Error común de programación 2

38. Quoted in 0. Thorpe, The First Mission to Australian Aborig­ ines (Sydney, 1950")» P* 193.

39* J» H. Cullen, "Bishop Willson", Australian Catholic Record. Vol. XXV11, January, 1950» P* 35» Quoted Mary Shanahan, Out of Time, Out of Place. p, 45*

He had all the aristocratic tendenc-ieB criticised in the English

Benedictines "what they term in Ireland the ’Cawtholic Soles’” , as

a correspondent to the Freeman’s Journal put it. "We in the colony...

have o-ur 'Cawtholic soles’ and it would not he considered fashionable

for any clergyman to recognise in public any Catholic outside that

IlO

favoured circle." First prior and later abbot of the Benedictines

in Australia Gregory became Vicar-General when the Irish Francis Mur­

phy, Ullathome's successor, became Bishop of Adelaide in 1844«

Sent down by Folding to mediate in differences between another Eng­

lishman, Bishop VJillson of Hobart, and the very Irish Vicar-

General, John Joseph Therry> Gregory presented an ultimatum and

suggested that if Willson did not accept it he had"better resign his

mitre". Willson declined to continue negotiations.

Bishop Willson, although an Englishman, recognised that "it

would be an act of folly to appoint other than Irish bishops for

priests and people who were Irish"/ By 1841, there were thirty-

three missionary priests in Australia, twenty-eight of whom were

Irish. Sixteen years later, the numbers had risen to one hun­

dred and forty-four with one hundred and twenty-nine Irish. The

other fifteen were English, French, German and Spanish. It would

be a mistake to conclude from this that the Catholic church in Aus­

tralia was essentially Irish. As Dr. John Molony has emphaised,

the Benedictine ambitions of Folding and Ullathome did not founder on the rock of Irish nationalism but on the ultra-montanism of the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (Sacra Congre-

gatio De Propaganda Fide) in Rome. Molony points out that, sub­

ject to final approval by the Pope, the Congregation had the pow­

er "to initiate, deal with, and bring to conclusion all matters

.... necessary and opportune, even in places in which, although a

hierarchy existed, the Church was still lacking in maturity".

40. Freeman’s Jovirnal, 30 May, 1857» Quoted Shanahan, p. 39.

41. H. H. Birt, Benedictine Pioneers in Australia, Vol.ll., p.2Si>

42. John, IT. Molony, The Roman Mould of the Australian Catholic

Church (Melbourne, I969), p"» 13•

43. Codex Juris Canonici, Book 2, part 1, Canon 252, quoted

Decade 178

This De as it may, the Church in Australia had Irish troubles enough especially as Folding, who had no anti-Irish prejudices him­ self, tended to ovei^-sympathise with the exuberantly Irish John Joseph Therry especially in the Hobart dispute over church debts rather than with the stiff rigidly correct non-Benedictine Willson who was right in principle, wrong in emphasis. Father John McEnrroe, an intelligent and moderate Irishman, summed up the pos­ ition when he claimed:

If an Irish Bishop had been appointed for Hobart Town I think the dissensions and scandals that', have taken place from the dispute between Monseigneur Willson and Father Therry world have been avoided, and that religion

would be there in a much better state thaii it is at pre­ sent. Unfortunately the Irish and English characters are very different in their nature and when any difference

takes place between an English bishop and an Irish priest, then national antipathies and mutual mistrusts spring up and prevent a proper understanding and thus perpetuate bad feelings. In my opinion, very few Englishmen know how to..govern Irishmen, whether lay or ecclesiastical. Catholicism in Australia, despite Bishop Folding and his new Vicar-General, Henry Gregory, remained essentially Irish in expre­

ssion if not in discipline. Father Therry, who had arrived in May 1820 with Father Philip Conolly, began the church’s Australian tradition of support for the forces of social and political protest. Father John McEncroe, who had served under the liberal-minded Bishop

John England in America, came to the colony with H. H. Plunkett, newly-appointed Solicitor-General (afterwards Attorney General) in 1832. Both men represented the O'Connellite Roman Catholic liber-al

ism which suprorted Whigs, Radicals and dissenters in their assault against Anglican privileges in England. They had even less regard for Anglican pretensions in Australia. Plunkett drafted Bourke’s Church Act and supported the Governor and his successor, Gipps, in their efforts to establish the Irish system of education in Hew

44. J.H.Cullen, "Bishop Willson", Australian Catholic Record« Vol. XXIX, October, 1952, p. 311.

South Wales. McEnroe publicly advocated the rights of the working

man, opposed the squatters and campaigned against the continuation

of transportation. Roger Therry, the Catholic judge, had been

actively associated with O'Connell in Ireland and used his influence with Edward Blount, M.P. to secure English support for Bourke's church and education proposals. The Scottish convert, William Augustine Duncan, crystalised this Catholic liberalism in his news­ paper, the Australasian Chronicle but did not share the Irish en­ thusiasm for Ireland. "Our religion," he declared, "is neither

English nor Irish, but Catholic; and our patriotism, if we would hold our..place here, must be neither the one nor the other, but Aus- tralian".

