Australian Roman Catholic nun St. Mary MacKillop was excommunicated in 1871 by Bishop Laurence Sheil for insubordination, possibly due to misinformation from his advisers. In the 1860s MacKillop had cofounded an order of nuns, the Sisters of St. Joseph of the Sacred Heart, and established the free St. Joseph’s School, which provided secular as well as religious education and accepted no money from the government at a time when it still provided funding to religious schools. Some Australian priests and bishops were openly hostile to the degree of autonomy that the Josephites enjoyed and to MacKillop’s rejection of federal funding. She and the nuns were said to have garnered more ire when MacKillop reported accounts of alleged sexual abuse by an Irish priest in southern Australia; the priest was then returned to Ireland.
A year after being excommunicated, MacKillop was reinstated to the church, as Sheil, who was on his deathbed, acknowledged that he may have been misled.