- John Polding
John Bede Polding OSB (
18 october 1794 –16 March 1877 ) was the firstRoman Catholic bishop and archbishop ofSydney Australia .Polding was born to a
recusant Roman Catholic family inLiverpool ,England . His mother was a sister of the Very Rev. Father Bede Brewer, president general of the English Benedictine congregation. Polding's father died when he was eight and his education was supervised by an uncle. He was sent to the Benedictine school atActon Burnell and received the religious habit at the age of 16.Polding was an English
Benedictine monk ofDownside Abbey , He received minor orders in 1813 from John Milner at Wolverhampton, was ordained priest byWilliam Poynter on4 March 1819 .He was appointed
Vicar Apostolic of New Holland and Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania ) on3 July 1832 . He travelled to Europe in November 1840, during his absence Francis Murphy was appointed vicar-general of the diocese.Apart from the many churches he founded, Polding began the construction of the second
St Mary's Cathedral, Sydney in 1868.Polding also founded the
Sisters of the Good Samaritan in Sydney. He died on 16 March 1877 in Sydney.Experiences in Sydney
Polding was appointed the first bishop of Sydney on
5 April 1842 , and Archbishop on22 April 1842 . Despite his many successes as a founding bishop, Polding experienced a degree of resistance from his largely Irish Catholic church in Australia. Even after the EnglishCatholic Emancipation Act of 1829, the Irish understood any English leadership (even English Catholic bishops) in sectarian terms.The British
anti-clerical laws of the Reformation Parliament and the Act of Supremacy had bred deep resentment among the Irish of the English, and the consequences of the dissolution of monasteries during theEnglish Reformation had left Polding deeply committed to the primary vision of restoringmonasticism in English-speaking lands such as Australia.This was not a vision the Irish - who had managed with great determination to preserve a number of their monastic foundations as well as found the
Irish College - necessarily shared as a priority Fact|date=February 2007.External links
* [http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A020300b.htm John Bede Polding O.S.B.] on the Australian Dictionary of biography
* [http://www.catholic-hierarchy.org/bishop/bpolding.html John Bede Polding O.S.B.] on Catholic Hierarchy.org
*Dictionary of Australian Biography|First=John Bede|Last=Polding|Link=http://gutenberg.net.au/dictbiog/0-dict-biogP-Q.html#polding1
*CathEncy|wstitle=John Bede Polding
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