The
Catholic Weekly
Online
Sydney
19 October 2003
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Peace
in our hands
Jubilee
week for Pope
Special
guests at Mother Teresa’s beatification
School
insurance hike
Honoured
by university
It’s
truly feminine and truly beautiful
Spiritually
renewed by Lourdes
$1.75m
for Caritas
Catholic
Women’s Network
Board
short bonanza for Vinnies
Advice
to lectors, acolytes
Much
deeper reality
Editorial:
Time for tribute
Letters:
Barrel of a gun
Conversation:
Terry Hanley, lay missionary who has spent nearly 15 years in the field - Happy
to ‘spend rest of my life in Africa’
What
is peace like?
Religion
test upsurge
Malouf
on campus
Ministry
of Jesus to the sick and dying
‘Father,
this is your life’
‘Priest
in residence’ honoured
Bushland
setting for Thurgoona church
Full-on
disciple of Jesus
Active
practice of faith
Requiem
Mass for ‘Bacon Priest’
Bushland setting for Thurgoona church
Priests and parishioners worked side by side over six years to build the Church of the Immaculate Heart of Mary on a site of several hectares of bushland and gum trees in Thurgoona, a northern suburb of Albury.
The priests - members of the Confraternity of Christ the Priest, the Australian-founded missionary religious society - and parishioners built the church, community centre and presbytery of rammed earth, whose rich colour blends in with the surrounding bushland.
Their efforts were rewarded when the Bishop of Wagga Wagga, Bishop Gerard Hanna, consecrated the church in a two-hour ceremony attended by more than 500 people.
The Thurgoona church is the first building Bishop Hanna has consecrated in the diocese.
After the ceremony, the congregation enjoyed a smorgasbord luncheon under clear blue skies with entertainment provided by Irish dancers and bush poet Noel Stallard, of Brisbane.
This area already has a rich pioneering Catholic history. The Sisters of Mercy opened an orphanage and school there in the late 19th century. The orphanage buildings are now Guadalupe House, where the Mother of God Brothers care for men with serious disabilities.
Fr Patrick Hartigan, better known as John O’Brien, author of Around the Boree Log, was living there as inspector of schools when he embarked on a journey to the High Country to give the Last Sacraments to a man named Riley.
Later, as he sat around the campfire with the dying man’s companions, the priest remarked that it must have been round these parts that Banjo Paterson's Man from Snowy River made his ride chasing “the colt from old Regret”.
To his surprise his listeners told him that the man he had just prepared for death was the real “man from Snowy River”.
The Thurgoona church is in Hartigan St, named after the poet-priest.