SOCIETY OF MARY

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLV, Issue 21210, 3 December 1938, Page 10

SOCIETY OF MARY

HIGHDEN TO BE CLOSED ACTIVITIES TRANSFERRED TO TARANAKI Use das 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 Hawera, where the Order had 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 C. 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 (new 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 h received its canonical status i

ary, 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 ,ln 1931, after the disastrous earthquakes in Hawke’s Bay, Highden became a house of philosophy and for one year assumed th: 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 rppointed 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 similar 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.