“The Evil State of Tepidity”: Mass-Going and Absenteeism in Nineteenth-Century Australian Ecclesiastical Discourse

Abstract

This paper sets out to explore how the Australian Catholic Church's perceptions of Mass-going and absenteeism evolved in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. By examining the Lenten pastorals of Archbishop John Polding of Sydney, along with various mission sermons, the paper argues that a decisive shift is discernible after the 1860s. Where previous emphasis had fallen on absenteeism as a breakdown in the individual's relationship with God, later understandings introduced a dominant ecclesial imperative: Catholics who failed to attend Mass were also weakening the Church and effectively aiding hostile secular and Protestant forces arrayed against her. This shift was itself the product of a critical transformation in the field of ecclesiastical discourse as it gravitated inexorably towards more agonistic expressions.

Speaking to a packed church at the first Redemptorist mission in Victoria in 1885, Fr Thomas O’Farrell pulled no punches. “The mission is sent to raise people from the evil state of tepidity,” he declared, “those who, as our Blessed Saviour says, are ‘neither hot nor cold.’”¹ This quotation, taken from Melbourne's Catholic newspaper, the Advocate, cannot convey the full impact of such words on the men and women who came to hear O’Farrell that morning in St Mary's church, St Kilda. The report cannot reveal, for example, the vocal tones and emphases that Redemptorists often masterfully employed to drive home their none-too-subtle truths about being a good Catholic. Unfortunately, we will never know how members of that crowded throng felt when O’Farrell had come to the end of his opening piece. But this paper is going to suggest that what he said was possibly alien to the ears of those gathered in the pews, a way of speaking about non-attendance that was relatively unfamiliar to this generation of Australian Catholics.

Quite clearly, O’Farrell did not mince his words: the “tepid” practice of one's faith, in particular failing to attend Sunday Mass, was not presented as merely lazy or neglectful, but as an “evil.” Was this a case of rhetorical hyperbole, a fiery preacher overstating his message in the heat of the moment? Actually, it is almost certain that O’Farrell, like any good Redemptorist, had chosen his words very carefully. Redemptorist literature makes it clear that sermons were meant to evoke considerable unease within a congregation, particularly among the men.² Fear — only followed later by words of hope and encouragement — was the principal means employed to get people back to church, attending Mass, receiving Holy Communion regularly, and performing all the myriad other pious acts expected of Roman Catholics. What happened in St Kilda that morning, and for the next five weeks, was novel: the first Redemptorist mission in Victoria. Nevertheless, the novelty was not to be found solely in the event, but in the discursive operations of that event. What O’Farrell said reflected the concerns of a particular ecclesiastical discourse, one which, in absolute terms, effectively merged denominational identity and cultural performance: to be a good Catholic, indeed to be Catholic, one needed to attend Mass on Sunday. As O’Farrell later made clear in the mission, failure to attend Mass did not make one merely a “bad” Catholic; rather, one was effectively weakening the Church, wounding the body of Christ. Such negligence was interpreted as an act of rebellion, even of treason against Holy Mother Church — in a word, “evil.” Yet was O’Farrell really saying something new in 1885? Hadn't the hapless pastors of earlier years similarly harangued their congregations, or absent congregations, with such verbal lashings well before O’Farrell came along?

As this paper attempts to show, there is certainly evidence that pastors could be condemnatory, even brutal, with absentees from Mass and the sacraments. Earlier discursive constructions of Mass-going in Australia did not remove the necessity nor expectation of attendance at Sunday Mass. However, it seems that pre-1860s ecclesiastical discourse generally shied away from casting the absentee as an enemy of the institution. Using one key source — Archbishop John Bede Polding's Lenten pastorals — this paper outlines the content and assumptions of these discursive constructions of Mass-going and, by corollary, the typical responses to absenteeism. However, as the 1860s progressed, ecclesiastical discourse underwent a gradual but ultimately decisive shift towards a more agonistic outlook — a worldview which understood the relationship between Church and the world as fundamentally combative and oppositional. Accounting for the emergence of this agonistic orientation among the circularity of ecclesiastical discourses within the Australian Church is a complex task. However, this paper suggests that the import of an aggressive episcopal worldview vis-à-vis mid-nineteenth-century Irish Catholicism, in tandem with a discursive idiom of persecution, were decisive factors. In such a discourse, Mass-going was constructed primarily as a marker of institutional loyalty and, by corollary, non-attendance was understood as the virtual forfeiture of membership within the Church. This discursive shift will be explored in the post-1860s Lenten pastorals of Polding, where its appearance provides a noticeable contrast with his earlier pastorals, and in the sermons of some early parish missions.

Before proceeding, the theoretical underpinnings of this paper should briefly be spelled out. In Postsocial History: An Introduction, published in 2004, Michael Cabrera boldly suggests that a “new kind of history” has progressively emerged over the last two decades, one which privileges a de-centring of “objectivism” and “subjectivism” in favour of the constitutive role of discourse.³ Whether or not one agrees with Cabrera's assessment — and a number of reviews certainly questioned his presumption of consensus among a diverse group of scholars⁴— a significant number of historians are utilising theories of discourse as a theoretical and methodological tool. Arguably this has been most evident in fields such as labour history, feminist history and eighteenth-century French history.⁵ However, there have also been some stimulating studies in the area of religious history, of which Callum Brown's The Death of Christian Britain stands as the one of the most thought-provoking and controversial contributions.⁶ This paper attempts to bring the rich explanatory potential of discourse analysis to bear upon one aspect of Australian Catholic history. The term discourse, as any cursory reading of the relevant literature will attest, is a difficult term to define clearly, partly because it possesses such a varied intellectual pedigree.⁷ In one paper, Joan W. Scott — a major figure among historians who have taken the “linguistic turn”— defined discourse as “a historically, socially, and institutionally specific structure of statements, terms, categories and beliefs.”⁸ In this sense, historians using methods of discourse analysis would argue that people always experience the world through a particular discursive regime that places limits on what can be thought or conceived. In this paper, the term ecclesiastical discourse is taken to mean the circularity of institutional discourses within the Australian Catholic Church; what is being investigated, therefore, is the way shifts and developments within ecclesiastical discourse gave rise to particular understandings of Mass-going and its discursive other, absenteeism.

Colonial Catholics and Mass Attendance

Most Catholics in early colonial Australia were not regular Mass-goers. This fact stung many ecclesiastics on first encountering conditions within the missionary Church. Writing home in 1830, for example, Polding, later archbishop of Sydney, found “the prevailing indifference” among his spiritual charges “most astonishing.”⁹ Despite the heroic labours of Polding and his small band of clergy, this situation had not markedly improved by the 1860s. Indeed, in a circular to Irish bishops in 1859, Archdeacon John McEncroe forecast dire consequences if urgent action was not taken. “If a timely supply of good priests and teachers is not provided for Australia,” warned McEncroe, “we shall have to weep over the falling off of hundreds if not thousands from the faith in Australia.”¹⁰ There is ample evidence that the situation was much the same in other dioceses. When the Jesuits took charge of the Richmond mission (diocese of Melbourne) in 1866, Fr Edward Nolan reported that many of the Catholics living in the mission never attended Mass on Sunday.¹¹ In late 1868, a small group of Christian Brothers arrived in Melbourne and immediately set about providing education for Catholic boys. Writing to his superior general in early 1869, Brother P. A. Treacy made similar observations. “You have scarcely any idea of the religious ignorance and indifference here among the boys,” he wrote; “Remaining away from Mass on Sunday is an ordinary occurrence.”

