The war hero who co-founded a home nursing service

Anzac Day is a fitting time to put the spotlight on the priest who worked with Eileen O'Connor to establish Our Lady's Nurses for the Poor, a pioneering domiciliary nursing organisation, in 1913.

Father Edward McGrath was a young priest called in to help Eileen's mother evade destitution when she was widowed in 1911. He was moved by the depth of Eileen's faith and her extraordinary courage in enduring unrelenting pain and disability from what we now know to be transverse myelitis due to tuberculosis.

The unexpected collaboration of a bed-bound, young lay woman and a Catholic priest dedicated to caring for the sick poor garnered support from the wives of the premier and the governor general. It also drew the suspicion of elements in the church hierarchy who took offense to both the friendship itself and the fact that Eileen and Fr McGrath's shared enthusiasm and determination to make a difference meant they didn't always adhere to accepted protocol.

Captain Father Edward McGrath

World War I irrevocably changed their direction. The Provincial Leader of Fr McGrath's religious order arrived in Australia shortly before the war began. Dutch-born German national Fr Hubert Linckens traveled to Australia to sort out the finances of the Masters of the Sacred Heart and to investigate reports of poor discipline among the Australian Fathers. The outbreak of war meant Fr Linckens was unable to return to Europe, and somehow he was not interned here, so he made it his mission to find a priest to make an example of.

Unfortunately, Fr McGrath became that priest, Falsely accused of an improper relationship and "flight from a monastery with a woman"! He was banned from further communication with Eileen and her nurses and banished from Australia.

Fr McGrath became chaplain of the Cheshire Regiment of the British Infantry. In 1918, during a hellish counter-offensive near the town of Lens in northern France, half the troops were either killed or wounded. The six foot tall chaplain repeatedly ran out into No Man's Land under heavy machine-gun fire to rescue wounded men. He was awarded the Military Cross for his efforts.

Fr McGrath's Military Cross in the Eileen O'Connor Centre

A month later, Fr McGrath saw an officer shot down. He ran approximately 300 metres into No Man's Land to rescue the man and carried him back on his shoulders, under fire. For this, he was nominated for the most prestigious medal for valor in the Commonwealth, the Victoria Cross. In another cruel twist of fate, the ship carrying his paperwork was torpedoed by the enemy, and sank. The war ended soon afterwards, and the paperwork was never repeated, but the British officer he saved came to visit him many years later, when the priest was in his nineties and had finally been allowed to return and live under the loving care of Our Lady's Nurses for the Poor.