John Edmund Luck OSB was the fourth Catholic Bishop of Auckland, New Zealand (1882-1896).
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Luck was born in Peckham, Surrey, England, on 18 March 1840, one of seven children of Alfred Luck, a warehouseman, and his wife, Clementina Golding. Theirs was a profoundly religious household. After the death of his wife about 1847, Alfred Luck, a convert to Catholicism, shifted his family to Ramsgate in Kent. There he bought the home of the Gothic Revival architect Augustus Welby Pugin, and, at his own expense, built the monastery for the Benedictine community which was established nearby in 1856. Alfred Luck and one of his sons subsequently became diocesan priests, two of his daughters became nuns, and two other sons became Benedictines. These were John and his younger brother Francis, who was to precede John to New Zealand by two years.
After two years' study at the Seminary of St Sulpice in Paris, Luck was professed as a Benedictine in 1861, taking the name of Edmund. He then went to Rome to complete his theological studies, acquiring a doctorate of divinity at the Collegio Romano in 1865, the year he was ordained priest. The next two years he spent teaching philosophy at Subiaco, in central Italy, after which he spent 15 years at monasteries in England and Ireland. During that time he published two substantial books. Short meditations for every day of the year (1879) he translated from an Italian original; The life and miracles of St Benedict (1880) was a new edition of a work by Pope Gregory I, originally translated into English in 1606. Luck was stationed at Ramsgate when he was appointed Bishop of Auckland, New Zealand. He was consecrated there by Cardinal H. E. Manning on 3 August 1882, and arrived in Auckland in November that year.
After Jean Baptiste François Pompallier resigned as the first Bishop of Auckland in 1869, he was succeeded by two bishops who served for short terms with a period of five years between them when there was no bishop. This meant that administrative problems that had dogged the Catholic Diocese of Auckland since the 1850s remained unresolved. Thomas William Croke, although he restored the diocese's finances, stayed only from December 1870 until January 1874. Walter Steins SJ became bishop in December 1879, but died in September 1881. However, Steins did introduce the Benedictine order to Auckland and this opened the way for the appointment of a Benedictine bishop.
Luck gave the diocese a lengthy period of stable, careful and constructive leadership. He was assiduous in pastoral visitation, held two synods (1884 and 1888), and twice (1884 and 1891) visited Europe to collect staff and money. He developed Catholic education, introducing several new religious orders to the diocese. In 1883 the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart and in 1884 the Sisters of Our Lady of the Missions arrived to complement the Sisters of Mercy in staffing parish schools. The Marist Brothers came in 1885 to operate schools for boys. In 1888 the Little Sisters of the Poor opened a home in Ponsonby for the aged poor. In 1886 Luck obtained members of the Society of Joseph for the Foreign Missions, known as the Mill Hill fathers, for work among the Māori people, who, except for the mission of James McDonald, had been neglected by the Catholic Church since the 1860's. He completed the nave of St Patrick's Cathedral, Auckland in 1885 and he had built the bishop's house which stands on a site in Ponsonby purchased by Pompallier in 1853. This large house was designed by Augustus Pugin's sons, and is the finest example of the Pugin style of architecture in New Zealand.[1]
Bishop Luck died in Auckland on 23 January 1896.
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| Preceded by Walter Steins SJ |
4th Bishop of Auckland 1882-1896 |
Succeeded by George Michael Lenihan OSB |
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