Available statistical sources for the nineteenth century confirm the extraordinary level of absenteeism among Catholics. For example, in his study of religion in Australia, the sociologist Hans Mol used the Victorian Statistical Registers to determine the percentages of adherents attending church in the major denominations in that colony. For Catholics, the percentage “usually attending” in 1861 was 20.08%. In 1871 the percentage “usually attending principal service” was a mere 23.13%, reaching only 34.31% by 1881.¹² The New South Wales Statistical Registers pointed to similar trends for Catholics: those “numbers of persons generally attending public worship” in 1861 came to 22.9%, and in 1871, 35.7%. In 1881, the figure stood at 30.22%, though “attendance” was not actually defined.¹³ Taking a closer look at the NSW returns, Walter Phillips has questioned Mol's treatment of the figures. Though Phillips argues that the returns are a reliable source, he suggests that Catholic figures before 1893 were lower than expected since they included children under fourteen. Indeed, the problem of determining at what precise age an individual qualified as an “adherent” introduced a degree of statistical anomaly not unrecognised by both the various denominations and the government censor. In a revised set of figures, Phillips maintains that Catholic adherence in 1870 was closer to 40.1%, falling to 33.4% in 1880.¹⁴ Despite the difficulties of accurate interpretation, such figures do provide a picture roughly consistent with the experience of churchmen in the field.

Why was there such a high level of absenteeism? Failure to attend Mass could easily be counted as a moral failing on the part of the laity, but bishops and clergy found that the situation was hardly so simple. In his early missionary journeys, Polding encountered evident goodwill among the people. In a letter written to one “Dr Brown” in 1838, Polding described his impressions of Catholics in the Illawarra region, south of Sydney: “whatever may be the vices of this people, you are consoled in their reverence for the clergy, and their extreme desire to attend Mass.”¹⁵ However, it was not uncommon for visiting bishops to be greeted with indulgent displays of affection, accompanied by large numbers at Masses. The bishop was often regarded as a celebrity and the laity were naturally keen to make a good impression. The fact that these episcopal visits evidently made little impact on the Mass-going habits of the laity did not render such displays merely facile or even calculating. It pointed, rather, to the complex psychological and attitudinal make-up of colonial Catholics. They were, as Gregory Haines has remarked, “greatly given to drink and yet great supporters of temperance movements. They were over-represented both in the gaols and the police force. The poor gave and the rich withheld; the priest was reverenced and ignored in the same day.”¹⁶ Indeed, there is certainly evidence of struggles between groups of lay Catholics and episcopal authority. Margaret Pawsey, for example, has detailed the bitter wrangling between some sections of the laity and Melbourne's Bishop Goold in the 1850s and 60s.¹⁷ Catholics in the mid-to-late nineteenth century were perhaps less inclined to quietly “pray, pay and obey” than their twentieth-century counterparts. But other critical factors were at work.

An extraordinary shortage of priests always undermined the missionary efforts of the nineteenth-century Church. In his study of Catholicism in colonial New South Wales, James Waldersee showed that the ratio of priest to people in 1841 was one to 1,320. In 1850, it was one priest to every 1,500 Catholics and this situation had not significantly improved by 1860.¹⁸ Ruth Schumann's study of piety in colonial South Australia revealed a ratio of 1 priest to 955.6 Catholics in 1871.¹⁹ However, it was not simply a matter of manpower. Bishops always struggled to find suitable priests who were up to the challenge of missionary work. For some, the hard life, isolation and lack of support proved too much. Again, Schumann provides figures which are telling: between 1844 and 1900, 138 priests were recruited for the diocese of Adelaide, but of these, sixty-seven eventually left — a 49% attrition rate. Compared to the period 1900 to 1944, when only four priests of forty recruited left, such statistics point to the evident instability of priesthood during the colonial period.²⁰ Such instability undermined the capacity of the missionary Church to provide adequate sacramental ministry.

The task of the priest was further hampered by colonial demographics. Significant numbers of Catholics lived in scattered settlements across the country. Furthermore, given the shortage of priests, many country missions covered enormous areas. Such a situation meant that priests were not always able to celebrate a weekly Mass for some country centres. For example, in the archdiocese of Melbourne, the c. 1886 mission return for Kyneton detailed three churches where Mass was celebrated.²¹ At the main church in Kyneton itself, the priest indicated that Mass was celebrated each day and twice on Sunday. However, at St Ambrose's in Woodend, Mass had been celebrated just sixteen times in the previous year, and only eight times during the previous year at St Lawrence's in Redesdale.²² Even in some missions closer to Melbourne, the priest was forced to rationalise Masses. The c. 1890 mission return for Dandenong listed around 2,000 Catholics. The mission itself covered a large area embracing Dandenong, Cranbourne, Berwick, Pakenham, Frankston, Hastings, Balnarring, Sorrento, and Ferntree Gully. For the ten churches in this mission, the priest indicated that Mass was celebrated three times a month in four churches, once a month in three churches and at irregular periods in the remaining.²³

Condemnation and Consolation

To this point, the paper has suggested that significant numbers of Catholics were not attending Mass regularly in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. It would be easy to assume that such a phenomenon revealed the irreligious nature of colonial Catholics: that they were nominal at best and hostile at worst. However, there can be no self-evident interpretation that allows a simple correlation between absenteeism and religiosity. Rather, how absenteeism was determined, how it was understood and what concerns were attached to it pointed to a complex discursive operation, specific to a particular time and place. The fact that Polding and other ecclesiastics read absenteeism as a grave problem reflected a dominant assumption within nineteenth-century ecclesiastical discourse, one that brought together Mass-going/absenteeism and religiosity as mutually interdependent objects. To explore how they were conceptually juxtaposed and what variable meanings were attached to them, this paper draws upon one useful source.

The pastoral letter represented a key medium of communication between the bishop and his flock. According to Gregory Haines, the pastoral letter “was a recognised and commonly used instrument by which a bishop promulgated and defended Catholic doctrine, regulated his Church, and applied his teaching to and expressed his concern for the circumstances and needs of his people.”²⁴ It was, above all, a teaching medium. Crucially, it was not only accessible to those who could read. In fact, pastoral letters were often read out and explained from pulpits in most churches across a given diocese. This paper focuses on the Lenten pastorals of John Polding, written from the 1830s right up to the 1870s. In some senses, they are clearly unique: a strong Benedictine spirituality flowed through them, testifying to Polding's own monastic and contemplative sensibilities, and their consistent use of Scripture set them apart from more typical episcopal texts of the nineteenth century. Yet the discursive constructions of Mass-going found within them are not untypical of bishops in Australia before the 1860s. Though the thematic focus was always Lent, Polding addressed a number of wide-ranging topics — catechetical instruction of children, education, family, and so on — that touched upon the practical concerns of the laity. Most importantly for our purposes, Polding also consistently addressed the problem of “indifference” specifically in relation to attendance at Mass and the sacraments.

