Perhaps you can help ?

Our project to promote interest in the life and work of Archbishop Polding is being blessed by increasing numbers of visitors to our Facebook page and blog.  We are discovering that interest in Archbishop Polding is not confined to Australia, but that there are "followers" overseas, particularly in England and Europe.

It is so wonderful to learn of the esteem in which the Archbishop is held even by those beyond these shores.

As our project continues, we find ourselves in need of support from those of you following this work.  We need support in planning events (such as the annual Polding pilgrimage), help in distributing promotional material about the Archbishop, assistance with our ongoing research work and other general assistance.

Perhaps you have some time to assist?  Perhaps you have already studied Catholic history in Australia and would like to help make it better known? Perhaps you are retired with more free time and have an interest in Archbishop Polding?  Perhaps you are interested in history or genealogy and are familiar with historical research?  Perhaps you have experience in organising religious gatherings? Perhaps you have secretarial skills?  Perhaps you are young and enthusiastic?

Please consider offering assistance!

We can be contacted at this e-mail address or via our Facebook page.

AMDG

Looking through the Eye of Faith : 2

Over a period of years, we hope to publish on this blog extracts from Archbishop Polding's Pastoral Letters, as published in The Eye of Faith : The Pastoral Letters of John Bede Polding.  The editors of this important volume had carefully collated all the Pastoral Letters which J B Polding had written to the Faithful of the Church in Australia, of which he was bishop, since 1835. 

In this post, we continue with extracts from an essay which acts as a preface to this volume.

Archbishop Polding in 1869.
Image : State Library of NSW.

In Polding’s day, in the Church in the New World, the pastoral letter resumed something of the role and importance which its forerunners had in the early Church. In the United States and Australia, clergy were scarce and Catholics were in a minority. In each place, people from different cultural backgrounds were thrown together and were faced not only with the challenge of being pioneers in a new land, but also that of building new human and religious communities. In the case of Australia, there was the additional strangeness of the southern hemisphere and the worn, strange nature of the continent itself. §

In his Pastorals, Polding developed his themes after the manner of the early bishops and monastic leaders, the Fathers of the Church. His Benedictine formation ensured that the first foundation of his thought would be the Scriptures and their writings. … He was primarily a spiritual man, one who read Scripture 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). §

His monastic tradition and formation gave Polding the special aptitude to grasp the Pauline doctrines of the Body of Christ and a spiritual fatherhood. § [They] also gave him his compassionate understanding of the needs of convicts and aboriginals, an understanding which was never patronising. 

Most of Polding’s direct quotations came from the scriptural texts then most commonly employed by the liturgy … As a teacher, as well as one who had learnt in this school, he placed great value on the liturgy. He tried to make it a feature of the Australian Church, even to the public recitation of vespers during his visits to country stations. However, his best use of the Bible was not by quotation or as a basis for apologetics. It was when he savoured the Word of God that Polding’s thought was richest and his exhortations most telling. 

Polding’s liturgical formation gave him a sensus fidelium which enabled him, when he had the leisure, to ramble with delight and sureness through the whole field of the Scriptures. This it was which gave to his best teaching the charm of poetry and, to his exhortations, direct access to men’s hearts. 

This use of Scripture helped Polding to speak directly to his audience. It amounted to a form of teaching which flowed from a life of a prayer and which attempted to arouse in his people of desire for God and the things of God. In its subordinate parts, it presented values other than those materialistic and hedonistic ones which produced inhumanity, the crude brutality of the early colony and the refined cruelty which was taken its place. It took account of the fact that early Australia failed to support little more than a misconstrued old Testament religion – harsh justice, the thriving of the mighty and the lamentations of the weak, many of whom lapsed into that petty iniquity which their little means could afford. According to one observer, those many Catholics who had abandoned the religion had also erected proud barriers protect to protect either the success or their shabby iniquities. Polding deplored this but he seldom confronted the miscreant with the imprecations of church law. Rather, he sought to reach people with the immediacy of the Scriptures, to speak to their hearts and thus encourage them to overcome their pride or their lassitude. 

