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The First Priests
At least two Catholic schools were established in the early years of the nineteenth century but neither survived very long, and it was not until after the arrival of Therry and Connolly in 1820 that significant development took place. By 1833, there were about ten Catholic schools in the country.
The document on the Church in the modern world, the last and easily the longest released by the Council, has had an enormous impact on the way the Church interacts with the rest of society. It firmly situated the work and interests of the Church in the world and society: nothing that is genuinely human is to be regarded as alien to the Church.
The first priests arrived at 1800 and they were also convicts. Among them was James Dixon, he was given the privilege of having masses. When he returned to Ireland, mass wasn't legally celebrated until Fathers John Joseph Therry and Philip Connolly arrived in 1820.
The 1950s were a boom time for Australian Catholics. Numbers grew rapidly, increasing the proportion of Catholics in the Australian population . Many parishes were established in the new suburbs of the major cities and the number of priests, sisters and brothers continued to expand. The impact of all the effort expended on education was felt as Catholics made noticeable advances in social-economic status. The Catholic community had grown to be what the Irish bishops of the nineteenth century had worked for and dreamed of: a thriving Church based on the Irish model.
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The First Catholic Bishop in Australia
Today's Catholic Community
The First Catholics in Australia 1788
The First Catholic Bishop was John Bede Polding and he was an English Benedictine Monk. He first arrived in Australia at 1835 and in 1843 he was appointed Archbishop of Sydney.
There were already a handful of religious orders in Australia including The Sisters of Charity, The Good Samaritan Sisters, founded by Polding in 1857, and The Sisters of St Joseph founded in 1866 by Fr Julian Tenison Woods and Mary Mackillop, now known as Australia's first saint. By 1871, these 'Josephites' were running 35 schools in the Adelaide diocese. By 1880 there were a total of 815 sisters from all orders teaching in schools and by 1910 the number exceeded to approximately 5,000 sisters.
In 1788 The First Fleet arrived in Australia with the first Catholics which were Irish Convicts. By the year 1803 a total of 2,100 Irish convicts, almost all of them were catholic, have been brought into Australia.
The outcome of all these changes in society and the Church is that today's Catholic community looks very different from that of the 1950s. Mass attendance rates have fallen; the number of priests, sisters and brothers is declining and their average age is increasing. The relationship between clergy and people has changed. Old forms of devotion like the Rosary have nearly disappeared but there has been a growth of interest in alternative forms of prayer borrowed from a variety of cultures and traditions. The Church's teachings have been re-interpreted in the light of modern understandings of history, sociology, the sciences and other fields of human endeavour, and then re-expressed in language more suitable for the times. By and large, however, the teachings themselves have not changed.
The document on the liturgy instigated a revolution in Catholic worship, with changes including the celebration of Mass in the vernacular rather than Latin and the redesign of churches and rituals to emphasize and encourage the active participation of all present.
For several centuries, ordinary Catholics had been discouraged from reading the scriptures themselves. This attitude only began to change about the middle of this century. By the time the document on Divine Revelation was released, not only were Catholics not discouraged from reading the Bible, they were 'forcefully and specifically' urged to do so!