Within these pastorals, there was no shortage of harsh judgement meted out to those negligent in their “religious duties.” In his Lenten pastoral of 1837, Polding tackled the problem of indifference head on. “Are there not very many,” he lamented, “who live in systematic contempt of the ordinances of Religion, whom we have repeatedly exhorted to return to the practices of a Christian life, to throw off their habits of criminal indulgence and indolence?” At times, Polding seemed to be altogether overcome by the general apathy of his flock. “In bitterness of heart,” he wrote in 1840, “survey that large period of your life you have passed in neglect of your religious duties. O in that vast extent are there not numberless crimes to be atoned for.”²⁵ Indeed, in his 1858 pastoral, those who flouted the law of abstinence he labelled “false Christians.”²⁶ Yet despite the veracity of these admonitions, Polding often couched them within a more pastoral frame. If the harsh word was spoken, it was often mollified by the soft. So, in his 1837 pastoral, Polding spilt much ink describing how “the world and its business usurp that place in our hearts which God should occupy; hence indifference to prayer, hence neglect of attendance at Mass, hence years follow each other in rapid succession, and the Sacraments are not received.” Yet, in a consciously self-reflexive move, he later wrote,

Dearly beloved we will not speak to you in the language of recrimination and reproof; rather, we will entreat you in all affectionate solicitude for your welfare, — to take up the yoke of the Lord with a willing mind and cheerful heart, that you may experience its sweetness.²⁷

In his 1852 pastoral, Polding sought to rouse the people “from a state of indifference” by reminding them of their mortality: “Death, Judgement, Hell and Eternity! These are the awful realities of our existence, to which we are hastening rapidly.” Yet the soft words followed: “And we announce them, not to inspire fear or dismay, but rather hope and consolation, for the Church assures us this is the acceptable time.”²⁸ Such an approach was wholly typical of the homiletical tactics later associated with the Redemptorists and other missionary orders in Australia: first mortal fear, then the possibility of consolation and deliverance through the Church's sacramental system. For Polding, what the Church ultimately offered was hope: “Let the church be a place of rest for your wearied thoughts and a participation in the assemblies of the faithful your chief consolation.”²⁹

A fundamental observation can be made at this point. Within Polding's early pastorals, the “sin” of absenteeism and non-practice was a sin against God. For Polding, the failure to attend Mass and the sacraments, along with the penitential exercises of the Lenten season, was symptomatic of a breakdown in the relationship between the individual believer and God. It was God who was offended and, accordingly, it was God who required the necessary return to religious duty. In his 1840 pastoral, Polding wrote, “Acknowledging, therefore, that we have sinned . . . earnestly implore that the wrath and indignation of God may be turned away from us.” Sincere repentance through the performance of religious duties was the answer: “let us not forget that it is our duty to make use of the means of Grace, purchased for us at the price of the blood of Jesus, and applied to our souls in the Holy Sacraments.”³⁰ Similarly, Polding opened his 1844 pastoral by declaring that “we have sinned and grievously offended against our God.” The remedy was found in the return to religious practice and observance:

The inhabitants of Nineveh were not more guilty than we are: as therefore they found mercy, because they humbled themselves in fasting and in prayer, so may we hope that we shall be spared, if we faithfully comply with the penitential exercises of this holy time.³¹

The return to religious practice, then, was a matter of individual concern — the “care” of one's “own soul” and its eternal fate.

Where did “the Church” as a discursive object fit into this picture? Clearly, it was the channel of grace, the provider of the sacramental system necessary for salvation. Yet the state of the early nineteenth-century Church, with its manifest shortage of priests and problems of clerical discipline, its primitive or provisional infrastructure, and the absence of various parish ministries and structures, as we have seen, allowed it to provide only the barest forms of sacramental ministry. Indeed, before the late nineteenth century, one can only speak of an “institution” in the most generalised of terms. Early ecclesiastical discourse seemed sensitive to these limitations as it constructed notions of absenteeism: in the absence of supporting institutional structures, the emphasis was placed on the duties of the Catholic to God. The role of the Church, discursively speaking, was to reach out, to “implore,” to condemn but also to console, bringing the faithful back into a right relationship with God. Polding's early pastorals recognised the lowly state of the Church. “Though the state of the Church in these countries is so deplorable, that we cannot restrain our tears,” he wrote in 1840; “yet in the assurance that the mercies of the Lord are not exhausted in our regard, we have hope that we shall find help from him in the appointed time.” Perhaps it was for this very reason that his calls to repentance and religious practice were often presented as the Church “entreating” the faithful. “We entreat you, dearly beloved,” he wrote in 1851, “to comply with your duties in the name of our dear Saviour Jesus Christ.”³² Towards the end of his 1852 pastoral, he wrote,

And in conclusion, we address ourselves in all fatherly solicitude to you, dearly beloved, who have lived long in habits of sin . . . do not, we entreat you, continue in a state which renders all that your Saviour has suffered for you . . . fruitless.³³

There is also evidence that ecclesiastical discourse envisaged the Church, through the ministry of her priests, as rescuer of the nominal and negligent. After gathering in their second synod in 1862, for example, the Australian bishops issued a pastoral letter to all the clergy. It was particularly concerned with correcting irresponsible financial dealings among the clergy, but, significantly, it also urged the priest to be mindful of ministering to the “spiritually poor.” Priests were exhorted to give greatest consideration to

the uninstructed, the distant, the careless, the corrupted, the thousands of human souls that in these countries, from one cause or another, never see a priest, never receive sacrament, and uninstructed, uncared for, live and die without the consolations of religion.³⁴

When this synod met, however, ecclesiastical discourse was already in the process of evolving towards a far more agonistic outlook, an outlook that would result in very different discursive constructions of Mass-going and absenteeism. But why the shift?

The Ascendancy of an Agonistic Discourse

Part of the answer rests with the Catholic Church in Ireland. Emmet Larkin's thesis that Irish Catholicism underwent a “devotional revolution” in the second half of the nineteenth century has largely stood the test of time, despite being seriously challenged by Patrick Corish, Desmond Keenan, and, more recently, Thomas McGrath.³⁵ Before the famine, lay Catholic attachment to the institutional Church was relatively weak, resulting as much from the inadequate state of church property and quality of the clergy than from lay indifference. However, following significant social changes in the aftermath of the Great Famine, in tandem with Cardinal Paul Cullen's wide-ranging ecclesiastical reforms, Larkin maintains that “the great mass of the Irish people became practicing Catholics.” Sean Connolly has supported Larkin's findings in his own study of pre-famine Irish Catholicism:

In the second half of the nineteenth century, at a time when churchmen elsewhere were coming to terms with falling church attendance, and a growth in popular indifference, Irish Catholics moved in the opposite direction, developing . . . remarkable levels of religious practice.³⁶

Mass attendance figures have been used to support this thesis, principally through the work of David Miller. Most recently, Miller has maintained that figures for Mass attendance in 1834 — a year when the “Commissioners of Public Instruction” conducted comprehensive surveys — yielded a 43% attendance rate for Catholics.³⁷ This stands in stark contrast to figures in the post-famine Church upwards of 80–90%. Most significantly, this devotional revolution coincided with the gradual “Irishing” of episcopal leadership within the Australian Church. So, from the late 1850s and 60s, the Irish bishops began dominating the episcopal scene — men such as James Quinn in Brisbane (1859), his brother Matthew Quinn in Bathurst (1865), James Murray in Maitland (1865), William Lanigan in Goulburn (1867) and, importantly, Francis Moran, archbishop, later cardinal, of Sydney (1884). They were proteges of Cullen, products of the post-famine Irish Church: conservative, uncompromising, confident and combative, true hard-liners. O’Farrell notes that such aggression was part of the “temper of the Irish Church” in its post-famine guise, and its transference to the Australian Church manifested itself in “a conviction that the job of such priests was not merely to minister but to redeem. Theirs was a war against indifference, neglect, sin, heresy, sensuality and seculardom.”³⁸

