A retired priest from Adelaide Archdiocese is campaigning to make the virtues and holiness of Jan Ruff-O’Herne better known. Source: The Catholic Weekly.
Before she died at the age of 96 in 2019 in an Adelaide nursing home, Ms Ruff-O’Herne had collected a cupboard of distinctions – the Order of Orange-Nassau, from the Netherlands, two Australian Centenary Medals, and an RSL ANZAC Peace Prize.
She was an officer of the Order of Australia and a Dame Commander of the Order of St Sylvester.
The most distinguished of all may lie in the future, if she is one day to share the title of “saint” with Mary MacKillop.
Fr Roderick O’Brien is campaigning to make her virtues and her holiness better known.
Foremost among these was an heroic capacity for forgiveness. And she had a lot to forgive – wounds which stayed with her for the rest of her long life.
“Jan is a model for all kinds of people; people who have suffered rape and other forms of abuse, civilian victims of war, refugees, migrants, teachers, carers, spouses, advocates, artists, women, and Franciscans,” Fr O’Brien said.
Her painful but edifying story began in the Dutch East Indies, now known as Indonesia. She was born in Java in 1923 and grew up in a tightly knit, happy Catholic family. She went to a Franciscan primary school and was trained as a teacher in a Franciscan teachers’ college.
The Imperial Japanese Army invaded in March 1942 and her whole family was interned in a prison camp. In February 1944, the 21-year-old was sent to a brothel for Japanese soldiers.
The Japanese euphemism for them was “comfort women”, but they were brutalised sex slaves. For the next three months, every day, every night, she was raped and beaten. A doctor checked her weekly for venereal disease. He raped her, too. Even then, amid her torment, Ms Ruff-O’Herne did not despair.
“Her faith seems to me to have been so well grounded, first in a loving, faith-filled family, and then in her Franciscan formation,” Fr O’Brien said.
In 1994 she published a memoir, Fifty Years of Silence, about her experiences.
Astonishingly, Ms Ruff-O’Herne was not bitter. In her mind, the road to healing had to pass through forgiveness.
Fr O’Brien is so sure Jan Ruff-O’Herne should be declared a saint that he is writing articles about her virtues – faith, hope, love, friendship, poverty and forgiveness.
FULL STORY
An Australian saint of forgiveness? (By Michael Cook, The Catholic Weekly)
