightly,” she says. “That’s connected to the virtue of hope – hoping something good will come out of everything, even in the most terrible situation”.