Chapter Seven Hard-Headed Spirituality and Soft-Hearted Piety: the Redemptorists

176 PART III Chapter Seven Hard-headed Spirituality and Soft-hearted Piety: The Redemptorists. Sixteen years after Murray's installation as Bishop of Maitland he took another important step in securing religious discipline by introducing the Redemptorist Congregation to his diocese, an order hitherto unknown in Australia. Impressed by the work of these religious men both in Rome and Limerick, Murray had invited them to Maitland during his visit to Europe between 1880 and 1882. 1 They arrived at a time when orders of regular priests with their particular brands of spirituality were notably absent from the Australian Church. It was not until the twentieth century that even older and more central dioceses such as Brisbane and Hobart could boast of having religious priests among their clergy. 2 The coming of the Redemptorists to Maitland was a coup for Murray and like his own arrival it signalled a new phase in the history of the diocese. Within his episcopate it was a second period of revitalization. It was a time of consolidation, a time when he sought to confirm, more thoroughly than he had been able to do at the beginning, the moral citizenship of Catholics. Murray's aspirations were not peculiar to him nor to Catholic bishops generally, nor even to Catholics. They reflected events on the world stage, and new ideas about authority, during the second half of the nineteenth century. Nation states such as Britain, Germany and France were all expanding their territorial sway, with each one holding very definite ideas about the nature of citizenship within their empires. The new imperial citizenship had clear spiritual dimensions, especially evident among Germans. Advances in communications, such as the telegraph, supported the expansion and even global dissemination of ideas. Closer interrelationships and control became possible within 1 Manuscript prepared by Father Shearman, CSSR, 1907, Archives of the Redemptorists, Kogarah. 2 F. Mecham, 'The Contribution of the Clergy to the Spirituality of the Australian Church', The Australasian Catholic Record, Vol. LV, No. 1, January 1978, pp. 43- 55. 177 communities more vast and uniform than any the world had seen. The Catholic Church, in its own way, was doing the same. Always, in principle, a universal church, it now demonstrated a new energy in seeking to extend its earthly dominions. With the unification of Italy the papacy had lost one of the great symbols of its temporal power, namely the papal states, and in compensation, perhaps, the beleaguered Pius IX began more aggressively claiming and expanding his ecclesiastical boundaries. Besides, while ecclesiastical dominion might have now seemed entirely spiritual it continued to carry strong resonances of territorial lordship, and far beyond St Peter's Basilica. Murray, whose spiritual sway cast its own territorial shadow, began ordering his domain in an aggressive and systematic fashion. It seems more than mere coincidence that the arrival of the Redemptorists coincided with the immediate aftermath of the 1880 Education Act. As we have seen, Murray had come to his diocese in 1866, the time of the passing of the Education Act which had marked the beginning of the end of state aid to denominational schools. Murray was able to play upon and use to effect the adversarial situation which evolved. For example, he wrote to Vincent Dwyer claiming that while 'we will be put to some inconvenience for a time ... in the end we will gain much by the fierce agitation which has been raised against us throughout the colony'. 3 Catholics came to define even more emphatically who they were, choosing Murray's path for a variety of reasons. The 1880s demanded even greater energy, focus and renewal from the Catholic community. Having lost the earlier battle, church authorities rallied the faithful in support of their own system of schools.4 Catholic schooling, and the broader religious campaigns to which schooling was central, would only succeed if all Catholics co-operated fully in the enterprise. There was no better group than the Redemptorists to terrorize the faithful into submission and to convince them of the hell which awaited them otherwise. 3 Murray to Vincent Dwyer, 22 December 1879, Murray Papers, MDA. M. Lyons, 'Aspects of Sectarianism in New South Wales circa 1865 to 1990', PhD., Australian National University, Canberra, 1972, pp. 331-332. 4 Loc. cit. 178 The ceremony surrounding the arrival of the Redemptorists on 30 April 1882 was not unlike Murray's own triumphal entry into his diocese sixteen years before. Parishioners and local dignitaries assembled at Singleton Railway Station to greet the bishop and the Redemptorist C o mmunit y. 5 The gathered crowd then walked in procession to St Patrick's, where the official ceremonies and celebrations took place. As on the earlier occasion, the musical resources of the diocese had been gathered and St Patrick's was the venue for another performance of Mozart's Twelfth Mass. Well-known parishioners, Miss Quinn, daughter of the Mayor, J. P. Quinn ('a foremost Catholic of the district'), and a Mr McCosker, son of Bernard McCosker, resident in the area since 1837, sang the solo parts, and Miss O'Carroll played the organ accompanied by a small orchestra. 