From the Australian Open to her true vocation off court
Vocations
Twenty years ago Adelaide’s Olivia Lukaszewicz was a top flight professional tennis player but is now firmly ensconced as a Schoenstatt Sister of Mary. RICHARD EVANS reports.
Until she was 22-years old Olivia Lukaszewicz spent the bulk of her life hitting a tennis ball on courts not just across Australia but at professional tournaments around the world.
And the girl whose parents immigrated from Poland and who grew up in Parafield Gardens in Adelaide’s north, was good. Very good indeed, to the extent that she played 70 matches on the women’s pro tennis tour and even turned out against former world number one Justine Henin at the Australian Open.
Sr M Olivia with her brother Fr Matthew. Giovanni Portelli Photography © 2023
When we spoke by phone in mid-January, the 37-year-old Sr M Olivia, as she is now known, was looking out at the foothills of the Blue Mountains in Mulgoa in New South Wales where she now lives as an integral member of the Secular Institute of the Schoenstatt Sisters of Mary, a community of consecrated women founded in Germany in 1926 by Father Joseph Kentenich Schoenstatt Sisters of Mary. The institute’s centenary will be celebrated in October this year.
Sr M Olivia has been in NSW just over a year and in October will return to the community’s headquarters in Schoenstatt in Germany’s Rhineland to undertake a further five-month formation period.
Her story is familiar in part with injury forcing her out of the game when she was still 22, followed by a period adapting to life without the daily routine of training and playing that had sustained her since the age of five. It is finding her vocation through a deeper encounter with God that takes her story to another dimension.
Sr M. Olivia’s parents moved to Australia in the late 1980s and tennis being largely a sport for the well-off in Poland, her father Stan, “a social player”, was staggered by the volume and accessibility of courts in South Australia.
“There was a huge brick wall at a school nearby and there was a young boy who used to hit against the wall and was from a migrant family as well,” said Sr M Olivia.
“We would watch him train and eventually his dad gave us a couple of old spare racquets that he had and we started hitting up against the wall too. This is the way tennis started for my brother and I.”
Soon Olivia, whose older brother Matthew also took up tennis, became proficient enough to enter a tennis tournament in the Adelaide Hills.
“I was aged seven and that was my first competition. From there it rapidly developed and I went from one competition to another,” she said.
Aged nine, fate lent a helping hand in the shape of her new coach, Peter Smith.
Smith has a reputation that stands alongside anyone in world tennis, including coaching Lleyton Hewitt in his early years.
“Because I was so little when I started playing tennis, I had a double-handed forehand and a double-handed backhand,” said
Sr M Olivia.
“Peter Smith never tried to correct this style, he simply worked with it and supported it.”
Her first overseas tennis trip was for an under 12 competition in New Zealand, with Olivia playing competitive tennis throughout all her childhood years.
From Year 7 to 9 she went to St Mary’s College in Adelaide but couldn’t continue because of her tennis commitments and finished secondary school by correspondence.
Church – at St Maximilian Kolbe Church Ottoway before the family moved to Adelaide’s inner west suburbs when Olivia was 12 or 13-years-old and attended the Church of the Resurrection in Unley – had been a constant for Olivia growing up.
But a serious elbow injury in her early 20s, alongside other factors, proved terminal to her career.
“I’d always thought that if tennis wasn’t going to be my career, I wanted to get some tertiary education behind me, so I went to university and finished a degree in nutrition and dietetics,” Sr M Olivia said.
“When I was 17/18, I had some health issues that I was able to correct through my diet, so I’d really come to understand the importance of nutrition. After I graduated, I was lucky to get a new grad role at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital and my working career kicked off from there,” she said.
Meanwhile, Olivia opened her heart to fulfilling her deepest desire in life, that of getting married and becoming a wife and mother in what she thought was her vocation. But as she entered her late 20s without this happening, she hit a particularly low ebb.
“I couldn’t understand why God was making such a good and beautiful pursuit of marriage so difficult for me,” she said.
“I was at a really low point in my life and going through a tough time and I was angry with God as if it were his fault.”
In despair, she knew she had to find and talk to someone she could trust. Fr Peter Zwaans was her parish priest and later became her spiritual director.
“After a few meetings, I remember feeling a prompt in my heart to talk to Father about my vocation,” she said.
“And after hearing me out, he said, ‘Olivia, it’s good you have this desire of marriage in your heart. Keep praying about it and if it is God’s will he will lead you there. But if he has something different in store for you, then you just need to ask him to show you’.”
This comment shook her to the core.
“Father didn’t realise it at the time but what he said brought about a very humbling realisation for me because up until that point I had only ever prayed to God for what ‘I wanted’, failing to stop and ask whether if this was also something that ‘God wanted’ for my life.”
This was a spiritually life-changing moment for the former elite sportsperson and from that moment on, she opened herself completely to the will of God in her life.
“At first, God’s call came as a tremendous shock to me and I was scared to even think that it could be real,” Sr M Olivia recalled.
“But within three months, God showed me several times in very distinct ways that he was calling me to something other than what I had planned. And I went from shock and fear to a clarity and peace that I’d never experienced before.
“I will never forget it. It happened in front of Jesus in the most Blessed Sacrament during a time of silent Adoration where I gave my wholehearted ‘yes’ to his call.”
The vocation had been discovered but not yet the community and so Sr M Olivia needed to start from scratch and listen to the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
“I knew this process needed to continue being God’s will, and not my own, and it required trust,” she said.
“But by the grace of God this is exactly what I received.”
After an online search of many communities across Australia, Sr M Olivia found herself being drawn to the Schoenstatt Sisters of Mary.
“For me, it was the Blessed Mother who drew me to the community. I’d made a consecration to Mary not long before and I identified her as the one who had led me into a far deeper relationship with Christ than I’d ever had,” she said.
The Schoenstatt Sisters of Mary is the oldest secular institute (not a religious order) within the Catholic Church with more than 1000 sisters spread across all the continents, with houses in Mulgoa and Perth in Australia.
In 2020, Sr M Olivia moved to Germany and first learned the language before beginning her official stages of formation with the Sisters. She is now half way through an eight and half year journey of formation.
When we spoke, Sr M Olivia had just returned from an annual visit to her parents who still live in Adelaide.
Her older brother Matthew was ordained a priest in 2023 (with Sr M Olivia in attendance) and he has since worked as a priest in Mosman in Sydney before a recent transfer to St Patrick’s in Church Hill, Sydney’s oldest remaining Catholic church.
While never reaching his sister’s international heights, Matthew also became an accomplished national tennis player.
Fifteen years on from leaving her sport professionally, tennis still holds a very dear place in
Sr M Olivia’s heart where she keeps up with results of the next generation whenever she can. Over the summer she was as an enthusiastic supporter of the Polish team that took out its first title at the United Cup tournament in Sydney in January.