(iii)

Bourke's Church Act and his education proposals were no more than the extension of reform from the motherland to the colonies. Be­ tween 1688 and 1828 landlords and the Church of England dominated the English social and political scene while in Ireland Catholic priests, trained from 1795 in their own Seminary at Maynooth, were active agents in the fight first for emancipation and then for re­ peal of the union between Ireland and England. In England and Ire­ land Anglicans, or those who "conformed" by taking the sacrament of the Anglican Church, had for generations held all the important of­ fices in church and state, staffed the schools and universities and held rich benefices, often as absentees, doled out through friends and relations. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Dur­ ham received an annual income of £19*000 a year; the absentee Rector of a rich benefice might receive an annual income of £7,000 while in the industrial and remote rural parishes Evangelical and other poor

45* Freeman's Journal. 16 May, 1857. Quoted T. L. Suitor, Hierarchy and Democracy in Australia, p*57*

Deoade 180

cl^gyinen were expected to exist on stipends as low as £ 5 0 a year. In Ireland, the whole official complex of church and state rested on the backs of a conquered people whose religious and political traditions differed from the religion and traditions of their oon- querors. In England and Ireland, the Anglican clergy were part of the Establishment but in Ireland the Catholio clergy identified them­ selves with the people. They took their preferences with them to the United States of America and Australia. In Australia, the position was further complicated by the fact that in the beginning

the Catholic hierarchy was mainly English and the Catholic laity al­ most entirely Irish.

In England Lord Liverpool and Robert Peel, who began the pro­ cess which changed the old rural Tories into the new middle-class Conservatives, saw the need for change and appointed Ecclesiasti­ cal Commissioners to provide the means for the church to safeguard its Established privileges as well as reform itself. The Evangel­ icals and all those churchmen influenced by the changing moral cli­ mate, which no longer admired libertine aristocrats and hard drink­ ing, fox-hunting parsons, were ready enough to cooperate with the Whigs when they came in pledged to political and religious reform. Following the emancipation of Catholics under the Tories (1Ö29) the pace was rapid. Whigs, Liberals, Radicals and Irish Catholic M. P.s led by Daniel 0*Connor appropriated surplus church revenue to secular purposes; suppressed ten Irish bishoprics and abolished the Irish equivalent of church rates; enlarged the Ecclesiastical Com- mision and authorised the Commissioners to draw up a comprehensive and detailed scheme of church reform.

When Broughton left England in 1829 the Tories he favoured had controlled the inevitable process of change. When he returned in 1834» to obtain more clergy and to make clear the conditions under

which he was prepared to accept a bishopric, the Whigs were in off­ ice and the equally inevitable reaction against the pace of reform set in. By and large, the Evangelicals and their friends welcom­ ed reform as a logical extension of their own desire to rouse the Established Church into greater concern for moral values and to make resident pastors throughout the country the Friends and Bene­ factors of the Community -- the Promoters and Guardians of Piety, Decorum, and Good Order -- the liberal, intelligent, and instru­ ctive associates of the Rich -- the humble, candid, compassion­ ate and charitable teachers of the Poor Broughton, who had Evangelical leanings himself, had no quarrel with this. What he feared, a

3

In his perplexity, Broughton turned to the Tractarians who repudiated state interference with the church. The Movement dated from John Keble's sermon on National Apostasy in 1833, which declar­ ed that the nation was part of Christ's Church and not the church part of the nation, "If public opinion denied this, then the nat­ ion was in a state of apostasy; and, whatever the consequence, such a 'direct disavowal of the sovereignty of God* must be implacably re- sisted," he asserted! The Whigs might counter, as Bourke did, that a third of the population of New South Wales was Catholic and cared nothing for Anglican liturgy or beliefs. For Broughton and the Tractarians this was irrelevant. As Geoffrey Faber puts it*

The Church was a legal, constitutional, element in the government of the country. She was this, because she was more than this. By human law she was the Estab­ lishment. By Divine law, and by the right of uninterr­ upted succession, she was the Apostolic Church of Christ in England — and in Iceland gind, Broughton would have added, throughout the British Empire 7J To deprive her

46

67

68

47* Broughton to Coleridge, 19 October, 1837* (Microfilm, Nat.L.)

Deoade ₁₈₂

of her worldly goods was, as Pusey explained to his bro­ ther, an act of sacrilege, not to be justified by any argument of expediency.^

There was much more in all this than selfish regard for the maintenance of wealth and privilege — although this too had its in­ fluence on many who supported Tractarianism. Nor was it merely a last-ditch stand of the old order against the new. The Tractarians were convinced that religion was threatened in England, as Broughton feared it was threatened in Australia, and they regarded their

Tracts for the Times as so many shots fired against the laxness and worldliness of a declining and threatened church, on the one hand, and against the avid utilitarianism of people like Archbishop Whately, on the other. There was passion and oonviotion behind the pedantic dry-as-dust hair-splitting that constituted much of the argument in the pamphlets which nevertheless rapidly became something in the nat­ ure of best-sellers. This was the new pulse of the Anglican Church rather than any suggestion of a return to what Dr. Eris O'Brien dis­ missed as a mere "out-relief department of the British aristocracy".

In particular, the Tractarians rebelled against the Whiggish suggestion that the Church's essential role should be to act as a ."moral police", a mere department of state. As one colonist put it 1

It is clear that some form of Christianity should be est­ ablished, to instruct the poor and the ignorant, other­ wise it will cost us as much for the support of gaols and penitentaries as the support of the clergy would amount to£ö While it would be an exaggeration to say that Sir Richard Bourke and his equally Whiggish successor, Sir George Gipps, regarded the -church as no more than this they still had the average Englishman's

notion that religion is mostly a matter of morality. Both men were devout Anglicans of genuine religious feeling. Nevertheless,

49. Ibid.

50. W. Mann, Six Years Residence in the Australian Provinces ending