The Catholic church in the Australian colonies, 1840-1865

Abstract

In the century or so beginning 1776 European communities all over the world were politically remoulded in terms of the Enlightenment politique: the sovereignty of the multitude realised in legislatures of elected representatives, and even ( in some cases) in an elected executive. Now this development was congenial to Catholic thinking, as the future Pius VII declared when Napoleon first upturned the status quoante in Italy. For instance, election and representation and consultation with the governed dominate the entire constitution of several of the mediaeval religious orders which flourish to this day. In 1800, however, the Catholic West had to rediscover this thomist tradition - the diffusion of responsibility under the aegis of the natural law - after the centuries of practical and theoretical authoritarianism introduced by, and in response to, the Protestant revolt. O’Connell managed this in Ireland, between 1800 and 1814-0 ; Bishop England ( more than any other) spread the good news in the United States; McEncroe ( more than any other) in Australia But there was in all these men a pronounced tendency to mobilise the Catholic vote by an explicit appeal to a combination of national and religious loyalties very effective, when the appeal was made against the social background of penal Ireland, a warm and intimate alliance of people and priest against an invader alien in religion as well as race, and ruling, for all practical purposes, by martial law What was needed, to finish the education of the Catholic political conscience in modern industrial nation-state democracy, was a more careful disengagement of the sacred from the secular. O'Connell himself began this; it was part of his genius to see that the British Constitution as it stood, provided sufficient guarantee of the liberties of the Church, and that in New South Wales where the national issue was not tiere to complicate, there could in truth be " a free church in a free state. For a very short period in the 1830*8, the moderation of Bourke, in the civil sphere, and Polding in the eccelesiastical, seemed likely to achieve this; W.G-. Broughton assisting, in a fashion, by dividing the Protestants, at a time when open and ideological unbelief was rare. There followed, however, a period of crisis; the critical period, not only in the formation of Australian Catholicism, but in the formation of Australian civilisation as a whole. Papulation, settlement, and economic diversification, went ahead at a very rapid rate. While the Church shared in the sudden prosperity, its rulers were confronted with a building and staffing programme which imposed a severe strain on slender resources - resources the more slender in that the growth of secularism restricted state aid just when geographical scattering and the break-up of the family as a group threatened to attenuate popular allegiance to the hierarchical church. Show more