John Polding
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Missionary John Bede Polding O.S.B. (18th Nov 1794-16th March 1877) was the first Roman Catholic bishop and archbishop of Sydney Australia. He was an English Benedictine monk of Downside Abbey, He received minor orders in 1813 from Bishop Milner at Wolverhampton, was ordained priest by Bishop Poynter on 4 March 1819. He was appointed Vicar Apostolic of New Holland and Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) on the 3rd of July 1832. He was appointed the first bishop of Sydney on April 5th 1842, and Archbishop on April 22nd 1842.
Despite his many successes as a founding bishop, Polding experienced a degree of resistance from his largely Irish Catholic church in Australia. Even after the English Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, the Irish understood any English leadership (even English Catholic bishops) in sectarian English/Irish terms. The British anti-clerical laws of the Reformation Parliament and the Act of Supremacy had bred deep resentment between the Irish and English, and the consequences of the dissolution of monasteries during the English Reformation had left Polding deeply committed to the primary vision of restoring monasticism in English speaking lands such as Australia. This was not a vision the Irish - who had managed with great determination to preserve a number of their monastic foundations as well as found the Irish College- necessarily shared as a priority.
Apart from the many churches he founded, Polding began the construction of the current 2nd St Mary's Cathedral, Sydney in 1868.
| Preceded by: Archpriest John Joseph Therry |
1st Catholic Archbishop of Sydney 1842-1877 |
Succeeded by: Roger Bede Vaughan O.S.B. |
[edit] External links
- John Bede Polding O.S.B. on the Australian Dictionary of biography
- John Bede Polding O.S.B. on Catholic Hierarchy.org
- This article incorporates text from the public domain 1949 edition of Dictionary of Australian Biography from
Project Gutenberg of Australia, which is in the public domain in Australia and the United States of America.