Some of these characters were undoubtedly big personalities, formidable ecclesiastics. However, it was the worldview they brought with them — the discursive lens through which they understood their new surroundings — which proved decisive. They were the products of an aggressive ecclesiastical milieu, in which the role of discourse was fundamental to Cullen's ultramontane project. In Ireland, Lawrence Taylor argues that discourse functioned as a powerful ally in the growing institutionalisation of Irish religion in the latter nineteenth century.³⁹ This discourse was a “middle-class Victorian one,” not unlike counterparts in Protestant England or America, yet anchored to a “particular institutional matrix — that of the Irish Catholic Church.” According to Taylor, this discourse — which he explored through the annals of the Irish Catholic Directories, published annually from 1836 — alternated between an “idiom of opposition and persecution” and an “idiom of empire.” At times, the idiom of persecution was found dominant, involving “the constant iteration of the theme of British oppression and the subsequent moral opposition and superiority of the Irish Catholic people and church.” However, as the Catholic Church consolidated its position within Irish society in the latter nineteenth century, Taylor argues that the idiom of empire predominated. “Not only could the hierarchy provide an alternative state to British Ireland,” he writes, “they could also claim to lead an alternative world empire. If Australia was a British colony, then Catholic Australia was increasingly an Irish dominion.”⁴⁰ According to O’Farrell, the Irish bishops carried this vision of an “Irish spiritual empire” with them. Such a vision manifested particular emphases within ecclesiastical discourse in the Australian Church. In one sense, it represented a vision of a renewed Church, strong and vibrant, liberated, consisting of a deep and abiding religiosity. “They would build, in Australia,” O’Farrell argued, “a new, free Ireland, a religious realm in which the piety and fervour they knew so well in old Ireland would experience an ennobling, transforming liberation.”⁴¹ Yet it also added an increasingly intransigent dimension to ecclesiastical discourse: secular society was often cast as the enemy, ready to extinguish the faith at any and every opportunity. The emergence of a more agonistically oriented discourse within the Australian Church was not limited to the circularity of dominant discourses coming out of nineteenth-century Irish Catholicism. As will be evident with Polding's later pastorals, papal antipathies towards modernity, most evident in the pontificate of Pius IX, also proved influential (and were of course closely interconnected with Irish Catholicism through Cullen). But one must also account for how agonistic discourse interacted with political developments in the colonies themselves. What seems clear is that one area of colonial policy proved particularly troublesome: education. Furthermore, how the Australian Church understood the motivations and consequences of this policy pointed to the dominance of a discursive idiom of persecution.

Early in the nineteenth century, colonial governments had provided aid to churches, working on the premise that they represented a much-needed civilising influence. Colonial governments also funded church or denominational schools in the absence of a comprehensive state-run system. From mid-century, however, significant changes were afoot. The gold rushes of the 1850s transformed the Australian colonies, trebling the continent's population in the space of a decade. This was most marked in Victoria where in Melbourne, for example, the population jumped from 23,000 in 1851 to 125,000 by the close of the 1850s.⁴² Such an influx of population represented a blessing and a curse: the Victorian government found itself in possession of a much larger tax base, but its resources and urban infrastructure were stretched to the limit. It was during this period that state aid to religion was gradually phased out. More importantly, the rapid increase in population had revealed the incapacity of the denominational system to meet the new challenge. In the early 1840s, colonial governments had already determined that a parallel national system of education was required, and this was achieved by the end of the decade. Though denominational schools continued to be funded, the 1850s suggested to many that the maintenance of two systems was inherently wasteful. South Australia was the first colony to institute a single educational board for both systems, and other colonies followed suit in the 1850s and 60s.⁴³ But the fate of the denominational system emerged as the key political issue during the 1860s. Very significantly, Michael Hogan writes that during this decade debate over denominational schools began to run explicitly along sectarian lines.⁴⁴ Earlier division had usually witnessed churchmen vs. liberal politicians. But when Protestants could see that the denominational system was a lost cause and that it worked to the benefit of Catholics, many threw their support behind the more liberal position. By the end of the 1860s, the writing was on the wall. The first blow was struck in Victoria, with the withdrawal of state aid in 1872. Other colonies soon followed. Through the lens of agonistic discourse, the Australian Church “read” this shift in policy as a blatant form of persecution.

The hierarchy had long maintained the necessity of a separate schooling system specifically to nourish the faith of Catholics. The removal of state aid not only confirmed their conviction that the state could not be trusted, the ensuing sectarian animus also suggested that mainstream Protestant society was fundamentally opposed to Catholic interests. However, the vehemence of language found in official Church documents cannot be explained merely as a response to colonial policy. Rather, colonial policy was being framed and understood by the Church within a categorical matrix that already cast the institution as the object of persecution. Such language stressed a Church under siege. For example, in the First Plenary Council of Australian bishops, convened in 1885, the necessity of maintaining a separate education system rested upon a sense of clear and present danger. Statute 14 read:

Parents shall make it their business, so far as it is possible, to have their children, frequent Catholic schools — whether primary, intermediate, or university. We know by a sad experience how easily the precious gift of faith, which we all carry in frail vessels, may be lost forever. It is difficult for youth to preserve it intact, considering their inclination to evil, and the dangers surrounding them. Let the priest oppose, by all means in his power, all attempts of the enemies of our faith to influence Catholics to send their children to heterodox schools.⁴⁵

But a separate education system represented one, albeit the most critical, aspect of this more agonistic outlook. Mixed marriages, which had been initially tolerated in some sections of the Church, were now condemned outright. This condemnation rested on the perceived danger such a marriage posed to the faith of any children. In their pastoral letter following the Second Plenary Council in 1895, the bishops held that “the Protestant parent for the most part does not conceal his contempt for his wife's religion; frequently he does his worst to make his children despise it as well.”⁴⁶ Clearly, then, while political and social developments in the colonies did not result in the production of agonistic discourse within the Church, they were nevertheless instrumental in how the discursive idiom of persecution was progressively articulated.

Such an agonistic ecclesiastical discourse constructed Mass-going and absenteeism in new ways. Certainly the admonitions appeared harsher. The pastoral letter of the First Plenary Council declared that “the Catholic who, unless prevented by a serious obstacle, absents himself from Mass on a Sunday or holiday, is guilty of a grievous sin.”⁴⁷ The Catechism of Christian Doctrine, the first catechism specifically adapted for Australia by the Second and Third Plenary Councils, emphasised that failure to attend Mass on Sunday through one's own fault represented nothing less than a mortal sin.⁴⁸ However, such admonitions were not especially new. What was new was the very strong ecclesial imperative now attached to Mass-going. If earlier constructions of Mass-going had emphasised religious duty as a duty to God, it was now as much a duty to Church and community. Indeed, Mass-going became fundamentally a marker of loyalty to the institution itself. This central notion led to a number of critical emphases within discursive constructions of Mass-going. Stress on the penalties of non-attendance often received equal if not more treatment than extolling the benefits of attendance. Secondly, the absentee was presented as having forfeited their Catholic identity. In this discursive world, Mass-going, along with sending one's children to a Catholic school and marrying other Catholics, effectively defined what is meant to be Catholic. In terms of Mass-going, you didn't attend Mass because you were Catholic; rather, you were Catholic because you attended Mass. In its more extreme manifestations, agonistic ecclesiastical discourse could construct the absentee as a rebel, a traitor, one who through their absence from Mass and religious duties had put themselves in the enemy camp of secularism.

