Religious Orders and Institutions

New Zealand Tablet, Volume L, Issue 17, 3 May 1923, Page 33

Religious Orders and Institutions

The Dominican Nuns in Otago

(Contributed.)

Fifty-two years ago Patrick Moran, first Bishop of Dunedin, sailed in between the Otago Heads, landed at Port Chalmers, and made his entry into the beautiful little city which was to be his home for a quarter of a century, and in which in the fulness of his ripe age he was destined to lay his mortal remains. With this great son of faithful. Christian Ireland there came a little company of the Sisters of St. Dominic, inspired like their future Bishop with the deathless spirit which has sent unto the ends of the earth so many children of Patrick and Brigid, hungering and thirsting to gain souls for Christ— peregrlnari pro Christo ! With gratitude to God who sent that good Bishop and those saintly nuns across the world, from the green hills of Holy Ireland to the green hills of Otago, we, who are their spiritual heirs to-day, who find perennial inspiration in their example, who cherish and bless their memory, turn back towards the past in order to honor them and to renew within ourselves their apostolic zeal and their burning love for Christ and His Church. As long as St. Joseph’s Cathedral stands in its Gothic beauty above the rising and falling tides, the memory of our first Bishop will be green in Dunedin. Monuments in stone recall him in the churches whose bells call to one another from Oamaru to Invercargill, and from Port Chalmers to Lake Wakatipu. But grander and more indestructible is his monument in the hearts of a Catholic people on whose souls he has left the imprint of his own noble, simple, steadfast Faith. What he achieved, what difficulties he overcame, what victories he won, wore told by eloquent lips during the celebration of jubilee of the diocese, two years ago, when, in his own Cathedral, before the altar at which he so often offered for his flock the everlasting Sacrifice of the New Law, venerable men and women whose love for him is stronger than death, their children among whom he came and went in the Catholic schools which he built, and fheir childrens’

children who have been taught to look back to him with respect and veneration due to a great Churchman and an apostolic Bishop, assembled to do him honor and to hear from one of his own pioneer priests the story of his life and labor.?. For ourselves, it is fitting to remind all our readers that Dr. Moran was the founder of the jVc w Zealand Tablet, in days when a hostile press that hated truth gave him neither justice nor charity, and that this Catholic periodical which has carried on for more than forty-seven years the work for which he instituted it, has not swerved from the straight line of loyalty to the Faith, and of gratitude to that race to which, under God, we owe the Faith, from its birth down to our day when, whatever may be its shortcomings, it can honestly and fearlessly claim that it is still inspired by the aims and ideals of our first Bishop, and that it does not, and, with God’s grace, never shall, be afraid or ashamed to stand for the true against the false and for the weak against the strong. Because Dr. Moran was the founder of the Tablet he has a special claim on all its readers. You who have been so loyal to the Tablet during recent years of stress have been loyal to him ; and, as we hope and trust that he will remember you in Heaven, so do we hope and trust that you, too, will honor his memory and pause a while ,to pray for the good estate of his soul. Be mindful of that fearless, fighting Christian spirit that was his; be proud of Faith and latherland as he was; learn from this great captain that amid hostile surroundings in this land the least of us is called upon to follow faithfully the Standard of the Cross, bravely and loyally like a soldier in the army of Christ. Many readers of the Tablet outside the Diocese of Dunedin have never known the Sisters of St. Dominic; and to all such we say that Dr. Moran’s success in New Zealand, was in no small way due to the prayers, to the labors, and to the courage of those pioneer Irish nuns who came here, with him fifty years ago now in order to teach the children to know and love Jesus Christ and to serve Him during all the days of their mortal lives. From the Island of Saints and Scholars they, too, came, facing hardships and privations of which we have but scant appreciation nowadays. Almost all the nuns of the first community have gone to their reward, dying as calmly and as bravely as they lived, going out of the world which was their prison into the eternity for which they labored always and wherein was set apart securely for them the only recompense they desired; the "Vision face to face of Him whom they had loved above all even when His loveliness was hidden in the shadows. They were saintly, cultured ladies, delicate human instruments that Christ called to lives of heroic zeal. But ii they were trail in body they were robust in their Irish Faith; and they knew Christ too well to think of pausing to reason why when it was He who called them. And, so, out of that far away, beloved land which, in the distant centuries when darkness brooded over Europe, held aloft the torch of holiness and learning amid the moaning western seas, they came forth as bravely and as fearlessly as the ancient saints whose names many of them bore and they planted in Dunedin, and afterwards in many places in Otago and Southland, the standard of St. Dominic which has long been for Christian Europe the oriflamme of religion and science and the pledge of true Christian education. Not in this page, nor in many pages, could we tell how deeply this diocese is indebted to the Dominican Sisters. But: we thank God that a loyal priesthood and a grateful people are not unmindful of what they owe to the nuns who made such noble sacrifices and sowed so wisely for the rich harvest of souls that the Church is reaping to-day in the green valleys, by the sounding shores, and under the mystic mountains of this remote outpost of Christianity. From Dunedin the Order has put forth numerous branches during the past fifty years. In Oamaru, in Teschemakers, in Invercargill the Sisters have large boarding schools as well as parochial primary schools. In smaller centres there are other Dominican convents, and everywhere they are fountains of learning and religion, . fruitful in blessings for the whole community. Long may the schools of the Dominican Sisters flourish in New Zealand. Long may the spirit of the pioneer Irish; nuns inspire those who come after them. And may He in whom is all their strength and all their joy give them out of the Love of His Sacred Heart the graces here and the final blessedness hereafter, of which they have taught'the secret to so many among our people yesterday and to-day.