Recently a writer for the Sydney Morning Herald claimed to have solved the mystery of why Sr Liguori fled her convent in Wagga Wagga one frosty evening in July 1920. In its day the Liguori affair was one of the most sensational episodes in Australia’s sectarian history. In the Herald’s print edition of 3 April 2023, the article carried the salacious headline: ‘Pregnant to a priest, nun on run defied church over child’. Spoiler alert: That never happened. As I explain in an article I wrote for Pearls and Irritations there never has been a mystery about why Sister Liguori left her convent and it had nothing to do with a priest or a child.
I referenced the SMH article in a paper I gave to the 26th ISAANZ conference at the Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, 12-14 December 2023. In that paper, entitled “The Sister Liguori Story – A Manichean Morality Play”, I examine the reasons why the Sister Liguori story continues to fascinate the public’s imagination more than 100 years after the event.