Before examining particular examples of such discursive constructions, an important qualifying point should be made. The advent of a more agonistic orientation within ecclesiastical discourse in the latter nineteenth century did not represent either its first expression or its complete domination within Australian Catholic culture. Within ecclesiastical discourse, the understood relationship between the Church and the world or society often gravitated towards particular polarities: from the more integrative, at one end of the spectrum, to the more agonistic at the other. As discourse moved towards a more integrative outlook, it tended to stress the role of the Church “in” the world, the transformation of culture. Often the task of the Church was expressed in more evangelistic terms; it privileged an ecumenical and co-operative outlook. However, as discourse moved towards a more agonistic worldview, it tended to stress the role of the Church “against” the world; the Church was often presented as defensive and combative, but also triumphalist. Though Taylor identifies “empire” and “persecution” as two different idioms, they are both essentially agonistic in orientation. The agonistic outlook also tended to privilege a sectarian stance — indeed, in its more extreme manifestations, it could even welcome it as a powerful unifying force among its own. In the early nineteenth-century Church, one can find evidence of both integrative and agonistic expressions within ecclesiastical discourse, and variations in their expression from colony to colony. Yet, as the nineteenth century wore on, ecclesiastical discourse gravitated inexorably towards a more agonistic outlook. Integrative expressions did not entirely disappear. To take just one example, the pastoral letter of the Second Plenary Council could note that “Observant visitors to these colonies have been struck by the consideration which the Catholic Church everywhere enjoys,” and later go on to declare that

outside the pale of the Church the Australian people have declared themselves so far on the side of secularism. They favour secularism in the press; they have established secularism in the school; they connive at secularism in all departments of national economy.⁴⁹

Often, integrative and agonistic orientations existed in tension, even contradiction. So what did these more agonistic constructions of Mass-going look like? We begin with the later Lenten pastorals of John Polding.

Wicked Catholics and Soldiers of Christ

In Polding's 1860 pastoral, there is already evidence of a subtle shift in discursive constructions of Mass-going and absenteeism. After opening with a discussion of “indifference” and its dangers to the Christian vocation, Polding added the following note: “Think, too, again, Dearly Beloved, of your relation to the Church, which is the mystical body of Christ, and find in it, if you can, anything to excuse indifference and cowardice of Christian perfection.”⁵⁰ Later, Polding related the necessity of religious duties to the building up of the Church in Australia. “Men are ready enough to see that we are placed at the foundations of an empire,” he claimed, “are you, are Catholics, as ready to see that we assist at the foundations of a Church?” Here the needs of the Church were assuming prime importance.

As the 1860s progressed, Polding's admonitions to the negligent seemed more pointed. The alternating leitmotif was still present: the harsh word was followed by the soft, but the harsh words appeared harsher. “Here, if anywhere, the warning of Jesus holds,” he wrote in 1862; “‘He who is not with me is against me’. Between worship and contempt lies your choice, there is no mean.”⁵¹ This harsher line was expressed alongside increasing references to the perils of state education, mixed marriages and the hapless position of Pope Pius IX. So in his 1868 pastoral, for example, Polding noted the “tide of irreligious education that is sweeping over the land.” He saw as “frightful” the “tendency to indifference in the offspring of mixed marriage.” And in the inevitable loss of the pope's temporal domain, Pius IX was suffering “spoilation, and scorn, and torture.”⁵² Enemies were everywhere — and “worldly” Catholics were among them. The pope's losing battle involved a struggle against “the fashion of the world, the philosophy of the world, the hate of all infidels, and a majority of non-Catholics, the dislike and scorn of the lukewarm and worldly amongst Catholics themselves.” Herein lay the rub: the greater the persecution against the Church, the greater the responsibilities of Catholics to resist its tide — and the greater the negligence of those who didn't.

In the context of such perceived persecution, Mass-going and the performance of religious duties among the faithful were constructed as ecclesial imperatives. The negligent were not just a danger to themselves and their souls, but a profound danger to the embattled Church. Polding's 1869 pastoral best illustrates the discursive operations of this perception. The entire pastoral set out to compare the persecutions of the early Christians and the present Church in Australia. “These early Christians lived surrounded by the chaos of doubt and dispute that enveloped the mighty Heathen world,” he declared; “we are encompassed by the doubts and discussions of infidels and sectaries.”⁵³ What was the answer to this malaise? For Polding, it was nothing less than a strong spirit of mutual charity and unity within the body of Christ:

I know no remedy so practical as that spirit of mutual charity which we ought to inherit from our earliest fathers in the faith. And how did they sustain this spirit? Primarily by assiduity at the Holy Sacrifice, by a frequent communion, by realising in their thoughts and habits the great fact, that Christians are one body in Christ.⁵⁴

Crucially, then, the absentee was weakening this body, even at its very head. “Catholics of half-heart, hiding their faith in cowardice and human respect” were keeping “Peter in prison.”⁵⁵ In future pastorals, this emphasis was put in no uncertain terms. “You know that when our Lord's Church is called a body, we are using no mere figure of speech,” he stressed in his 1870 pastoral, “but that, as truly as correct as corrupt ulcers disfigures and sickens the whole body, so do impenitent, wicked, worldly, formal Catholics deface and enervate the Church.”⁵⁶ In his 1872 pastoral, he adopted an explicitly militaristic tone:

Every Catholic, every Soldier of Christ, to the duties of his own station. If he find that he has not fulfilled those duties, I care not how humble, how unimportant they may seem in the world's estimate, let him know and acknowledge that he himself is, so far, a support and encouragement to the foes of the Holy See, of the Church of Christ.⁵⁷

One should note certain continuities within the entire corpus of Polding's Lenten pastorals, perhaps somewhat obscured by my select quotation. There remained something of the compassionate pastor who demonstrated a strong awareness of the human foibles and weaknesses of his flock. “A literal, servile acquiescence is utterly out of place,” he cautioned in his 1873 pastoral. “His precepts are not penal laws; they are the very guiding hand of our Creator and our Father.”⁵⁸ Yet the appearance of a more agonistic orientation in his later pastorals is unmistakable. While many historians have rightly stressed the clash of ecclesiastical visions between Polding and the Irish bishops, Benedictine vs. Irish Catholicism, there was also much common ground. Indeed, in the evolution of increasingly agonistic forms of ecclesiastical discourse, it is perhaps more apt to note differences in degree rather than kind.