As a whole, Polding’s teaching aimed to bring a Christian culture to Australia, an integration of the ordinary and extraordinary elements of human life with its most sublime possibilities. He sought to bring to the young church in Australia a contemporary form of that monastic and Christian culture which had inspired medieval Europe. That this grand plan did not find full life, as its model had not found constant, living expression, save as an ideal, destroyed neither the value of Polding’s teaching nor the wisdom of striving to establish an inspiring religious culture in Australia. § 

As the interior of the old continent [of Australia] demands timeless youth, Polding knew how to start afresh. He faced fire, and flood, and dry rot, and disease and yet he continued. He fought for his foundation as a pioneer, in the face of the elements, had to fight for his flock and herds, his crops and his homestead. And when the occasion demanded a fierce fight he could be as a young David facing his Goliath. §

In his determination, Polding showed the young virtue, hope. In his labours, which continued almost until the sun had set, he acknowledged that, as they were from him, his works were impermanent; [yet] as requested by God, by his office as a founder- bishop, they were somehow necessary. The sympathy between Polding and Australia gave a special attraction to the teaching which was required of him. He wrote of spiritual freedom in a land of penal origin. To a land mostly desert, he brought the seeds of a new and satisfying spiritual fruit. His pastoral letters present the gospel truth which sets men free. They present this truth in ways which invite and show men how to live in brotherhood. They brought wisdom to a fertile desert land, to a place which, it has seemed to eyes blind to faith, God forgot.

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.

The engraving of Archbishop Polding was published at the time of his death, but was based on a photograph taken in Melbourne in 1869.  In it, the Archbishop is wearing a cope and mitre which were not his, but belonged to the Bishop of Melbourne, James Alipius Goold OSA.  The mitre was designed by AWN Pugin.

Looking through the Eye of Faith : 1

The newly-consecrated Bishop Polding OSB in 1834.
Image : State Library of NSW.

Thanks to the zeal of a previous generation of Church historians, a most important volume was published in 1977, to coincide with the centenary of the death of Archbishop Polding.  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.  The following 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.

This, the earliest known illustration of John Bede Polding, was painted at Downside Abbey shortly after his consecration as a bishop in 1834 and before his voyage to Australia.  This image was digitally enhanced from an old photograph made of the painting many years ago.

AMDG

For the Administration of Justice

Archbishop Polding writes about Elections

Archbishop Polding in the latter 1860s.
A carte de visite in the Collection of the National Library of Australia.

An election for the Legislative Assembly in the Colony of NSW coincided with the Season of Lent in the year 1856.  Archbishop Polding chose to comment on dynamics which were harmful both to the Church and the Nation as part of his Lenten Pastoral Letter for that year.  It is very interesting that the Archbishop made no mention of the policies of governments or candidates; he was much more concerned with the evil of discord.

The following is the pertinent extract from that letter, revealing how very little certain things have changed between 1856 and today.  

We are anxious also specially to warn you, Dearly Beloved, that times of public elections, such as the present, are full of dangerous temptations; and that many, it is to be feared, who are ordinarily right-minded and circumspect, yield themselves on such occasions to unbridle excesses in the spirit and deeds of detraction.  

The maxims and habits of the irreligious world penetrate so thoroughly everywhere, that we need to be constantly on our guard lest - even inadvertently - we give into the modes of thought and action utterly unworthy of our vocation as Christians.   We are called to do our work in the world after unworldly fashions, and woe! to us, if its unrighteous means and grovelling aims are allowed to occupy and guide our hearts and hands.  It is ours to show that political privileges can be duly appreciated - that they may be earnestly pursued and watchfully guarded - that our choice may fall on men whose characters shall not disgrace our vote - always in the spirit of perfect Christian courtesy, and charity.  

To misrepresent the personal history and motives of individuals; to ridicule personal peculiarities; to rake up animosities; to drag to light and exaggerate old calumnies; to invent and propagate new ones : these are means which men of the world, by a wicked convention, agree to admit, or justify, or even glory in, when they may serve to secure or defeat particular purposes.  We need only remind you that all these things are utterly condemned by the holy doctrine of the Church. Not to save a world from ruin - as you well know - may any Catholic deliberately foster in himself or others the hateful spirit of the detraction, from which such practices, and - what is worse - the extenuation and justification of such practices, proceed.  

And it is in this latter regard we wish particularly to direct your thoughts and invigorate your consciences.  You know how awful an aggravation of the actual deed of sin it is, to imply or teach principles that lead to it.  And this is done by the use of the Press - that two-edged instrument for good or for evil - as the mode of propagating calumnies and enmities in times of elections.  The most horrible detraction is recklessly justified or extenuated.  You know to what absurd lengths the wickedness is carried.  Even national names and animosities, the bickerings of race and clan in times gone by, are renewed and printed and reprinted, as if we had fallen back into barbarism, and as if the very characteristic vice of savages - the handing on of feuds of family and race from generation to generation - had regained possession of us. It has pleased Almighty God in His providence to bring us together in this fair land from almost all nations of the civilised earth; doubtless for a blessing, if it be not lost by our own folly and perversity. 

