Catholic Church in Australia

The Catholic Church in Australia is part of the worldwide Catholic Church under the spiritual and administrative leadership of the Holy See. From origins as a suppressed, mainly Irish minority in early colonial times, the church has grown to be the largest Christian denomination in Australia, with a culturally diverse membership of around 5,075,907 people, representing about 20% of the overall population of Australia according to the 2021 ABS Census data.
The church is the largest non-government provider of welfare and education services in Australia. Catholic Social Services Australia aids some 450,000 people annually, while the St Vincent de Paul Society's 40,000 members form the largest volunteer welfare network in the country. In 2016, the church had some 760,000 students in more than 1,700 schools.
The church in Australia has five provinces: Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney. It has 35 dioceses, comprising geographic areas as well as the military diocese and dioceses for the Chaldean, Maronite, Melkite, Syro-Malabar, and Ukrainian Rites. The national assembly of bishops is the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference. There are a further 175 Catholic religious orders operating in Australia, affiliated under Catholic Religious Australia. One Australian has been recognised as a saint by the Catholic Church: Mary MacKillop, who co-founded the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart religious institute in the 19th century.

Demographics

Since the 1980s, Catholicism has been the largest Christian denomination in Australia, constituting around one-quarter of the overall population and becoming slightly larger than the Anglican and Uniting churches combined. Up until the, adherents had been recorded as growing both numerically and as a percentage of the population; however, the 2016 census found a fall in both overall numbers and the percentage of Catholics as a proportion of Australian residents, with 5,291,839 Australian Catholics in 2016, down from 5,439,257 in the . This was repeated again in 2021, with the numbers dropping to 5,075,907 people, representing about 20% of the overall population of Australia according to the 2021 ABS Census data.
Until the, Australia's most populous Christian church was the Anglican Church of Australia. Since then, Catholics have outnumbered Anglicans by an increasing margin. The change is partly explained by changes in immigration patterns. Before the Second World War, the majority of immigrants to Australia came from the United Kingdom and most Catholic immigrants came from Ireland. After the war, Australia's immigration diversified, and more than 6.5 million migrants arrived in the following 60 years, including more than a million Catholics from Italy, Malta, Lebanon, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Croatia and Hungary.
At the 2016 Census, the ancestries with which Australian Catholics most identified were English, Australian, Irish, Italian and Filipino.
Despite a growing population of Catholics, weekly Mass attendance has declined from an estimated 74% in the mid-1950s to around 14% in 2006.
There are seven archdioceses and 32 dioceses, with an estimated 3,000 priests and 9,000 men and women in institutes of consecrated life and societies of apostolic life, including six dioceses that cover the whole country: one each for those who belong to the Chaldean, Maronite, Melkite, Syro-Malabar and Ukrainian rites and one for those serving in the Australian Defence Forces. There is also a personal ordinariate for former Anglicans, which has a similar status to a diocese.

State/Territory	% 2016	% 2011	% 2006	% 2001
Australian Capital Territory	22.3	26.1	28.0	29.1
New South Wales	24.7	27.5	28.2	28.9
Northern Territory	19.9	21.6	21.1	22.2
Queensland	21.7	23.8	24.0	24.8
South Australia	18.0	19.9	20.2	20.8
Tasmania	15.6	17.9	18.4	19.3
Total	22.6	25.3	25.8	26.6
Victoria	23.2	26.7	27.5	28.4
Western Australia	21.4	23.6	23.7	24.7