Medium and Message

Though relatively little has been written about parish missions in Australian Catholicism, they remain an intriguing and central feature of pre-Vatican II Catholic culture.⁵⁹ In an influential book about the parish mission in American Catholicism, Jay Dolan argued that missions were essentially “revival meetings,” much like their Protestant counterparts, manifesting a strong evangelical tone with its corresponding emphasis on personal conversion and the expression of highly affective religious sentiments. Unlike its Protestant cousin, however, the Catholic revival meeting represented what Dolan has termed “sacramental evangelicalism.” Accordingly to Dolan, “Catholic revivalism blended the gospel of evangelicalism with the ritual of the sacraments; the end result was a sacramental evangelicalism.”⁶⁰ In terms of this paper, the parish mission represents an especially interesting object of inquiry. Clearly, through its sermons and instructions, it is a useful source for investigating the operations of ecclesiastical discourse. But it is also the event itself which is highly significant. The degree to which a given discourse effectively conditions and shapes cultural perceptions and sensibilities rests on what scholars term a base of discursivity, meaning the sum total of interlocking mediums — modes of print, events and ritual performances, customs, even physical structures, and so on — through which discourse is communicated.⁶¹ Before the mid-to-late nineteenth century, we cannot really speak of a strong base of discursivity within the Australian Church. Up to the 1860s, and perhaps even into the 1880s, Australian Catholicism represented, as K. T. Livingston writes, the ministry to “a wide, scattered population, carried on by individual, itinerant priests.”⁶² Yet from the late nineteenth century, a network of various agencies of ecclesiastical discourse emerged: more newspapers, devotional magazines, the establishment of sodalities and confraternities, along with other sporting, charitable and social voluntary associations, a rapidly expanding Catholic school system, and an enormous building program. The presence of these mediums constituted a strong base of discursivity. In many senses, the Australian Church was, discursively speaking, “invented” during the latter nineteenth century, since any institution is fundamentally an imagined community — not unreal, but, rather, a product of various discursive operations.

The parish mission was a particularly efficacious medium, not only because it effectively communicated a discourse which stressed institutional expressions of loyalty, but because the very event itself functioned as a discursive practice which contributed to the creation of the institution — the Church — as an object of visibility and, hence, power. According to Dolan, the mission “served to strengthen the community and promote the consolidation of the institutional Church.”⁶³ And Lawrence Taylor argues that “the missioner demonstrated priesthood as domination and, more generally, the overwhelming cultural power of the encroaching institutional world.” He goes on to suggest that “in the process, of course, the specific language of the sermon — a particularly inflamed and romanized version of institutional church discourse — was empowered.”⁶⁴ In the parish mission, then, we see the discursive coalescence of medium and message.

Dolan's study indicates that parish missions in the US were rare before 1850; after 1850, they “quickly became the accepted technique of the evangelisation of Catholics.”⁶⁵ In Australia, parish missions were relatively infrequent before the 1880s. Certainly bishops and secular clergy conducted ad hoc missions in the course of their itinerant pastoral work, but they were a far cry from the extraordinary occasion later recognised as a parish mission. This distinctive event became the work of religious orders that specialised in revival-style ministry. The Jesuits had conducted missions since their arrival in Australia in 1848, but three orders in particular were central: the Redemptorists from 1882, the Vincentians from 1885, and the Passionists from 1887.⁶⁶

One can track the growth in parish missions in Victoria, for example, by tabulating reports of missions found in the Advocate.⁶⁷ Generally speaking, in the latter nineteenth century, parish missions were novel enough to be comprehensively listed and described in Catholic newspapers. Of course, as they later became part and parcel of the parish landscape, newspapers ceased to report them. However, at least as far as the Advocate is concerned, reports continued rolling in until the early twentieth century. The Advocate began publication in 1868, and between this date and 1870, it listed twenty-five missions, conducted predominantly by the bishop and secular clergy. Between 1871 and 1875, forty-one missions were listed — over half the work of the bishop and secular clergy. Between 1876 and 1880, sixty-three missions were listed, but a shift in personnel is discernible. During this period, the bishop and secular clergy conducted eighteen of these missions, while the Jesuits and other orders conducted the remaining listed — the task of parish missions was emerging as a specialised role of the religious clergy. Between 1881 and 1885, 136 missions were reported: the Jesuits conducted thirty-four, the Carmelites, thirty-six, and the well-known Rev. Patrick Hennebery conducted forty-one.⁶⁸ Most significantly, from 1885, the Redemptorists starting conducting missions in Victoria and they emerged as the principal missionary order within the Church. From 1887 the Vincentians were also active within Victoria. So, between 1886 and 1890, the Advocate reported 159 missions — the Redemptorists taking ninety-two and the Vincentians taking twenty-eight. The period 1891–1995 witnessed the high point: 301 missions reported, with the Redemptorists taking a staggering 209. No missions by secular clergy were listed. Finally, up to the year 1900, the Advocate reported 190 missions, with the Redemptorists taking 126 and the Vincentians, forty-eight. This flurry of missionary activity from the 1880s suggests that the importance attached to the parish mission by episcopal leadership was paramount.⁶⁹ In the remainder of this paper, analysis of a few mission sermons provides further insights into the workings of agonistic ecclesiastical discourse.

At an instruction for men, delivered at the first Redemptorist mission in Victoria, Fr O’Farrell spoke about the relationship between “Catholic sons” and their “mother, the Catholic Church.” His sermon was full of language that emphasised “duty” and “prompt obedience to her Commandments.” However, the reporter was evidently struck by one of O’Farrell's phrases: “One telling hit made by the preacher was when he alluded to those cowardly sons of the church who are Catholic from Sunday till Thursday, and who cease to be Catholics at the Friday's dinner.”⁷⁰ There is certainly a hint of rhetorical hyperbole in these words, but this sort of language was carefully and purposely phrased for a male audience. O’Farrell seized on words that stung: those men who neglected their religious duties were “cowardly sons.” Earlier O’Farrell had declared that men had a duty “to undertake fearlessly the defence of their Church and its doctrines when attacked either by governments or private individuals.” From one point of view, equating the manly defence of the Church with abstaining from meat on Friday appears extreme, but agonistic discourse centred on the startling juxtaposition of words and notions. Such juxtapositions — the evil of tepidity, for example — operated both as a shock technique and a clear, if harsh, message: even the smallest acts of obedience were fundamentally constitutive of Catholic identity. True Catholics performed their religious duties faithfully; those who didn't were barely Catholic at all.

Missions that were run by other orders manifested the same discursive operations. For example, in September 1885, the Carmelites conducted a mission in the parish of West Melbourne. At the evening sermon on the opening day, Very Reverend Prior Joseph Butler spoke about “dependence on God.” According to the correspondent:

Fr. Butler said we belonged to God by creation, fatherhood and redemption. These rights over us we could not shake off. Men said: “Let me live as I like; I do not want religion; I want to be let alone.” Even Catholics were heard to say: “I do not want confession at Communion; I do not want to be bothered; I want to live quietly.” But if we belonged to God there were obligations which we were bound to fulfil towards him . . .⁷¹

This stress on obligation prefaced a very clear judgement on those who failed in their duties: “We must either willingly serve God with the saints,” Butler declared, “or be the unwilling victims of His anger with the rebel angels in hell.”⁷² Butler's use of the word “rebel” angels was typical of the militaristic connotations found in agonistic discourse. The message was clear: those who were negligent in their duties were rebelling against God and Church. Indeed, the mission itself became a marker of loyalty to the institution, virtually compelling attendance. Delivering the opening sermon at a mission in Williamstown in February 1889, the Vincentian priest, Fr. James Hanly, described the mission as an opportunity for “rooting out from their [parishioners] hearts the cockle of sin.”⁷³ According to Hanly, parishioners were therefore expected “to apply themselves with all earnestness to the exercises of the mission.” His point was made clear by a simple anecdote. According to the correspondent:

As an example of what some did, he mentioned a case that occurred at a place near Kyneton, where he was engaged giving a mission a few months ago. A man who lived twenty-seven miles from the church with his wife and family attended every service during the mission. They had come from their home in the bush in a covered wagon, in which they had bedding and everything necessary for them during their stay. There was no valid excuse for anyone absenting himself.⁷⁴

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the Advocate reported that the mission was a resounding success.

