Finally, the Irish in Australia have done more than their share in
the work of education and social service. Under Irish auspices
several of the Catholic teaching congregations, including the
Christian Brothers and the Presentation Nuns, were introduced, and
their work has borne goodly fruit. A mighty power for good is the
Hibernian Australasian Benefit Society. The organization, which was
founded in 1871, has spread rapidly and has a large active
membership.
Truly the land of the Southern Cross is not the dimmest jewel in the
coronet of Ireland's glories.
REFERENCES:
Hogan: The Irish in Australia (1888), The Gladstone Colony (1898);
Mennell: Dictionary of Australian Biography (1892); Duffy: Life in
Two Hemispheres (1903); Kenny: The Catholic Church in Australia to
the Year 1840; Moran: History of the Catholic Church in Australasia
(1898); Davitt: Life and Progress in Australasia (1898); Bonwick: The
First Twenty Years of Australia (1883); Flanagan: History of New
South Wales (1862); Byrne: Australian Writers (1896); Wilson: The
Church in New Zealand (1910); Hocken: A Bibliography of the
Literature Relating to New Zealand (1909).
THE IRISH IN SOUTH AFRICA
By A. MILLIARD ATTERIDGE.
The tide of emigration from Ireland has set chiefly towards America
and Australia. In South Africa, therefore, the Irish element among
the colonists has never been a large one. But, despite its
comparatively small numbers, it has been an important factor in the
life of South Africa. Here, as in so many other countries, it has
been the glory of the sons of Erin to be a missionary people. To
their coming is due the very existence of the Catholic Church in
these southern lands.
When Dr. Ullathorne touched at the Cape on his way to Australia in
1832, he found at Cape Town "a single priest for the whole of South
Africa," an English Benedictine, who soon afterwards returned to
Europe in broken health. Few Irish immigrants had by that time found
their way to the Cape. They began to arrive in numbers only after the
famine year.
The founder of the Catholic hierarchy in South Africa was the Irish
Dominican, Patrick R. Griffith, who, in 1837, was sent to Cape Town
by Gregory XVI. as the first Vicar Apostolic of Cape Colony. His
successors at the Cape, Bishops Grimley, Leonard, and Rooney, have
all been Irishmen, and nine in every ten of their flock have from the
first been Irish by birth or descent. In the earlier years of Bishop
Griffith's episcopate there was a large garrison in South Africa on
account of the Kaffir wars. Many of these soldiers were Irishmen. At
Grahamstown in 1844 the soldiers of an Irish regiment stationed there
did most of the work of building St. Patrick's Church, one of the
oldest Catholic churches in South Africa. They worked without wages
or reward of any kind, purely out of their devotion to their Faith,
giving up most of their leisure to this voluntary labor.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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