News that Australian nun Mary MacKillop will be canonised has been welcomed in Dunedin.
"We've been working and praying for this for some time," the Dunedin leader of the Associates of the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart, Patricia Clark, said.
Mother Mary, who died in 1909, aged 67, is best known for founding the Sisters of St Joseph, an order dedicated to helping the poor in rural areas.
She was beatified by the late Pope John Paul II in 1995.
Mother Mary helped establish many schools in New Zealand, including in Arrowtown and Port Chalmers.
Mother Mary brought sisters from South Australia in 1897 to help set up a school in Port Chalmers but was waylaid by a priest who believed Arrowtown's need was greater.
The book Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart - New Zealand Story 1883-1997 describes how she arrived in Arrowtown in 1897 to find an "excellent wooden school, a really pretty building".
Once that community was established, she brought the sisters to Port Chalmers, where they took over running a small Catholic school in 1898.
The sisters ran the Arrowtown school until 1943, when its roll became so low it was not sustainable, and the Port Chalmers school was handed back to lay teachers in 1979.
The Sisters of Joseph came to Dunedin in 1932 and ran the Holy Name convent and school in Cumberland St until 1969.
The University of Otago now has buildings on the site.
A convent opened in Balclutha in 1953 and a school in 1954.
It was integrated into the state system in 1982.
A new Catholic church in Balclutha was named for Mother Mary in 1996.