***

In The Catholic Church and Community in Australia, Patrick O’Farrell drew attention to a valuable documentary source. In 1933, one J. M. Cusack had written an article entitled “Australia's Future” for the journal Manly.⁷⁵ This essay later appeared in O’Farrell's compilation of church documents.⁷⁶ In the piece, Cusack warned that overflowing church congregations and flourishing sodalities actually concealed a sizeable “number of careless Catholics . . . far beyond my gravest thoughts.” Cusack explained how he quizzed some of his colleagues about the situation, only to have his suspicions confirmed — large numbers of Catholics were staying away from Mass. In Cusack's view, such a phenomenon was evidence that the “ship was sinking.”“Seeing the evil,” he declared, “we ask what is the remedy?” Now O’Farrell was interested in using this source to open up the “great discrepancy that may exist between Catholic principles and the behaviour of a substantial proportion of Catholics.” To this end, it remains a rich source. Yet the historian interested in discourse would interrogate the source in quite a different way. Why, for example, did Cusack think of absenteeism as an “evil”? What body of knowledge underpinned such an apparently extreme response? Why, indeed, would Cusack see in only a minority of absentees a Church in real trouble?

This paper has argued that such sensibilities can be traced back to the emergence of a more agonistic ecclesiastical discourse in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Where absenteeism was previously constructed as an individual failing, a breakdown in the relationship between the believer and God, later discourse added a strong ecclesial imperative to this understanding: the absentee was also a danger to the Church, a thorn in the side of the body of Christ. In such a discursive regime, the absentee practically ceased to be Catholic, apparently beholden to the lures of a hostile, secular society. It was from within this discursive regime, therefore, that someone like Cusack could be so alarmed by a relatively low level of absenteeism. There is evidence that such understandings persisted right up to the Second Vatican Council. But did Australian Catholics come to share the constructions of Mass-going found within this particular discourse? It is one thing to discuss a shift in ecclesiastical discourse, it is quite another to gauge the responses of the laity. For the historian, this is not just a matter of statistical research: determining, for example, how many failed to attend Mass. The recent work of Callum Brown suggests that historians must be sensitive to the ways discourses informed and suffused “protocols of personal identity.”⁷⁷ In other words, even when sections of the laity were not attending Mass, did they still subscribe to the cultural attitudes espoused by dominant institutional discourses, or were there other counter discourses at work? This remains a fruitful area for future research.

Footnotes

• 1

  Advocate, 13 June 1885, 16.

• 2

  “On Missions,”Australasian Catholic Record 1 (April 1895): 331.

• 3

  Michael Cabrera, Postsocial History: An Introduction (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004), xiv, xix.

• 4

  See S. H. Rigby, “History, Discourse and the Postsocial Paradigm: A Revolution in Historiography?,” History and Theory 45 (February 2006): 110–23. Also Mariana Valverde's review in American Historical Review 110 (April 2005): 438–39.

• 5

  In labour history, see the collection of essays in Rethinking Labor History: Essays on Discourse and Class Analysis, ed. Lenard R. Berlanstein (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1993). Also Dick Geary, “Labour History, the ‘Linguistic Turn’ and Postmodernism,” Contemporary European History 9 (2000): 445–62. In feminist history, see Kathleen Canning, “Feminist History after the Linguistic Turn: Historicizing Discourse and Experience,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 19 (1994): 368–404. Also Joan W. Scott's revised Gender and the Politics of History (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1999). In studies of the French Revolution, see Jack R. Censer, “Social Twists and Linguistic Turns: Revolutionary Historiography a Decade after the Bicentennial,” French Historical Studies 22 (Winter 1999): 139–67. Also, see Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

• 6

  Callum Brown, The Death of Christian Britain (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2001). Some other notable works in religious history include Averil Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of Christian Discourse (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991). David Brakke provides a useful commentary on this approach within studies of early Christianity in “The Early Church in North America: Late Antiquity, Theory and the History of Christianity,”Church History 71 (2002): 473–91, esp. 485. There also seems to be greater interest in discourse among studies of Catholicism and Protestantism in the early modern period. See, for example, Arthur F. Marotti, Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005). Also Fiona Somerset, Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Some recent essays in this journal have also undertaken an investigation of discourse in various ways. See Sue Morgan, “Wild Oats or Acorns? Social Purity, Sexual Politics and the Response of the Late-Victorian Church,” 31 (June 2007): 151–68; Rowan Strong, “A Vision of an Anglican Imperialism: The Annual Sermons of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts 1701–1714,” 30 (June 2006): 175–98.

• 7

  There are a number of useful works that provide a description of the term's emergence within the humanities and social sciences. See Diane Macdonell, Theories of Discourse: An Introduction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989). R. Keith Sawyer, “A Discourse on Discourse: An Archaeological History of an Intellectual Concept,” Cultural Studies 16 (2002): 433–56. Within the discipline of history itself, see Peter Schottler, “Historians and Discourse Analysis,” History Workshop Journal 27 (1989): 37–65.

• 8

  Joan W. Scott, “Deconstructing Equality-versus-Difference: Or, the Uses of Postructuralist Theory for Feminism,” Feminist Studies 14 (Spring 1988): 35.

• 9

  Henry Norbert Birt OSB, Benedictine Pioneers in Australia (London: Herbert & Daniel, 1911), 291.

• 10

  James Waldersee, Catholic Society in New South Wales, 1788–1860 (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1974), 213.

• 11

  Ursula M. Bygott, With Pen and Tongue: The Jesuits in Australia, 1865–1939 (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1980), 63.

• 12

  Hans Mol, Religion in Australia (Melbourne: Thomas Nelson, 1971), 11.

• 13

  Mol, Religion in Australia, 11.

• 14

  Walter Phillips, “Religious Profession and Practice in New South Wales, 1850–1901: The Statistical Evidence,” Historical Studies 15 (1972): 378–400 .

• 15

  Birt, Benedictine Pioneers, 318.

• 16

  Patrick O’Farrell, The Catholic Community and Church in Australia (West Melbourne: Thomas Nelson, 1977), 206.

• 17

  Margaret Pawsey, The Demon of Discord: Tensions within the Catholic Church in Victoria, 1853–1864 (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1982).

• 18

  Waldersee, Catholic Society, 213.

• 19

  Ruth Schumann, “The Practice of Catholic Piety in Colonial South Australia,” Flinders Journal of History and Politics 9 (1983): 7.

• 20

  Ruth Schumann, “The Catholic Priesthood of South Australia, 1844–1915,” Journal of Religious History 16, no. 1 (June 1990): 69.

• 21

  A “mission return” was a report completed by the senior priest detailing the Catholic population, confraternities and organisations, devotional life, state of church property, sacramental ministry, and finances of his parish or “mission” as it was termed. Following his appointment to the Melbourne archdiocese in 1886, Thomas Carr ensured that priests completed mission returns every year. A large number of these returns have survived and are held by the Melbourne Diocesan Historical Commission. See also T. P. Boland, Thomas Carr: Archbishop of Melbourne (St. Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1997), 190–92.

• 22

  c. 1886 Mission Return for Kyneton.

• 23

  c. 1890 Mission Return for Dandenong.

