The training of priests for the New South Wales Mission, 1811-1865

Abstract

The opening of St Patrick’s College, Manly by Cardinal Moran in 1889 marked an important watershed for the Catholics of New South Wales. The imposing sandstone edifice represented both a culmination of the colony's attempts at supplying local-born priests for the ever-expanding mission, but also a new departure in the Sydney archdiocese's arrangements for priestly formation. The new college was modeled on the Irish and Roman seminaries that Moran knew so well, with the training programme being carefully monitored by the archbishop himself from his nearby palace. St Patrick’s would quickly gain a reputation for producing dedicated and reliable priests who were sent to all the Australian colonies. The priests ordained from Manly conformed closely with the strict expectations of Irish Catholic clericalism that Moran and his suffragans in New South Wales demanded; there can be little doubt that the ‘priest factory’ at Manly established solid foundations for an increasingly robust Australian priesthood in the early twentieth century. Manly’s success also helped to generate a largely negative evaluation of earlier attempts at priestly formation in New South Wales. While Moran’s seminary is considered to have been an unqualified success, Archbishop Polding’s ill-fated attempts at Benedictine priestly formation have often been judged an unmitigated disaster. Despite this negative evaluation, the early priests of New South Wales included numerous men who gave heroic service and who were loved and respected by their flocks. How are we to explain this apparent disconnect between the historiography of failed priestly formation in early New South Wales and the evidence of widespread success and individual sanctity among priests on the mission field? What was the nature of priestly formation for the New South Wales mission before the establishment of the seminary at Manly? This paper will present an empirical analysis of the various educational regimes under which the Catholic clergy of NSW received their training in the first half of the nineteenth century, and argue that the training of early colonial priests was perhaps more rigorous and successful than the previous historiography has recognised.