PROPHETS and visionaries can be uncomfortable people to meet and not everyone appreciates their habit of shining a clear light into dark, unvisited places.
Patricia Brennan was such a visionary, in both the religious and medical worlds. Her passionate advocacy of the rights of women in the Anglican church, and of the needs of victims of sexual abuse in the wider community, did not always win her admirers.
She was a woman of fierce integrity which would not allow her to gloss over what she saw as inequality. At least one opponent labelled her as a strident feminist in the mould of Germaine Greer.
But those who knew her saw beyond the relentless intellect. They knew that she wept for the people she saw as victims in every sense and appreciated and loved her determination to work for justice.
Born Patricia Wilkinson, she had a conventional Anglican upbringing.
After graduating with a medical degree from Sydney University she went with her new husband Robert Brennan to Nigeria, where they both worked as missionaries. She was sometimes the only doctor for hundreds of miles.
The couple had three children and on their return to Australia, Dr Brennan became concerned with the position of women in the Christian church, and the Anglican church in Australia in particular, where women were denied equality in many ways, most particularly by being excluded from the ranks of the clergy.
And so began a long, passionate and often harrowing journey, where she drew together a number of groups with similar concerns and founded the organisation known as the Movement for the Ordination of Women.
They began in 1983, in the manner of Luther, nailing 12 theses to the door of the Chapter House of St Andrews Cathedral in Sydney.
The movement took off, generating an inevitable conflict between those who thought shock tactics were the only way to go and those who were reluctant to antagonise the conservatives in the church.
But after the first Brisbane meeting in 1984, Linda Walters expressed the effect of Dr Brennan’s words: “We came together so jaded and tentative, angry and frustrated, hurt and disillusioned, and as we articulated all this pain with varying degrees of confidence, the energy began to flow.”
Dr Brennan went with five other women, including myself, to the 1988 Lambeth Conference, where we stood outside Canterbury Cathedral with our home-made banners. We were kissed by Desmond Tutu, graciously welcomed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, applauded by the American bishops, but studiously ignored by our own Australian Anglican Primate.
Despite the hostility of many of the clergy, one of whom publicly declared that ordaining a woman would be like ordaining a meat pie, in 1992 the dream came true with the first women being ordained by Dr Peter Carnley in Perth.
Today, there are more than 400 female priests and two female bishops in Australia, although Dr Brennan’s home diocese of Sydney still refuses to ordain women. It was a unique time in church history and Dr Brennan was made a member of the Order of Australia for her services to women.
She then turned her formidable passion and intellect to the field of sexual abuse, serving as medical director of the Liverpool Sexual Assault Service, where she brought in new ways of treating victims and helping them to find a voice.
At the time the cancer that eventually killed her was diagnosed, she was a consultant forensic physician in the field.
Close to death, she chose the hymns for her funeral, including one that encapsulates the philosophy that guided her all her life:
God be in my head, and in my understanding.
God be in mine eyes, and in my looking.
God be in my mouth and in my speaking.
God be in my heart, and in my thinking.
God be at mine end, and at my departing.
And whoever or whatever we conceive God to be, those words sum up her life’s journey.
Dr Patricia Brennan is survived by her husband Robert, her children Kate, Peter and James and her grandson Gabriel.
She is mourned by all who knew her.
