THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 1905. THE MOTHER CHURCH OF AUSTRALASIA

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIII, Issue 38, 21 September 1905, Page 17

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 1905. THE MOTHER CHURCH OF AUSTRALASIA

<^rrffirr¥^9p> *TH happy appropriateness, the National oftvjivwlff' Council in Sydney was this year jnmfW//%f made memorable by the solemn con■*OX( )g[(g> secration ol St. Mary's Cathedral, the -3n^j^%Y* mother-church of Australasia. That no;ble building was (as Cardinal Moran said at its solemn dedication five years ago) ' erected on the site where the first foundations of the Church were | laid in the southern continent— foundations which for many «a long year were destined to be cemented with the tears and 1 sanctified by the toil of heroic men, exiles for religion, and confessors of the Faith.' That beautiful story in chiselled stone brings us back to the I days when the barbarities of the convict system made early lifo in Australia a hideous nightmare and (the country's history a Newgiate calendar, and ' Pale Anguish kept the heavy gate, And the Warder was Despair.' * It was only in 1820 that regular ministrations of religion were permitted— and even then under severe restrictions—to the thousands of Irish Catholic conivicts and tbo few free settlers of our Faith in Australia and Tasmania. The illustrious Dr. Ullathorne, the second Prefect- Apostolic, arrived in 1833. At that time the Catholic body m New South Wales numbered 17,179 in a total populatiaw of 00,7-94, of whom some 36,000 were free. There was at that time no roofed churoh on the Australian mainland. There were four Catholic schools. Four chlirches were, however, in course of construction. In Tasmania there was no school, ■and its solitary ohuirch, iin Hobart, was described by Dr., Ullathorne as ' a mere temporary shed.' In 1831 Australia, Tasmania, and the adjacent, islands were formed into a Vicariate-Apostolic, John Bede Folding, an English Benedictine, was appointed its first Bishop— a strange fulfilment of the prophetic raillery which styled him, in his schoolboy days,, ' the Archbishop of Botany Bay.' His vast dioceso contained, in 1841, 35,690 Catholics, ministered to by twonfcy-eigiht priests, and scattered through a territory over twenty times more extensive than the British Isles. In 1812 and 1843 the dioceses of Hobart and Adelaide were created, and in the following year (1844) tho first Synod of the Church in Australasia was held in Sydney. The Catholic population had risen to 56,899 in 1851, the year of the gold-fever. There are now nearly a million adherents of the Anciemt Faith within the boundaries that marked the jurisdiction of Australia's first Bishop m 1835. In the birth-year of the nineteenth century there was no priest exercising the sacrett 'ministry in Australasia. As late as 1824 there were only two. In 1833 there were only four. In the present year of grace they number more than a thousand m -ttie seven colonies over which Dr. Polding's spiritual sway once extended. Just seventy years ago the first Catholic Bishop set his foot upon the shores of these great South lands. There are now six Archbishops (one of them a Cardinal), sixteen Bishops, three Coadjutor-Bishops, three Vicars-Apostolic, and one

Abbot Nullius — in all, a hierarchy consisting of twentynine Prelates exercising episcopal jurisdiction. This year's Sydney Council may well exclaim, with that of 1885 : ' Such a contrast between the beginning and the close of a century is unexampl-ed in history. Such a blessing of fruitfulness is unparalleled since the early ages of the Apostles.'