Celebrating 200 years of Mass appeal

Sydney
25 May 2003

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Celebrating 200 years of Mass appeal

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Celebrating 200 years of Mass appeal

Bicentenary Mass and outside photos by Max Herford and John Immig

By Marilyn Rodrigues

Some things change, and others stay the same. A paraphrased cliché, perhaps, but it perfectly describes the feeling of being at St Mary’s Cathedral to celebrate 200 years since Australia’s first official Mass.

In his homily, before a congregation of more than 3000 people, the Archbishop of Sydney, Dr George Pell, pointed out the most important thing that has endured through two centuries is what we must pass on to future generations - our desire to come together to worship.

Our numbers, and the number of countries we have migrated from, have grown vastly; the liturgy may have changed; and English plus other languages replaced Latin almost everywhere, but the Mass continues.

“And the Eucharist remains the centre of Catholic life now, as it was here 200 years ago and as it was everywhere in the Catholic world for nearly 1800 years before that,” the archbishop said.

A nice element of local continuity is St Mary’s Cathedral choir, whose members were in beautiful form for the bicentenary Mass.

The choir, founded in 1817 by Catherine Fitzpatrick, is the oldest surviving choir in Australia and probably the oldest continuing citizen group in the country.

Archbishop Pell said the choir sang vespers at early Masses in the home of James Dempsey, in Kent St, Sydney, which is thought by many to have been where the convict priest Fr James Dixon celebrated the first official Catholic Mass in the colony on May 11, 1803.

In the 200 years that had transpired since then, Dr Pell said, the Catholic community had gone from being a “small, poor, almost persecuted minority” to an “active, energetic participant in the mainstream of Australian life”.