Before everything else we are Catholics; and next, by a name swallowing up all distinctions of origin, we are Australians; from whatsoever land we or our parents have arrived hither, be it from Ireland, from France, from England, from Scotland, from Germany; we are no longer Irishmen, and Frenchmen and Englishmen and Scotchmen [sic] but Australians; and the man who seeks by word or writing to perpetuate invidious distinctions is an enemy to our peace and prosperity.  The generation of today is not to answer for the follies and vices of past generations; and he who strives by bringing up the memory of past quarrels and injuries, to avenge himself for the past or the present, is endeavouring to realise the fable of the wolf and the lamb; hatred and violence are in his own spirit...  Let us avoid such an unchristian spirit and all its developments.  

As civilised men, as men of ordinary morality, we detest and despise it: as Catholics, we renounce and abhor it.  That man is a pest and a domestic traitor among us, who, by naming the name of nation, or race, or class, or past injury, stirs up by word or pen one bitter feeling.  Let us banish all such topics of conversation; let us not encourage such publications as abound with them.  In such deadly wounds to Christian charity, we cannot imagine any justification, nor will we admit any dangerous extenuations on pretence of custom or expediency.

NOTES

All known pastoral letters of Archbishop Polding were published in 1977 by the Lowden Press under the title The Eye of Faith.  This extract from 1856 Pastoral Letter appears on pages 95 and 96 of that volume.

The 1856 election was of particular significance, being the first election for the Legislative Assembly in NSW, a new body devised for the self-government of the Colony. The first Premier of NSW, Stuart Alexander Donaldson, took office in June 1856, but was quickly succeeded by Charles Cowper and then Henry Watson Parker : all in the year 1856. Before 1856, the government of NSW consisted of the Governor (directly appointed by the Crown and sent from England for a defined term).  After 1824, the Governor was assisted by a partly-elected Legislative Council, which after 1856 was transformed into the NSW Upper House. 

A Trial by Fire

The conflagration which engulfed Notre Dame, Paris on 15th April cannot help to remind us of a similar disaster that befell the Australian Church on the night of 29th June 1865.  After nightfall, it was noticed that the original Cathedral of Saint Mary in Sydney was ablaze.  It is sometimes claimed that charcoals falling through the floorboards of the sanctuary during Vespers and Benediction earlier in the evening, were responsible for the blaze.

Within a short time, the old Cathedral was engulfed in fire.  Its interior, being almost entirely polished timber, was alight rapidly.  The efforts of fire-fighters were of little avail.  The courageous efforts of a few were responsible for the rescue from destruction of many of the Cathedral's treasures, and not least so the Blessed Sacrament, Reserved in a side chapel.  A huge crowd of Sydney-siders gathered in Hyde Park and neighbouring roads to witness this terrible event.  No such fire had hitherto been seen in Sydney.

A sketch of the Cathedral fire on the night of 29th June 1865.

By morning, it was clear that the entire Cathedral had been devastated, the interior completely gutted and the walls alone standing.  Some of the stonework, notably the apse of the Cathedral, had collapsed in the blaze.  Old Saint Mary's was not insured ... the scale of the loss was quite dreadful.  We know now that a new and greater Cathedral was built after that disaster;  but for Catholics, the destruction of their Mother-Church that night, was a terrible blow. 

On the night itself a few artists seem to have sketched the events of the fire and a number of illustrations appeared quickly in newspapers and magazines.  We include here one of those sketches, which shews in great detail what was happening.  Firefighters, assisted by volunteers, try to control the blaze, whilst many people, their faces lit-up by the flames, look helplessly on.

The next day, a photograph was taken of the ruins of the Cathedral, looking south-east from Hyde Park.  It shews the complete destruction of the timber roof as well as the interior of the Cathedral.  The apse of the Cathedral did not withstand the intensity of the heat and had collapsed.  The final plumes of smoke can be seen emerging from the tracery window in the western facade (facing Hyde Park).

The devastated shell of Saint Mary's Cathedral the day after the fire.

Looking at these images and comparing them with those of Notre Dame in this week past, reminds us how quickly can be destroyed what has taken so long and so much to build.

Ut in omnibus Deus glorificetur.

First Australian Catholic Historian

Apart from the short reminiscences of some Catholic pioneers, Australia's first book of Catholic history was published in 1886 by a senior priest of the Archdiocese of Sydney.  This was the Very Reverend John Kenny.  Dean Kenny's book was titled A History of the Commencement and Progress of Catholicity in Australia up until the Year 1840.  These days, we would use the word Catholicism in place of "Catholicity".

