Feature: First priest to the Great South Lands

Sydney
14 April 2002

Thousands welcome relics to St Mary’s

Woman chooses palliative care ahead of euthanasia

Jail being used for wrong purpose

Oarful day for Riverview

Caritas helps quake victims

Embryo pact on ‘slippery moral slope’

In love with the Little Way and saintly humility

Archbishop calls for saint’s help to protect the unborn

Woomera action may be justified, says bishop

Shed workers use new skills to help others

Spirituality, ethics in focus

St John’s, Woodlawn, reunion

Janelle’s bake takes the cake

Perfect patron – a saint with a joy that inspires

Litany in Chinese verse

Editorial: Asking for a little help

Letters: Stem-cell research

Conversation: Abduction ‘gave me strength, courage’ - Juliana Waithera Muiruri, aid worker

Reflections: Peace and the Arab-Israeli conflict

From Samoa with love ... and a gift

Opinion: Relics – veneration of God’s transforming grace

Pilgrims and Padre Pio – it’s big business

Feature: First priest to the Great South Lands

Feature: First priest to the Great South Lands

Fr Riccio’s map of Terra Australis olim Incognita nunc ex parte cognita

By Dr Joe Morley

Another bit of history has been blown away by research. The History Archives of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples, which has just moved house in Rome, has emerged as a treasure chest of information about the Church in Australasia from the 17th century to 1976.

Research in the archives disproves Cardinal Moran’s claim that the appointment of convict priest Fr James Dixon as Prefect Apostolic of New Holland in January 1804 was the first ecclesiastical appointment made by the Holy See for the Australian Church. (PF Moran: History Of The Catholic Church in Australia).

In fact, the first such act by the Holy See took place in 1666.

In an audience on August 28, 1601, the Portuguese navigator De Quiros briefed Pope Clement VIII on his voyages in the South Sea and about his wish to take Catholicism to the thousands of natives he believed lived in the Great South Lands, and to secure papal approval and blessing for such an expedition.

He followed that up with a Memoria. Clement approved and, in March 1602, issued two Briefs, commanding the Franciscans based in Peru and exhorting the archbishops, bishops and other ecclesiastics in the Indies to give De Quiros every assistance.

De Quiros left Rome, returned to Spain, and eventually secured permission to lead the expedition. His fleet left Callao in Peru in December 1605 and, on May 3, 1606, discovered the New Hebrides which he mistook for the Great South Land. He called it La Austrialia del Espiritu Santo. The expedition collapsed and De Quiros returned to Spain, secured approval for another expedition in 1614, but died in Panama in 1615, on his way to Peru to launch the project.

In 1621, a Franciscan Friar, Juan de Silva, took up the idea of a mission to the undiscovered people of the Austral Lands. He was attached to the Franciscan Province of Castile, and in 1621 was confessor to the Spanish royal family.

Silva devised a grand plan, based on De Quiros’ discoveries, for Franciscan Friars to convert the natives of the Austral Lands of the South Seas. He petitioned King Philip III of Spain in 1613 and 1621, seeking his backing. The king showed interest but died on March 31, 1621, and was succeeded by his 16-year-old son, Philip IV.

Silva now wrote to him about the Austral Lands as most fertile, densely populated, and having the best climate in the world.

Unlike the conquests by force of arms by earlier explorers and conquistadors, his mission would be an evangelical undertaking to take the Gospel to the people of the Austral Lands without force of arms (British Library Manuscripts C 62.1.18 (68) ).

He enlisted the aid of Dr Sebastian Clemente, chaplain at the royal chapel at Lima, Peru, to petition Pope Gregory XV, proposing a mission to La Austrialia del Espiritu Santo.

His proposals were discussed at the Vatican on August 30 and September 12, 1622, and rejected with the advice that nothing more was to be done.

