Religious conflict was just one of the issues, but it was a crucial and very public issue. Florence Nightingale was deeply religious and very aware of the problems of religious conflict—of  odium  theologicum . ^[10] Nightingale was particularly concerned that her nurses should not be caught up in Protestant fears about the gains made by a resurgent British Catholicism since the repeal of the Penal Code in Ireland and the 1829 Catholic Emancipation Act in England. ^[11] Fear of Catholicism meant that the number of Catholics admitted to the Nightingale School of Nursing was deliberately limited, with the result that the Nightingale Lady Superintendents, Matrons and Sisters, in London and in Sydney under Osburn, were all Protestants. In the early 1890s, Angelique Lucille Pringle was forced to resign as Matron of the Nightingale Training School and St Thomas’ Hospital. Florence Nightingale considered her as one of the best of her Matrons, the ‘best and ablest woman I know’ and called her ‘Pearl’ for her outstanding qualities. Such qualities were irrelevant when Pringle converted to Catholicism; there was no question that her conversion meant she had to resign. ^[12]

The potential for conflict between Protestants and Catholics intensified from the 1850s in Britain and Australia. From this decade the Catholic Church hardened its doctrinal line on a number of issues and benefited from a number of high profile converts including Cardinal Manning. Manning had been a member of the High Church wing of the Church of England, that part of the church that had most in common with Catholicism. With the example of Manning and others, there was good reason why Evangelicals feared High Church practices as leading to conversion to Catholicism. There was also good reason why many of Nightingale’s nursing Superintendents and Matrons belonged to the High Church wing of the Church of England.

The attraction of Nightingale nursing for High Church women lies in the origins of nursing and its transformation in the nineteenth century. In the first half of the nineteenth century, there were broadly two different categories of nurses. The first category, and majority of nurses, were working-class men and women who nursed members of their own sex and learnt nursing through experience. The women amongst these nurses were, in part unfairly, permanently stigmatised by Charles Dickens in his 1844 novel, Martin Chuzzlewit , especially with his character Sairey Gamp. Gamp was working class, coarse and unfeeling, unskilled and prone to drink. The second category of nurses were members of religious orders. From the 1840s, these included a number of Church of England Sisterhoods, inspired partly by the example of Pastor Fliedner in Germany and his revival of the order of Deaconesses. ^[13] The primary inspiration for nursing sisterhoods, however, came from the much admired Catholic Sisters of Charity. A common cry of the day, including the Times in its reports which led to Florence Nightingale being sent out to the Crimean War, was: where are the Protestant Sisters of Charity? ^[14]

By the end of the century, there was a third category of nurse, the Nightingale nurse. In many ways they were the Protestant answer to the fame of the Sisters of Charity. These nurses were inspired by Florence Nightingale’s role as the Lady of Lamp in the Crimean War during 1854-6. From 1860 they were trained at the Nightingale Fund financed School of Nursing, St Thomas’ Hospital, London. Nightingale nursing essentially referred to orderly, disciplined, trained, female controlled nursing care which emphasised hygiene and moral, as well as physical, cleanliness. What made Nightingale nursing different, and so widely acceptable in a Protestant society, was that it offered a unique synthesis of the two previous types of nurse. Nightingale nursing was initially carried out by much the same type of women who had been stigmatised as Gamps but they were now under the control of Sisters who were ideally middle class and ‘ladies’, inspired by a vocation, not to religious life, but to nursing. ^[15] Religion was explicitly used to inspire this sense of vocation. Henry Bonham Carter, Nightingale’s trusted cousin and Secretary to the Nightingale Fund, for example, advised Nightingale in 1871 that the Probationers at the Nightingale School of Nursing needed more bible classes ‘to keep them above the mere scramble for a remunerative place’. ^[16]

Demanding the same dedication as professed sisters, Nightingale nursing inevitably shared many of the features of the religious Sisterhoods. This tendency was reinforced as Nightingale nursing superintendents, like Osburn, did their midwifery training at Kings’ College Hospital, under the nursing control of St John’s House, a Church of England Sisterhood. ^[17] It was due to this arrangement that the Protestant Standard was able to repeat the accusation that Mary Jones, Superior of St John’s House, was the model for Lucy Osburn’s nursing style and not Florence Nightingale. ^[18] Features in common to both groups included the title of Sister and living in tightly controlled communities. Both wore uniforms which, for nursing sisters,increasingly included the veil. Nightingale nursing and many of the sisterhoods, at least at this time, also had two recruitment streams—one for working-class women, the other for educated, middle-class women. For example, middle-class, educated women entered the Sisters of Charity as choir sisters; less educated working-class women became lay sisters. Similarly, middle-class, educated women entered the Nightingale Nursing School as Lady or Special Probationers (students) and became Sisters; in Sydney under Osburn they were called Sister Probationers. Less educated  working-class  women  entered  as  Nurse  Probationers  and  became,  and  stayed,  Nurses. ^[19]

