SOCIETY OF MARY

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 132, 1 December 1938, Page 23

SOCIETY OF MARY

HIGHDEN TO BE CLOSED

ACTIVITIES TRANSFERRED

(Special to the 'Evening Post.")

PALMERSTON N., This Day. Used as a novitiate house of the Society of Mary for 15 years, the Roman Catholic educational institution at Highden, near Awahuri, is to be closed down and the activities transferred to the Taranaki district, where the Order has been given a site by Mr. McHardy, father of the late Father Emmett McHardy, who lost his life from a disease contracted during missionary work in the Solomon Islands.

At the present time there are about ,30 students and lay brothers in residence. Father E. O'Connor, S.M., acts as novitiate master, and Father P. P. Cahill, S.M., as procurator. In the pleasant surroundings of what was once part of the, Walter W. Johnston Estate, many Marist priests have served their second novitiate and more than 100 students have been there for one of their seven years in preparation for the priesthood. The first band of second novitiates arrived at Highden in 1923. With them came the late Very Rev. Dr. Kennedy, S.M., as master of novices, and under his direction were Fathers Vibaud, T. B. Segrief (now rector of Lismore College, Queensland), McDonald, and Fraher. Two other bands of Marist Fathers went through their novitiate the following year and in the holy year of jubilee (1925) a group of students^from Greenmeadows Seminary marked the first of the students' canonical novitiates to be made at Highden, which received its canonical status in January, 1924.

With the appointment of the Very Rev. Dr. Kennedy, S.M., as provincial, Father W. J. Schaefer, S.M., took control in 1929. Then, in 1931, after the disastrous earthquakes in Hawke's Bay, Highden became a house of philosophy and for one year assumed the character of a scholasticate under the direction of the Very Rev. Dr. C. W. Casey, S.M. The following year Father Schaefer continued to act as director, relinquishing the position in March, 1936, when he left for Rome to assume his new duty as assistant to the Superior-General in Rome. In his place as master of novices was appointed Father J. J. Kennedy, S.M., formerly one of the tutors at St. Patrick's College, Silverstream. Highden has also been a novitiate house for lay brothers, and they have been prepared to take their part in the foreign mission fields entrusted to the Society of Mary—Samoa, Fiji, the Solomons and similiar islands—or assist in the seminaries or colleges staffed by the Marist Fathers. In the period of its existence, Highden achieved an important place in the sphere of education of candidates for admission to the society, to which a large number of New Zealand-born priests belong.