Silva sent a seventh Memorial and copies of his earlier ones to Philip, and another to Gregory XV’s successor, Pope Urban VIII, dated September 20, 1623, urging the Pope to sponsor his mission. Research in the Vatican and Propaganda archives has failed to find the originals of the Memorials. However, copies of four of them, including that to Urban VIII, which were printed in Madrid between 1621 and 1627, are in the British Library in London.

An Italian Jesuit, Cristoforo Borri, wrote to Urban VIII in 1630, telling him of the Dutch discovery of the north and northwest coasts of the Great Unknown South Land and adding that he had failed to persuade Portuguese authorities to send an expedition to the new land.

On February 25, 1666, a meeting of Propaganda Fide was told that a French priest, Jean Paulmier, had asked Pope Alexander VII (1655-1667) to grant him the Apostolic blessing and faculties as a missionary to the unknown Australian Land, saying that other priests in Paris had agreed to accompany him on a mission there for the salvation of so many millions of souls.

Alexander consented, and placed the matter under jurisdiction of Propaganda Fide, which endorsed the plan.

But Paulmier failed to get other priests to join him and his plan lapsed.

That was the first ecclesiastical appointment by the Holy See to what eventually became the Australian Church.

Paulmier had written a paper, printed in Paris in 1663, in which he claimed that 130 years earlier, a Norman ship bound for the East Indies, landed on the coast of Terra Australis and had brought back to France a native who became a Christian, had married and was his, Paulmier’s, ancestor. Paulmier wrote that there was ‘no land so miserable or destitute for help as Terra Australis’ and that only France could convert it (RM Wittgen SVD: The Founding of the Roman Catholic Church in Oceania 1825 to 1850 Canberra 1979).

As early as 1652, an Italian Dominican, Fr Vittorio Riccio, sought permission from the Vatican to go to ‘Terra Australis, which they call the Unknown’.

He was sent instead to the Far East. But he never gave up his dream of evangelising Terra Australis.

On June 4, 1676, then Prior of St Dominic Monastery at Manila, in the Philippines, Fr Riccio again wrote to Rome, advising that he was planning ‘a rare mission ... to explore and enter Terra Australis, called the Unknown, the fifth part of the world, a land containing innumerable kingdoms and nations’.

He enclosed a map across which was inscribed Terra Australis olim Incognita nunc ex parte cognita [Terra Australis once Unknown now partly Known].

Shipping delays prevented Riccio’s letter reaching Rome until 1681. On June 15 (in the Pontificate of Innocent XI), the cardinals agreed to the plan in its entirety, created the Prefecture Apostolic of Terra Australis (including Papua New Guinea, West Irian, Australia and Antarctica), and made Riccio its Prefect Apostolic, with full faculties. But when Riccio died in Manila on February 17, 1685, neither letters nor documents had arrived from Rome, presumably because of similar delays to those which had caused his letter to take five years to reach Propaganda.

Creation of the Prefecture Apostolic meant that the whole of New Holland was a mission territory in which no Catholic cleric could validly minister without faculties granted by the Pope.

However, on November 7, 1798, while Napoleon had Pope Pius VII imprisoned in Florence, it was entrusted to the care and zeal of the new Society of the Faith of Jesus.

New Holland received no more attention until 1804. In the reign of Pope Pius VII – after Governor King had granted the convict priest Fr James Dixon permission, on April 19, 1803, to exercise publicly his priestly functions – the institutional hierarchical Church officially embraced New Holland (NSW) again.

Propaganda Fide appointed Fr Dixon as Prefect Apostolic of New Holland on January 2, 1804. However, in April, following the convict uprising at Castle Hill, Governor King revoked Dixon’s permission to minister publicly.

Propaganda Fide dealt with New Holland again 12 years later, when – on September 9, 1816 – it appointed an Irishman, Fr Jeremiah Flynn, as Prefect Apostolic of ‘Botanibe’ (sic).

Two years after Fr Flynn’s abortive mission (Governor Macquarie deported him on May 20, 1818), the first priests officially sanctioned by both Propaganda Fide and the British Government (Frs Connolly and Therry), established the institutional Catholic Church in NSW (eventually Australia).