The New Zealand TABLET THURSDAY, JUNE 4, 1903. A MEMORABLE CENTENARY

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 23, 4 June 1903, Page 17

The New Zealand TABLET

THURSDAY, JUNE 4, 1903. A MEMORABLE CENTENARY

* To promote the came of Religion and Justice by the way* of Truth and Peace.' LKO XIII. to the N.Z. TABLET.

T is the business of history to get back to origins — to track the footsteps of our institutions backward through all the paths they have trodden since their infant days. This the Church in Australia has lately been doing in the quiet celebration of the first centenary of the first Mas? that was celebrated on its shores

since the days when it was first colonised by a batch of 1030 convicts who were landed at Sydney Cove in 17«7. Among the some 6000 convicts there in the earliest years of the nineteenth century were some 200') Catholics, many of whom had been deported for complicity, or alleged complicity in the gallant but ill-fated struggle of 1708. Three of these were priests — Fathers Harold, Djxon, and O'Neill. '1 he most evil traditions of the penal laws were in force in the new convict colony against the exercise of the Catholic religion. But in 1803— after many representations — Father Dixon was emancipated and permitted once a month, under humiliating restrictions, to exercise his sacred ministry among the Catholic convicts in Sydney. His first Mass was celebrated on May 15, 1803. There was no altar-stone. The chalice was of tin— the work of a convict. The vestments were like Joseph's coat of many colors — made of parti-hued old damask curtains sacrificed for the occasion; anl the whole surroundings of this memorable event in the history of the Church in Australasia bespoke the poverty of hethlehem and the desolation of Calvary.

That fifteenth day of May, a century ago, marked the first small and grudging signs of official toleration which the fierce officialism of those early Australian dajs showed to the Cld Church in these virgin lands. The concession had been forced upon the Sydney authorities by the Home Uovernment. ft was viewed with marked disfavor by them from the first. After a little more than a year it was withdrawn after a mock-trial and a hideous inquisition of lash-torture. The three Irish priests were gradually permitted to ieturn to their native land. The last state of the Catholic convicts became worse than the first. The lash and loaded irons were freely applied to compel them to at least external conformity with the perfunctoiy observances of the official creed. A deep spiritual desolation fell upon the infant Church in Australia. 'Vengeance and cruelty,' says Erskine May, ' were [the convict system's] only principles ; charity and reformatioo formed no part of its scheme.' The traditions and torture-punishments that

made the Old Bailey a home of such evil odor were in full blast in the new south land.

• Pale Anguish kept the heavy (fate, And the Warder was Despair.' Callous inhumanity and a hard animalism ran through and through the system ; but out of its jaws a directing Providence has, nevertheless, drawn a high civilisation and a glorious Church, as Sampson took honey from the mouth of the devouring lion.

The thirties were well advanced on their course before a decent meed of religious liberty was accorded to the practice of the Catholic religion in Australia. The evils of the convict system lay heavily upon the Church in three of the' seven Colonies till the nineteenth century had passed the midway of its course. Her struggles were chiefly struggles against the system and its results ; her worst trials were the creation of the system ; the heaviest losses of her children came through the operation of the system ; her triumphs were Avon over, or in despite of, the system ; and, in Bishops Willson and Ullathorne, she was chiefly instrumental in smiting it to death, as the fair Christian maiden of the Rhineland legend slew, with her cross in sacred confidence high uplifted, the devouring monster of the Drachenfels. It was a long, Blow agony, but she triumphed in the end over the political, social, domestic, and personal wrongs of the convict days. The persecuted 'little flock' of 1803 has now grown into a million, spread over the seven colonies of Australasia. The one priest that exercised the sacred ministry in Australasia is now represented by over a thousand under the guidance of seven Arohbishops (one of them a Cardinal), eighteen Bishops, three "Vicars-Apostolic, and one Abbot nullius — in all, a hierarchy consisting of twenty-nine prelates exercising episcopal functions. There are, besides, close on 600 religious Brothers, nearly 5000 nuns, 1512 churches (some of them not surpassed by the great ecclesiastical monuments of the Old World), four ecclesiastical seminaries, 359 colleges and high schools, 792 primary schools, 80 institutes of charity, and 113,602 children, receiving a Citholic education under Catholic teachers in Catholic institutes of learning. #

It is, indeed, a vast progress — spiritual, numerical, social, political. And the sturdy pioneers of the early decades of the nineteenth century — many of them deported without t^ial for political offences, or under the suspicion of political offences, or for things not punishable by any code of laws existing nowadays — sowed in stripes and tears what we now reap in joy. The centenary of the first Mass celebr.tted in an Australasian white settlement recalls the grave ai d thankful words that came from the- hearts of the Fathers of the Sydney Plenary Council of 1895 — words which we can use with even greater reason and appropriateikss to-day : ' Such a contrast between the beginning and the close of a century is unexampled in history. Such a blessing of fruitfulness is unparalleled since the early ages of the Apostles.'