6 The superior of the Redemptorist Community, Father Edmund Vaughan, thanked the faithful for their enthusiastic welcome, promising that a mission would begin in Singleton on the very next Sun d a y. 7 This gathering at Singleton Station, itself a symbol of the changes brought by rail transport and the conquering of distance, the procession to the local church and the promise of a mission were very public declarations of the arrival of the Redemptorists. They were, too, acts of dominion: the claiming by Catholics of the public thoroughfares of Singleton and the claiming by the Redemptorists of the spiritual life of the Catholic community. The fathers and brothers had come from the English Province of Redemptorists established in 1843 at Clapham near London. The religious circumstances of Clapham were very different from those of Maitland. There would have been no enthusiastic welcome nor triumphal procession for them at their arrival there. England was an emphatically Protestant nation and Clapham was the weekend retreat of those 5 The term, community, refers to the six fathers and brothers who arrived in Singleton. 6 Singleton District Pioneer Register, Singleton, 1989, p. 57, and Freemans Journal, 6 May 1882. 7 E. Vaughan, CSSR to V. Dwyer, Singleton, n.d., File C2.29, Murray Papers, MDA. 179 champions of Protestantism, the 'Clapham Sect'. 8 Australia was a territory on which the Redemptorists might hope to make a bolder impression. The first Australian community was both English and Irish.9 Fathers Edmund Vaughan and Henry Halson were English, while Fathers James Hegarty and Thomas O'Farrell and Brothers Lawrence Watters and Daniel Gleeson were Irish. 10 Murray, Roman and Irish though he was, was delighted to have these Redemptorists from England in his diocese. He was even pleased to have as superior Edmund Vaughan, uncle of the Benedictine, Roger Bede Vaughan, Archbishop of Sydney, although ten years later Murray confided to Father Thomas O'Farrell that perhaps an Irish superior would better serve the needs of Irish Catholics, a comment suggesting that it was time for a change.11 Despite Edmund Vaughan's Englishness and his Benedictine associations his social connections obviously impressed Murray. 12 The youngest of nineteen children, Vaughan had been raised by his eldest brother, who had inherited the Vaughan estate of Courtfield in Herefordshire. His was an old English-Catholic family. One of his brothers, William, became Bishop of Plymouth and two of his nephews, Roger Bede and Herbert, became archbishops, the first of Sydney and the second Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster. 13 They were a family with ambitions of high ecclesiastical office and the means of attaining it. Edmund himself was a scientist, musician and a poet. 14 Of the same age and from eminent ecclesiastical families it is not surprising that Murray and Vaughan respected one another. 15 Murray had not found such a kindred spirit in Edmund's nephew, Roger Bede, Archbishop of Sydney. 8 E. M. House, Saints in Politics: The 'Clapham Sect' and the Growth of Freedom, London, 1971, pp. 15-20. 9 The Irish Province of Redemptorists was established from England in 1853. P. Corish, The Irish Catholic Experience: A Historical Survey, Dublin, 1985, p. 202. 10 S. J. Boland, CSSR, Faith of Our Fathers: The Redemptorists in Australia 1882- 1992, Armadale, 1982, p. 19 and pp. 25-26. 11 Ibid., p. 74. 12 P. O'Farrell, The Catholic Church and Community in Australia, West Melbourne, 1977, pp. 173. 13 Ibid., pp. 25-26. 14 Manuscript prepared by Father Shearman, CSSR, 1907, Archives of the Redemptorists, Kogarah. 15 Murray Papers, C.1 and C2.1-61, MDA. 180 However, in 1882 other fights remained to be fought against the enemies of Catholicism. The Redemptorists, with their pastoral devices — missions, retreats and devotion to Our Lady of Perpetual Succour — and their particular preaching style, greatly impressed the Catholic laity, priests and religious of the diocese. They were different from anything the Catholic people of Maitland had hitherto encountered. Founded by a lawyer and priest, Alphonsus Liguori, in Italy in the mid-eighteenth century, the order had been approved by Benedict XIV in 1749 under the title, Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer (CSSR). 16 Redemptorist apostolic zeal was directed towards those who had never heard the church's message and to those whose faith needed strengthening. Working in crowded city churches and isolated country villages, they usually remained in each city or country area for a period of two to four weeks, during which they engaged in an intense campaign of preaching, teaching, visitation and hearing confessions.

Load more