St Patrick’s Church Hill is everyone’s second parish, Bishop Daniel Meagher told people at a farewell Mass for the Marist fathers who have looked after the church for 157 years, the Catholic Weekly reports.
Originally located in a slum so filthy that bubonic plague swept through in 1900, St Pat’s became the church of choice for Masses and confessions for workers in CBD skyscrapers since the 1950s.
The Marist Fathers who will now be ministering out in Western Sydney. PHOTO: Giovanni Portelli Photography /Catholic Weekly.
It is one of the busiest churches in Australia, with four Masses celebrated each weekday, 10 Masses on weekends, hours of exposition of the Blessed Sacrament every day and many hours of confession throughout the week.
The Marist fathers will continue their ministry in western Sydney. The archdiocese has not yet announced its plans for the parish after they leave at the end of the year.
In a gathering after the Mass, Fr Michael Whelan SM reflected on the decades upon decades of service by the Marists.
He paid tribute to “generations of travellers past and present, folk who come looking for God, searching for peace, wanting to give thanks, seeking strength and light in their struggles with good and evil”.
The history of St Pat’s is a tapestry of service and holiness. As Bishop Meagher reminded his listeners, some of the early priests were remarkable men, revered by their Irish parishioners even though they were all originally from France.
When the first Marist parish priest, Fr Joseph Monnier, died in 1874, his room was stripped bare by devotees in search of relics and souvenirs. The 1904 funeral of the third parish priest, Fr Peter Le Rennetel, was attended by 40,000 people.
The fifth, Fr Peter Piquet, was extraordinarily popular as a confessor. He died in 1936 – on the same day as the farewell Mass, 10 August.
Like another heroic figure, St Mary MacKillop, he was briefly excommunicated, in his case for giving the last rites outside his own parish and for carelessness in observing church marriage regulations. In its obituary, the Sydney Morning Herald described him as the Catholic community’s “most revered and beloved priest”.
Fr Whelan shared a moving epitaph to Fr Piquet, who was the last of the French Marists:
“Shepherd of sinners; to him went the drunkard from near the Cut, the shamefaced man from a distant parish, afraid to face the fierce blackthorn morality of his local priest, the wife of a mixed marriage troubled in conscience, and some of those tired and distressed poor women who along lower George Street hold out the begging bowl of their flesh … the French priest induced more people to make amends, to restore and to repair, than all those who angrily rebuked the sinners. He loosed their sins and later went into their homes, as a friend, making things straight.”
To much laughter, Fr Whelan noted that the Marist fathers were also men with weaknesses and failings. He cited a letter written in 1920 by the Australian provincial to the superior-general in Rome.
It complained about “the collection of misfits and malcontents” which he had inherited. The response was not altogether sympathetic: “Isn’t it a fact that one should expect this mixture of good and bad when one has responsibility for administering a religious congregation?”
Bishop Meagher alluded to many other pastoral initiatives which radiated from St Pat’s—including the famous Aquinas Academy. This was founded by Marist academic Dr Austin Woodbury in rooms on parish property in Gloucester Street. For decades he shared the philosophical and theological legacy of St Thomas Aquinas with his students.
Bishop Meagher concluded: “Today is a day to give thanks to the Marist fathers, 1868 to the present; to the fathers looking down from Heaven, God bless you, thank you; to the fathers here today, God bless you and thank you.”
This article by Michael Cook was published in The Catholic Weekly, the publication of the Archdiocese of Sydney.