Opinion: Who did celebrate the first Mass in Australia?

Sydney
2 June 2002

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Opinion: Who did celebrate the first Mass in Australia?

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Opinion: Who did celebrate the first Mass in Australia?

By Fr Terry Southerwood

Dr Joe Morley is to be thanked for his informative article (Is this our most precious relic? CW 5/5) in which he refers to an article by me in the Australasian Catholic Review, October 1979 (pp 420-428).

He says that I contended “that the first celebration of Mass in Australia took place at Storm Bay on the eastern coast of Tasmania in 1792”.

However, a revisiting of the article shows that I made no such claim.

Dr Morley adds that I claimed the celebrant was “one of the three Catholic scientist-priest chaplains with the French D’Entrecasteaux expedition - the Benedictine astronomers Père Pierson, L’Abbé Bertrand and Père Ventenat”.

In fact, in that article I corrected an earlier error I had made about three priests in Van Dieman’s Land. Only two arrived. Bertrand, I explained (Australasian Catholic Review, loc. cit., p422), did sail with the expedition, but was forced to abandon it at the Cape of Good Hope and return home. Also I stated that only Pierson was a Benedictine.

Nor can I find any reference in this article to a report that the priests celebrated Mass on board their ships.

What I did say (p424) was: “On the religious side, it was Pierson’s task, together with Ventenat, to see to the spiritual and moral health of the members of the expedition.

“As chaplains, they would have led prayers and celebrated some kind of liturgy at least on Sundays. These two French priests spent a total of two months on shore in southern Tasmania. It is inconceivable that they would not have celebrated Masses during that period …”

I wrote that l’Abbé Monges, a Canon Regular of the Gallican Church, probably had the honour of celebrating the first Mass on the Australian continent (Australasian Catholic Review, loc. cit., p422).

I also pointed out in this 1979 article that Cardinal Moran (History of the Catholic Church in Australia, Sydney, 1894) “suggests, gratuitously, that priests from the Quiros expedition celebrated Mass at Port Curtis (Q) in 1606”, and that the landfall was in the New Hebrides, not Australia.

Having clarified these points, I must admit that I did suggest that the first Catholic worship-service in Australia may have been held six years before the arrival of Receveur and Monges. I wrote (p 420) that possibly this would have been at Frederick Henry Bay in Tasmania on Sunday, March 8, 1772.

I have found no evidence of a chaplain on board.

However, I believe it is likely that Nicholas Thomas Marion du Fresne, a Knight Commander of the Order of St Louis and intimate friend of L’Abbé Rochon, would have at least led his crew in prayers on the Lord’s Day at that place.

In my recently-published fifth edition of A Prayer-Calendar of Deceased Priests in Australia, 1788-2002 (first published in 1977) I repeat my contention that l’Abbé Monges would probably have offered a Requiem for his confrère, Receveur, who died at Botany Bay in February 1788.