INVITATION GIVEN.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20234, 19 February 1934, Page 5

INVITATION GIVEN.

Eucharistic Congress in Melbourne. NEW ZEALAND’S PART. Archbishop Mannix, of Melbourne, speaking at the Roman Catholic Cathedral, Barbadoes Street, last evening, gave a cordial invitation to all Roman Catholics in New Zealand to attend the National Eucharistic Congress that will be held in Melbourne as part of the centenary celebrations this year. New Zealanders were asked by the Archbishop to regard the congress as being as much their own congress as it was that of the people of Melbourne and Victoria. Bishop Brodie, of Christ-, church, and Bishop Liston, of Auckland, were two New Zealand bishops who had already consented to take part. Archbishop Mannix stated that the Irish Cardinal Archbishop Macrory would preside at the congress. It was unusual, he said, for the Pope to send one of his Cardinals to any congress that was not international in character, but on this occasion sufficient importance had been attached to the event for a Cardinal to be chosen to preside. Although the Catholics of Melbourne comprised only a fourth or a fifth of the population, there was no more dignified section of the community, and it was therefore only right that they should have been asked to celebrate the centenary in their own distinctive fashion. It had occurred to Archbishop Mannix that he could give the Roman Catholic Church no better opportunity of showing its strength than by organising a national Eucharistic Congress, and he had gone ahead towards that objective.