Ten years after Bishop Griffith's appointment, Pius IX. separated
Natal and the eastern districts of Cape Colony from Cape Town, and
erected the Eastern Vicariate Apostolic. Once more an Irish prelate
was the first Bishop--Aidan Devereux, who was consecrated by Bishop
Griffith at Cape Town in the Christmas week of 1847. The great
emigration from Ireland had now begun, and a stream of immigrants was
arriving at the Cape. Bishop Devereux fixed his residence at Port
Elizabeth, and of his four successors up to the present day three
have been Irish. Bishop Moran, who went out to Port Elizabeth in
1854, was consecrated at Carlow in Ireland by Archbishop (afterwards
Cardinal) Cullen. The third Vicar Apostolic was Bishop Ricards, and
the present bishop is another Irishman, Dr. Hugh McSherry, who
received his consecration from the hands of Cardinal Logue in St.
Patrick's Cathedral at Armagh.
Until the discovery of the diamond deposits in what is now the
Kimberley district, some forty years ago, the Irish immigrants had
chiefly settled in the ports and along the coast. But among the
crowds who went to seek their fortunes at the diamond fields were
large numbers of adventurous Irishmen. The mission church established
at Kimberley became the centre of a new bishopric in 1886, when the
Vicariate of Kimberley, which for some time included the Orange Free
State, was established, and an Irish Oblate, Father Anthony Gaughran,
was appointed its first bishop. He was succeeded in 1901 by his
namesake and fellow countryman, the present Bishop Matthew Gaughran.
The gold discoveries on the Witwatersrand about Johannesburg produced
another rush into the interior in the days after the first Transvaal
war. A great city of foreign immigrants--the "Uitlanders"--grew up
rapidly on the upland, where a few months before there had been only
a few scattered Boer farms. Irishmen from Cape Colony and Natal, from
Ireland itself, and from the United States formed a large element in
the local mining and trading community. They were mostly workers. Few
of them found their way into the controlling financier class, which
was largely Jewish. The Irish were better out of this circle of
international gamblers, whose intrigues finally produced the terrible
two years' bloodshed of the great South African war. Many engineers
of the mines were Irish-Americans. Huge consignments of mining
machinery arrived from the United States, and many of the engineers
who came to fit it up remained in the employ of the mining companies.
Until after the war, the Transvaal and Johannesburg had depended
ecclesiastically on the Vicar Apostolic of Natal, but in 1904 a
Transvaal Vicariate was erected, and once more the first bishop was
an Irishman, Dr. William Miller, O.M.I.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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