The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 1907. THE CHURCH IN THE DOMINION.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXV, Issue 39, 26 September 1907, Page 21

The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 1907 . THE CHURCH IN THE DOMINION.

§EW ZEALAND has, within the space "of a lifetime, passed through a rapid political evolution. She has been in turn an appanage of New South >Vales, a Crown Colony-," and- a self-governing Colony- of the Empire. And on this day, September 26, she throws off the name-clothes that denote immature political development, and stands forth as a debutante new Dominion. With" her material development since her raw young days, we have dealt elsewhere. The Church has, too, grown with the growth and strengthened with the strength' of iihe new Dominion of the southern seas. Only -some sixteen .-years ago Thomas Poynton was still among us. He was the first Catholic settler in the land of the .moa— a Western Celt, a scion of one of the two races that did most to spread the faith in this far. outpost of the Empire. Catholic Emancipation had not yet been passed when, in 1828, he touched New Zealand earth at Hokianga'. Thomas Poynton lived to see in his adopted country four- bishoprics, over two hundred ohurches, some five hundred religious of both sexes, and a. Catholic population of over eighty thousand souls? And he "saw it all in the period that intervened between the, summer of his manhood and a green and honored old age. The pioneer Catholic of >New Zealand was instrumental in bringing about' the first official acts by which the country was transformed from a terra incognita of the Faith into a Province of the Universal Church. It became known, first at Sydney, next 4n Rome, through his entreaties for reapers for the little harvest of souls that had gathered with him aboirl; Hokianga. In 1835 New Zeala/nd was included in the newly created Vicariate-Apostolic of Western Oceanica. Three years later (in 1838) Bishop Pompallier and his companions sailed up the Hokianga River.. The cross was planted in New Zealand ; the Sacred Mysteries were offered ; and in Poynton' s house Gaulish Celt and Irish Celt inaugurated the labors, which soon made this remote corner of the earth blossom into a land of promise for the faith once delivered to the saints. Four years later (in 1842) New Zealand was created a separate Vicariate. Thenceforward events ecclesiastical nroved at a mjore ra<pid pace.. The year of the ~ European revolutions (1848) witnesses the creation of two dioceses in New Zealand— those of Auckland and Wellington. A third (that of Dunedin) was carved out in 1869. And the year ISB7 witnessed i the erection of the diocese .of CEristchurch, and the conferring of the archi<episcopal pallium on the Most Rev. Dr. Redwood, S.M. Ten years

later New Zealand was made a separate ecclesiastical Province of the Catholic Church. * .' And thus the Church in~New Zealand unfolded gently —emerged like the petals from an opening rose-bud.- In ,1810 the white Catholics of the Colony were not above 500 in a total population of some 5000. < To-day their nuirbers far exceed 100,000, with 230 churches,. 190 ' priests, 60 religious Brothers, 750 nuns, a -Provincial , Ecclesiastical Seminary, 2 colleges for boys, 25 boarding schools for girls, 18 superior day schools, 15 charitable institutions, and 106 primary schools, in which some 8000 children are nurtured into a full and wholesome development of the. faculties that God has bestowed upon them. The parable of the mustard seed is told- again in the rapra* growth of the Church in New Zealand from the small beginnings of seventy years ago."