This volume was The Eye of Faith : The Pastoral Letters of John Bede Polding. Its editors had carefully collated all the Pastoral Letters which Polding had written to the Faithful of the Church in Australia, of which he was bishop, since 1835.
It is a collection of great value.
In two marvellous and inspiring essays at the beginning of the volume, the editors describe the significance of these Pastoral Letters. These are some extracts from the first of those essays :
John Bede Polding’s Pastoral Letters are valuable historical
documents. During middle forty
years of the nineteenth century, Archbishop Polding wrote some seventy letters
on a variety of subjects : education; the care of orphans; hospitals; capital
punishment; salacious literature and censorship; world events, including the
Crimean war, the Indian mutiny; the papacy and the Papal States; floods and
other very local events; politics, the responsibility of government, social
harmony and the monarchy. A number
of them comment on questions which are attractive to present-day historians:
aboriginals; family life and the role of women; the wider social life of colonial
Australia, rather than its more narrow political expression. §
For the historian, the value of
the Polding Letters is enhanced by the acuteness of their observations and
comment. Their author’s
sensitivity to the nuances of colonial life - as well as to its obvious aspects
- grew out of his belief that religion was a vitally involved with human
activity, that each moment of time had an eschatological significance.
Polding did not observe facts
alone, but their implications for people in Australia. Each time he wrote he tried to draw his
audience closer to God, to encourage upright human conduct and to counter evil,
sin and the false ideologies which challenged God’s presence in Australia. His letters present a consistently based
view of the state of religion and of private and public morals in Australia
throughout the crucial years of the nineteenth century.
As historical documents, these
letters present aspects of colonial life which are not often encountered in the
writings of politicians, administrators and newspaper correspondents. They have an underlying unity which
derives from the known and consistent attitude of the author and which, in turn,
is of assistance to those who are seeking a basis of comparison between one
time and another during the forty years which they span.
The Pastoral Letters of John Bede
Polding are the footprints of the Australian Catholic Church’s first apostolic
tradition and its best surviving expression. They comprise a testament of the faith proposed for the
Church’s belief; of the hope which sustained its faith and justified its
discipline; and of the soul of its life of faith and hope, the doing of the
truth in charity. This deeper value, this bond of greater
unity in Polding’s Letters is to be seen by those who read, not as students of
one discipline or another, but with the eye of Faith.
The Polding Pastorals are possibly Australia’s only (though by no means pure), example of a religious literature – and of an implied Christian culture – which was both markedly monastic in character and contemplatives in orientation. They confronted the activism and unbelief which marked his day and do no less today. ...
Polding … and his writings suffer no
embarrassment by being numbered with John Henry Newman and his works.
To be continued.
NOTES
The Eye of Faith was printed by the Lowden Publishing Co., Kilmore Victoria in 1977. The editors were Gregory Haines, Sister Mary Gregory Foster and Frank Brophy. Special contribution to the volume were made by Professor Timothy Suttor and James Cardinal Freeman.
AMDG
