Australian Catholicism was born in chains, and spent the first hundred years of its existence trying to shed them and assert itself as a distinctive presence in a new land. In this, it was no different from others who settled what some were to come to regard as the true Great South Land of the Holy Spirit.
But Catholics also brought baggage to their new home – the legacy of longstanding enmities between British and Irish, Protestant and Catholic, the prosperous and the poor and those who held power and those who sought a share in it – that would colour their development and that of Australia well beyond that first century.
Many of the characteristics and controversies associated with the Church in Australia and its relationship with the wider Australian community in the early years of the 21st century can be traced back to those first 100 years of Catholicism on these shores. Prominent among them are the nature of authority, the place of religion in public life, local autonomy and global order, the absorption of different cultures and the role of the Church in educational and health care institutions serving a wider public.
Sydney priest and historian Edmund Campion records that the first Australian Catholics were lay people who arrived from England with the First Fleet in 1788. About one in ten of the 750 convicts and a few of the marines were Catholics, and about half the convict Catholics were born in Ireland. Eight days after the Union flag was raised at Sydney Cove on 26 January 1788 they joined everyone else in the colony at Australia’s first church service, led by the Church of England chaplain, the Reverend Richard Johnson, who preached on the text ‘What shall I render unto the Lord for all his benefits toward me’.
Campion’s account continues ‘The Catholic convicts who attended Johnson’s service were not entirely dependent on him for religious sustenance’:
Like all migrants, they arrived with spiritual and intellectual luggage already acquired at home. Irish Catholicism before the Famine (1845–52) was a bewildering mixture of formal Catholicism, debased Catholic practices, family piety, superstition, magic and Celtic mythology. Catholic convicts brought this with them. Consequently, even without the ministration of priests, the Catholic faith survived in colonial Australia as a poem that gave life meaning or respite. It was a view of the world enabling one to sustain the present and hope for the future.
Nor was it their faith alone that the Irish brought with them to Australia. Grievances from the Old World also accompanied them:
The conquest of Ireland had made them a landless people. In 1641, Catholics owned 59 per cent of the land; in 1688 22 per cent; in 1703 14 per cent; by 1788 about 5 per cent. The Protestant proprietors of Ireland maintained their hold on land through the Penal Laws, which kept the Catholic Irish as helots in their own country. When they came to Australia they carried this history with them and passed it on to their children.
Inevitably not all the fallout from such adverse circumstances was benign. Interpretations of the early history of Catholicism in Australia are challenged by Campion’s fellow historian, Patrick O’Farrell, as having been too deeply coloured by the popular conception of ‘unfortunate Irish convicts, manly and courageous victims of political injustice and religious persecution, more sinned against than sinning’. In reality, O’Farrell writes, about four-fifths of the Irish convicts could be described properly as ordinary criminals, with about a third of them having had previous convictions.
Tensions were apparent from the outset in that, whereas the English and Scots convicts were nearly all Protestants, the Irish were nearly all Catholics:
So it was that the deepest chasm that existed within penal Australia was more specific than that between gaoler and prisoner; it was the bitter gulf between those who held power and authority, and Irish convicts. This obsessive antagonism between Anglo-Scots Protestant ascendancy and Irish convict Catholicism, established with the foundation of Australia, has been a central and persistent theme in the history of Catholicism’s relations with its Australian environment. Its influence has been tragically corrosive.
So profound and persistent an estrangement and embitterment was to hamper the development of the Australian church repeatedly. ‘Its twisted, shackled inheritance is epitomised in the circumstances of the first recorded Mass, which was celebrated for a congregation of prisoners in Sydney in May, 1803, under strict regulations drafted by Governor King and with police surveillance, by an Irish convict priest, transported – by mistake, it seems – for alleged complicity in the 1789 Irish rebellion’, O’Farrell writes:
The Governor’s regulations stressed that the Catholics, so favoured by this ‘extension of liberal toleration’, must show ‘becoming gratitude’; that assembly for Mass must never be the occasion of ‘seditious conversation’; that the priest, Mr Dixon, was fully responsible for his congregation and must exert himself to detect and report any sign of disturbance or disaffection. This cautious toleration of Catholic worship had come fifteen years after the colony’s foundation. It was withdrawn, in panic, the following year, and although Dixon, and after him Father Harold, exercised their ministry in a private capacity, it was not until 1820, another sixteen that Mass could be celebrated publicly again.
(excerpted from chapter 2)