Catholics in a land without priests

Sydney
11 May 2003

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Catholics in a land without priests

The penal settlement of New South Wales had no resident Catholic priest and no Catholic church when it was established in 1788.

That situation obtained into the next century. Catholics were not only deprived of a priest, but were also threatened with reduction of their already meagre rations if they did not attend the Anglican Sunday service.

On November 30, 1792, five Catholic settlers at Parramatta petitioned Governor Phillip in their efforts to obtain the services of a Catholic priest officially.

The governor presented the petition to the authorities on his return to England. But it was ignored.

It is believed that Mass was celebrated in Port Jackson by a Catholic chaplain on one of two Spanish ships, Discovery and Intrepid, which arrived at Sydney on March 12, 1793.

It is also possible that the Spanish priest said Mass in a temporary observatory, which the commander of the expedition set up on Benelong Point.

A Memorandum About Sending Two Catholic Priests to Botany Bay, dated 1796, is in the Public Records Office in London. It shows that repeated attempts were made to get Catholic priests officially appointed to serve in NSW. All efforts were unavailing.

Thus no facilities for Catholic life and worship existed in Australia at the turn of the 19th century. For baptisms, marriages, or burials, Catholics had either to use the services of the Anglican chaplains or do without.

The first British priests to come to Australia were convicts - Irishmen transported for alleged participation in the Irish Rebellion of 1798.

But, because they were convicts, Frs James Harold, James Dixon and Peter O’Neil had no official status, were subject to punishment and were not allowed to exercise their priestly functions on arrival.

By 1802, Australia’s Catholics numbered more than 1700 - mostly Irish convicts transported after the 1798 Rebellion. The growing Catholic community still had no ministering priest.

But on April 19, 1803, Governor Philip Gidley King granted Fr Dixon limited facilities and authorised public celebration of the Mass, which was duly noted in The Sydney Gazette of Sunday, April 24, 1803 (pictured).

Fr Dixon offered the first officially-sanctioned Mass in Australia in the Rocks, Sydney, on May 15, 1803.

Edited from The Catholic Story, by BT Doyle and JA Morley (1953)