St Patrick's Seminary, Manly

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St Patrick's Seminary, Manly was the leading seminary of the Australian Catholic Church from its foundation in 1889 to its closure in 1995.

Conceived by Archbishop Vaughan, it was built from 1885 in Perpendicular Gothic style by Sheerin and Hennessy on a spectacular site overlooking the Pacific Ocean on a hill above Manly, New South Wales. It opened in 1889.

Two early novels of former student Thomas Keneally, The Place at Whitton (1964) and Three Cheers for the Paraclete (1968) are set in a fictionalized version of the seminary.

The seminary closed in 1995 when numbers of seminarians no longer justified the large building.

The building was then occupied by a hospitality school, but the Cardinal Cerretti Chapel is still used for weddings, most notably that of Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban in 2006.

[edit] References

K.J. Walsh, Yesterday's Seminary: A history of St Patrick's Manly, St Leonards, 1998, ISBN 1864489871
K. Livingstone, The emergence of an Australian Catholic priesthood, 1835-1915, Sydney, 1977, ISBN 090924636X
C. Geraghty, The Priest Factory: A Manly vision of triumph 1958-1962 and Beyond, 2003.