History

Arrival and suppression

Among the first Catholics known to have sighted Australia were the crew of a Spanish expedition of 1605–6. In 1606, the expedition's leader, Pedro Fernandez de Quiros, landed in the New Hebrides believing it to be the fabled southern continent. He named the land Austrialis del Espiritu Santo. Later that year, his deputy Luís Vaz de Torres sailed through the Torres Strait between Australia and New Guinea.
The permanent presence of Catholicism in Australia came rather with the arrival of the First Fleet of British convict ships at Sydney in 1788. One-tenth of all the convicts who came to Australia on the First Fleet were Catholic, and at least half of them were born in Ireland. A small proportion of British marines were also Catholic.
Just as the British were setting up the new colony, French captain Jean-François de Galaup, comte de Lapérouse arrived off Botany Bay with two ships. La Pérouse was 6 weeks in Botany Bay, where the French, besides other things, held Catholic Masses. The crew conducted the first Catholic burial, that of Father Louis Receveur, a Franciscan friar who died while the ships were at anchor at Botany Bay.
Some of the Irish convicts had been transported to Australia for political crimes or social rebellion in Ireland, so the authorities were suspicious of Catholicism for the first three decades of settlement.
Catholic convicts were compelled to attend Church of England services and their children and orphans were raised by the authorities as Anglicans. The first Catholic priests arrived in Australia as convicts in 1800 – James Harold, James Dixon and Peter O'Neill, who had been convicted for "complicity" in the Irish 1798 Rebellion. Fr Dixon was conditionally emancipated and permitted to celebrate Mass. On 15 May 1803, in vestments made from curtains and with a chalice made of tin, he conducted the first Catholic Mass in "New South Wales". The Irish-led Castle Hill Rebellion of 1804 alarmed the British authorities and Dixon's permission to celebrate Mass was revoked. Fr Jeremiah O'Flynn, an Irish Cistercian monk, was appointed as Prefect Apostolic of New Holland and set out from Britain for the colony, uninvited. Watched by authorities, O'Flynn secretly performed priestly duties before being arrested and deported to London. Reaction to the affair in Britain led to two further priests being allowed to travel to the colony in 1820 — John Joseph Therry and Philip Conolly. The foundation stone for the first St Mary's Church was laid on 29 October 1821 by Governor Lachlan Macquarie.
The absence of a Catholic mission in Australia before 1818 reflected the legal disabilities of Catholics in Britain and the difficult position of Ireland within the British Empire. The government therefore endorsed the English Benedictine monks to lead the early church in the colony. The Reverend William Bernard Ullathorne was instrumental in influencing Pope Gregory XVI to establish the hierarchy in Australia. Ullathorne was in Australia from 1833 to 1836 as vicar-general to Bishop William Morris of Mauritius, whose jurisdiction extended over the Australian missions.