The most significant feature in common between Nightingale nurses and members of religious sisterhoods such as the Catholic Sisters of Charity and the Anglican Sisters of St John’s House, was that they were communities of women with a woman in charge. Nightingale insisted that the most important aspect of her reforms was that nurses were under the leadership of ‘one female head’. ^[20] Nightingale nursing involved women who lived in and also resulted in a lowering of the age of nurses. Nurses who learnt from experience tended to be older and often widows. The Nightingale nurses, however, needed to be trained and so were younger. Ideally, the Nightingale nurse was between twenty-five to thirty-five years old; in practice both in England and in Sydney, the majority were in their early twenties. ^[21] The idea of a female-controlled community, including young girls, led to all sorts of horrors in nineteenth-century minds, not excluding Catholic Archbishops (as the Sisters of Charity in Sydney discovered). ^[22] The feminisation of religion was occurring but women were seen as more child-like, emotional, illogical and more easily influenced than men. A community of women, including young women, without male headship, was seen as inevitably leading away from rationality and true belief. For Evangelical Protestants the fear was that such potentially emotionally unstable communities were vulnerable to the ever-waiting enemy: Rome.

Lucy Osburn was one of the Nightingale nursing leaders who strongly identified with the High Church wing of the Church of England. It is highly likely that Nightingale, during one of her meetings with Osburn before she left for Sydney, advised her to avoid religious conflict by being discreet about her High Church beliefs. In early 1868, as Osburn’s ship was nearing Sydney, Florence Nightingale wrote to another new nursing Superintendent that ‘Any expression of High Church views or exhibition of High Church practices would be injurious to the success of the Nursing’. ^[23] If Nightingale did not, by some unlikely chance, give a similar warning to Lucy Osburn before she left London, she was soon to do so in writing. As early as December 1868, nine months after Osburn arrived in Sydney, Nightingale’s key adviser Henry Bonham Carter, knew enough to write to Nightingale that he feared Osburn was ‘bent upon Sisterhood notions’. He had heard that she called herself ‘the Lady Superior’, following Mary Jones the Head of the St John’s House Sisters, and had changed the nurses’ uniform to be more like that of a religious sister. He advised that ‘This is likely to do harm at Sydney where there is a good deal of party spirit R[oman].C[atholic]. & Protestant. Could you give her a hint to avoid this & keep the nursing as “secular” as possible in outward appearance.’ ^[24] Nightingale’s letter has not survived, but one of Osburn’s letters at this time makes it clear she was replying  to  these  concerns. ^[25]

With hindsight, there was little chance that religious controversy could have been avoided. As Malcolm Campbell has demonstrated, religious bigotry intensified in eastern Australia during 1865–85. This bigotry was fuelled by the arrival in January 1868 of sixty-two Fenian (militant Irish nationalist) prisoners in Western Australia. Henry Parkes intensified public hysteria by claiming the would-be assassin of Prince Alfred as part of a Fenian conspiracy. ^[26] Of all years, 1868 was the worst possible time to introduce a nursing system that could be confused with a Catholic sisterhood. In addition, the only other trained nurses in the colony were Sisters of Charity who had established St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney in 1857. As Osburn reported, there was the common belief in Sydney that Florence Nightingale was Catholic so it was logical to believe that she had instituted her system of nursing along Catholic lines. ^[27] The large and cumbersome Board of Sydney Infirmary could only make the conflict worse, as it did with most issues it dealt with. As with the majority of large Sydney charities at the time, the Infirmary Board was reputed to be militantly Evangelical but to gain government subsidies needed its governing body to be ‘unsectarian’. ^[28] The Board therefore represented the range of major religions in Sydney. It included Father Dwyer, a Catholic Priest who clashed with Henry Parkes over the treatment of Prince Alfred’s would-be assassin, and at least one Jewish member, Joseph Raphael. Raphael was rigidly conscientious in all his duties, a meticulous and highly skilled craftsman responsible for making Lucy Osburn’s beautiful cedar office furniture that is still in the Nightingale Wing of Sydney Hospital today. He was also described, by one of his  many  opponents,  as  ‘the  foulest-mouthed  man  in  Sydney’. ^[29] The Board was not a harmonious mix.

Nevertheless, Osburn did not take Nightingale’s advice. She highlighted any similarity with Sisterhoods by wearing, as indicated in contemporary photographs, a large cross around her neck. ^[30] She wrote in terms of taking her ‘vows’ when she entered nursing at St Thomas’ Hospital and, in her own words, was prejudiced in favour of religious sisterhoods. ^[31] Her management style also made her vulnerable to accusations that she ran nursing like a convent. Osburn had little concept of personal privacy or of other’s rights and, for example, was severely criticised by Nightingale for opening the mail of one of the English Sisters. Osburn not only opened the Sister’s letter, but she replied to it herself and did not tell the Sister she had done so for some time. ^[32]