• 24

  The Eye of Faith: The Pastoral Letters of John Bede Polding, ed. Gregory Haines, Sister Mary Forster, and Frank Brophy (Kilmore: Jim Lowden, 1978), 3.

• 25

  1840 Lenten Pastoral in Haines, Forster, and Brophy, Eye of Faith, 55.

• 26

  1858 Lenten Pastoral in Haines, Forster, and Brophy, Eye of Faith, 101.

• 27

  1837 Lenten Pastoral, in Haines, Forster, and Brophy, Eye of Faith, 52.

• 28

  1852 Lenten Pastoral, in Haines, Forster, and Brophy, Eye of Faith, 78.

• 29

  1844 Lenten Pastoral, in Haines, Forster, and Brophy, Eye of Faith, 58.

• 30

  1840 Lenten Pastoral, in Haines, Forster, and Brophy, Eye of Faith, 54.

• 31

  1844 Lenten Pastoral, in Haines, Forster, and Brophy, Eye of Faith, 57.

• 32

  1851 Lenten Pastoral, in Haines, Forster, and Brophy, Eye of Faith, 76.

• 33

  1852 Lenten Pastoral, in Haines, Forster, and Brophy, Eye of Faith, 82.

• 34

  Joint Pastoral to all the Clergy (1 November 1862) in Haines, Forster, and Brophy, Eye of Faith, 392.

• 35

  Emmet Larkin, “The Devotional Revolution in Ireland, 1850–75,” American Historical Review 77 (1972): 625–52. Patrick J. Corish, The Irish Catholic Experience (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1985), particularly ch. 6, 7. Desmond J. Keenan, The Catholic Church in the Nineteenth Century (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1983). Thomas McGrath, “The Tridentine Evolution of Modern Irish Catholicism, 1563–1962: A Re-examination of the ‘Devotional Revolution’ Thesis,” Recusant History 20 (199091): 512–23. See also S. J. Connolly, “The Moving Statue and the Turtle Dove: Approaches to the History of Irish Religion,” Irish Economic and Social History 31 (2004): 1–22, particularly 11–12.

• 36

  Sean J. Connolly, Priests and People in Pre-Famine Ireland, 1780–1845 (New York, NY: Gill & Macmillan, 1982), 279.

• 37

  David W. Miller, “Landscape and Religious Practice: A Study of Mass Attendance in Pre-Famine Ireland,” Eire-Ireland 40 (2005): 96.

• 38

  Patrick O’Farrell, The Irish in Australia (Sydney: UNSWP, 2000), 112.

• 39

  Lawrence J. Taylor, “Stories of Power, Powerful Stories: The Drunken Priest in Donegal,” in Religious Orthodoxy and Popular Faith in European Society, ed. E. Badone (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 169.

• 40

  Taylor, “Stories of Power,” 169.

• 41

  O’Farrell, Catholic Community and Church in Australia, 194.

• 42

  Ian Breward, A History of the Australian Churches (St. Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1993), 48.

• 43

  Ronald Fogarty, Catholic Education in Australia, 1806–1950, Vol. 1 (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1959), ch. 4, 5, 6.

• 44

  Michael Hogan, The Sectarian Strand: Religion in Australian History (Ringwood: Penguin, 1987), 90.

• 45

  Translation of some ‘Decrees of the Plenary Council held in Sydney in November 1885 on faith, Education, Matrimony, Uniformity of Discipline, Care of the Dead, Fasting and other Subjects (no other bibliographical details on text), 3.

• 46

  Pastoral Letter of the Archbishops and Bishops of Australia in Second Plenary Council, Sydney, 8 December 1895, 36.

• 47

  Pastoral Letter of the Archbishops and Bishops of Australasia in Plenary Council (1885) in Patrick Francis Cardinal Moran, History of the Catholic Church in Australasia (Sydney: The Oceanic Publishing Company, 1896), 690.

• 48

  Taken from the Catechism of Christian Doctrine, Adapted for Australia by the 2^nd and 3^rd Plenary Councils, Westmead, NSW, 1962, 40.

• 49

  Pastoral Letter of the Archbishops and Bishops of Australia in Second Plenary Council, 6–7, 11.

• 50

  1860 Lenten Pastoral in Haines, Forster, and Brophy, Eye of Faith, 112–13.

• 51

  1862 Lenten Pastoral in Haines, Forster, and Brophy, Eye of Faith, 135.

• 52

  1868 Lenten Pastoral in Haines, Forster, and Brophy, Eye of Faith, 147, 148, 149.

• 53

  1869 Lenten Pastoral in Haines, Forster, and Brophy, Eye of Faith, 154.

• 54

  Haines, Forster, and Brophy, Eye of Faith, 156.

• 55

  Haines, Forster, and Brophy, Eye of Faith, 158.

• 56

  1870 Lenten Pastoral in Haines, Forster, and Brophy, Eye of Faith, 165.

• 57

  1872 Lenten Pastoral in Haines, Forster, and Brophy, Eye of Faith, 178.

• 58

  1873 Lenten Pastoral in Haines, Forster, and Brophy, Eye of Faith, 180.

• 59

  The most extensive treatment can be found in H. R. Jackson, Churches and People in Australia and New Zealand, 1860–1930 (North Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987), ch. 3, particularly 65–76. See also S. J. Boland, Faith of Our Fathers: The Redemptorists in Australia, 1882–1982 (Victoria: H. H. Stephenson, 1982).

• 60

  Jay P. Dolan, Catholic Revivalism: The American Experience, 1839–1900 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1978), 112.

• 61

  Brown, Death of Christian Britain, 13.

• 62

  K. T. Livingston, The Emergence of an Australian Catholic Priesthood, 1835–1915 (Sydney: Catholic Theological Faculty, 1977), 6.

• 63

  Dolan, Catholic Revivalism, xviii.

• 64

  Lawrence J. Taylor, Occasions of Faith: An Anthropology of Irish Catholics (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 177.

• 65

  Taylor, Occasions of Faith, 25.

• 66

  A group of four Passionists actually arrived in Australia in the 1840s; three eventually came to South Australia. However it was not until the arrival of five Passionists in Sydney in 1887 that a proper Passionist foundation was made in Australia. See Br Jeff Daly, Passionists in South Australia (Glen Osmond, South Australia: Passionist Monastery, n.d.). This publication is an informative booklet.

• 67

  To tabulate this data, the Melbourne Diocesan Historical Commission Index to the Advocate was used.

• 68

  See Jackson, Churches and People, 66–69.

• 69

  The Pastoral Letter of the First Plenary of Council of Australian bishops (1885) understood parish missions as “necessary.” See the full text of the Letter in Moran, History of the Catholic Church, 685.

• 70

  Advocate, 27 June 1885, 16.

• 71

  Advocate, 19 September 1885, 16.

• 72

  Advocate, 19 September 1885, 16.

• 73

  Advocate, 9 February 1889, 16. On the history of the Vincentian Order in Australia see D. F. Bourke, The History of the Vincentian Fathers in Australasia (Australia: Congregation of the Mission, 1980).

• 74

  Advocate, 9 February 1889, 16.

• 75

  O’Farrell, Catholic Church and Community in Australia, 371–72.

• 76

  Documents in Australian Catholic History, Vol. 1, ed. Patrick O’Farrell and Deidre O’Farrell (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1969), Doc. 66, 465–68.

• 77

  Brown, Death of Christian Britain, 12.