He began this work with the following explanation :

The object that I had in view in writing the history of Catholic events in Australia, was to correct the mistaken notions in the minds of many, in regard to our history, and to reduce them to something like chronological order ; and to show the wonderful progress of Catholicity in Australia in such a short time.  I have been witness of many events recorded in the history.  I came to the colony in the year 1835, with Bishop Polding, as an ecclesiastical student : it will soon be fifty years ago ; and I was not unobservant of what was passing.  I was ordained a priest with four others, by Archbishop Polding, in the year 1843, and have laboured ever since on the Australian Mission.

Dean Kenny 1816 - 1886.
A carte-de-visite photograph of the 1870s.

John Kenny was born in Fife, Scotland in 1816.  In 1834, whilst still an ecclesiastical student, he was selected by Bishop Polding to be among the small party that accompanied him to the colony of New South Wales.  Amongst this party, John Kenny seems to be the only one who was not himself (nor did he become) a Benedictine.  In Australia, whilst still a student for the priesthood, he was mostly engaged as a catechist, whilst living at the seminary attached to Saint Mary's Cathedral.  But after his ordination, Father Kenny was appointed to Queanbeyan (1843) and afterwards to Penrith (1844-45), Macdonald River (1845-47), Geelong (1847-48), East Maitland (1848-67) and finally North Sydney (1867-78), where he lived until his death in 1886.

Although not in any respect a comprehensive account of the formative years of the Church in Australia, Dean Kenny's History is nevertheless much more than a mere curiosity.  Perhaps its principal value is where it records events which Dean Kenny witnessed at firsthand during the first five years following the arrival of Bishop Polding in Australia, and the inclusion in the volume of sermons and speeches of Archbishop Polding and Father William Ullathorne, the Vicar-General, which otherwise might have been lost to posterity.

As an appendix is included A Short Essay on the Aborigines of Australia.  If nothing else, the inclusion of this Essay demonstrates that the culture and welfare of the Aboriginal peoples of Australia was not something ignored by the Catholic Church in the nineteenth century.

Because Dean Kenny's History is such a rare volume, we take the opportunity to include some photographs of it.  AMDG.

Title page of Dean Kenny's History.

Conclusion of the Preface.
Dean Kenny was resident at Saint Leonard's in Sydney when he wrote his historical volume.

This particular copy of Dean Kenny's History bears his autograph :
"With the Author's Compliments John Kenny Dean."

Portrait of Archbishop Polding

Archbishop John Bede Polding OSB
Image : The Saint Bede Studio

This portrait of Archbishop Polding, depicting him in his 70s, is the frontispiece to a rather rare historical volume, A History of the Commencement and Progress of Catholicity in Australia up until the year 1840, written by Father John Kenny, a priest of the Archdiocese of Sydney.

When the volume was published in 1886, certain rare engravings and photographs of pioneering clergy were reproduced in it as a photographic plates.  It would seem that the portrait of Archbishop Polding was based on a photograph taken in the later 1860s, but enhanced with some artistic detailing for the purposes of publication in 1886.

In this photograph, we can see the Episcopal stole which the Archbishop wore for several photographic sittings.  It was a very long stole, terminating in tassles and untypical of the style of the period.  Almost certainly the stole was made in Europe.  It is embroidered with medallions depicting the saints, the two visible in this portrait being Saints Peter and Paul.

Click on the image for an enlarged view.


NOTES

The image has been digitally coloured and enhanced from the very faded sepia original.

AMDG

The Gothic Revival in Australia : 2

Archbishop Roger Bede Vaughan OSB
Archbishop of Sydney 1877 - 1883.
An engraving of 1878.

When Archbishop Polding died in March 1877, his Coadjutor, Roger Bede Vaughan, succeeded him as the Archbishop of Sydney.  Archbishop Vaughan had been a monk at Downside Abbey, England, before arriving in Australia in 1873.  He also shared the enthusiasm for Gothic taste in liturgical paraments and architecture.

In January, 1878, Archbishop Vaughan received the symbol of his office as Metropolitan Archbishop when the pallium was conferred upon him in Saint Mary's Pro-Cathedral.  To commemorate this occasion, several photographic portraits were taken of the Archbishop, vested in pontificals.  One of these photographs was reproduced as an engraving, which we are pleased to include here.  

Noteworthy is that the Archbishop is vested in a simple white Gothic Revival chasuble and an elaborate Gothic Revival mitre. He is also wearing Episcopal gloves and the pallium.  The mitre and the crosier are still preserved in the treasury of Saint Mary's Cathedral.  A photograph of the mitre, in its present rather faded condition, is given below.  It is extensively embroidered, with jewels enriching it.  One peculiarity - distinctly Gothic - is the metal filigree work which runs along the upper edge of the mitre on both sides of the front, terminating in a jewelled Cross.

Click on the images for an enlarged view.

The precious mitre of Archbishop Roger Bede Vaughan OSB.
Image : Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.