Emancipation and growth

The Church of England was disestablished in the colony of New South Wales by the Church Act of 1836, which also provided equal funding of Protestant and Catholic churches. Drafted by the Catholic attorney-general John Plunkett, the act established legal equality for Anglicans, Catholics and Presbyterians and was later extended to Methodists. Nevertheless, social attitudes were slow to change. A laywoman, Caroline Chisholm, faced discouragements and anti-Catholic feeling when she sought to establish a migrant women's shelter. She worked for women's welfare in the colonies in the 1840s, though her humanitarian efforts later won her fame in England and great influence in achieving support for families in the colony.
File:St Aloysius Church, Sevenhill.JPG|thumb|St Aloysius Church, Sevenhill, South Australia. The Jesuits were the first order of priests to enter and establish houses in South Australia, Victoria, Queensland and the Northern Territory – Austrian Jesuits established themselves in the south and north and Irish in the east.
The church's most prominent early leader was John Bede Polding, a Benedictine monk who was Sydney's first bishop from 1835 to 1877. Polding requested a community of nuns be sent to the colony and five Irish Sisters of Charity arrived in 1838. While tensions arose between the English Benedictine hierarchy and the Irish, Ignatian-tradition religious institute from the start, the sisters set about pastoral care in a women's prison and began visiting hospitals and schools and establishing employment for convict women. In 1847, two sisters transferred to Hobart and established a school. The sisters went on to establish hospitals in four of the eastern states, beginning with St Vincent's Hospital, Sydney, in 1857 as a free hospital for all people, but especially for the poor.
At Polding's request, the Christian Brothers arrived in Sydney in 1843 to assist in schools. Again jurisdictional tensions arose and the brothers returned to Ireland. In 1857, Polding founded an Australian religious institute in the Benedictine tradition – the Sisters of the Good Samaritan – to work in education and social work. While Polding was in office, construction began on the ambitious Gothic Revival designs for St Patrick's Cathedral, Melbourne, and the final St Mary's Cathedral in Sydney.
In 1845, Polding established the Australian Holy Catholic Guild of Saints Mary and Joseph. Some parishes have memorials dedicated to deceased members and friends. One such is at St Patrick's Boorowa, New South Wales. Examples of the Guild's reporting to members and election of office bearers can be seen in the Freeman's Journal. In 1848, they met under St Patrick's Church at the intersection of George and Hunter streets and had 250 members at that time. Records of the association, from 1845 to 1996, are held at the NSW State Library and this includes a copy of the constitution of the guild.
Establishing themselves first at Sevenhill, in the newly established colony of South Australia in 1848, the Jesuits were the first religious order of priests to enter and establish houses in South Australia, Victoria, Queensland and the Northern Territory – Austrian Jesuits established themselves in the south and north and Irish in the east. The goldrush saw an increase in the population and prosperity of the colonies and called for an increase in the number of episcopal sees. When gold was discovered in late 1851, there were an estimated 9,000 Catholics in the Colony of Victoria, increasing to 100,000 by the time the Jesuits arrived 14 years later. While the Austrian priests traversed the Outback on horseback to found missions and schools, the Irish priests arrived in the east in 1860 and had by 1880 established the major schools of Xavier College in Melbourne and in Sydney St Aloysius' College and Saint Ignatius' College, Riverview – which each survive to the present.
During 1869 and 1870, some Australian-based clergy attended the first Vatican Council in Rome.
Despite anti-Irish lobbying by English Catholic bishops and the British government, Irish cleric Patrick Francis Moran won the favour of Pope Leo XIII and was appointed Archbishop of Sydney in 1884, arriving in New South Wales on 8 September. A prominent figure in Australian Catholic history, he became Australia's first cardinal the following year after being summoned back to Rome, and presided over Plenary Councils of Australasia in 1885, 1895 and 1905 which laid the foundations for Church structure in the 20th century. The Australian colonies had hitherto relied heavily on immigrant clergy. In 1889, Moran founded St Patrick's College, Manly, intended to provide priests for all the colonies. Moran believed that Catholics' political and civil rights were threatened in Australia and, in 1896, saw deliberate discrimination in a situation where "no office of first, or even second, rate importance is held by a Catholic".
In Rome in 1884, Moran had met the Venerable Mary Potter and invited her to send a group of her newly established Little Company of Mary sisters to Australia in order to establish a local congregation. Six pioneering sisters arrived in Sydney in November 1885, commencing work caring for the sick and dying. Establishing a convent at Lewishman, they had nearly fifty members within just five years. In 1889 they opened a small hospital at Lewisham. Under the leadership of Mother Mary Xavier Lynch from 1899, the hospital would grow to be one of Sydney's leading general hospitals and nursing schools. Mother Mary Xavier established a new hospital at Adelaide in 1900 and Wagga Wagga in 1926, and despatched sisters to found hospitals in New Zealand and South Africa. In 1922 she became the order's first provincial of Australasia, and is remembered as one of Australia's most noted hospital and nursing administrators.
The Catholic Church also became involved in mission work among the Aboriginal people of Australia during the 19th century as Europeans came to control much of the continent. According to Aboriginal anthropologist Kathleen Butler-McIlwraith, there were many occasions when the Catholic Church attempted to advocate for Aboriginal rights, but the missionaries were also "functionaries of the Protection and Assimilation policies" of the government and so "directly contributed to the current disadvantage experienced by Indigenous Australians". The missionaries themselves argued that they protected children from dysfunctional aspects of indigenous culture.
With the withdrawal of state aid for church schools around 1880, the Catholic Church, unlike other Australian churches, put great energy and resources into creating a comprehensive alternative system of education. It was largely staffed by sisters, brothers and priests of religious institutes, such as the Christian Brothers ; the Sisters of Mercy ; Marist Brothers, who came from France in 1872; and the Sisters of St Joseph, founded in Australia by Mary MacKillop and Fr Julian Tenison Woods in 1867. MacKillop travelled throughout Australasia and established schools, convents and charitable institutions but came into conflict with those bishops who preferred diocesan control of the institute rather than central control from Adelaide by the Josephite religious institute. MacKillop administered the Josephites as a national religious institute at a time when Australia was divided among individually governed colonies. She is today the most revered of Australian Catholics, beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1995 and canonised by Benedict XVI in 2010. Catholic schools flourished in Australia and by 1900 there were 115 Christian Brothers teaching in Australia. By 1910 there were 5000 religious sisters teaching in schools.