Teams learn from past
Local
Teams members reflected on the early years of South Australian Catholicism at their gathering at Salisbury parish and St Augustine’s School on Sunday June 18.
Teams (of Our Lady) is a world-wide movement for married couples in the Catholic Church.
The day was facilitated by Teams member Rachele Tullio, who is the APRIM at St Augustine’s School. She took the participants though the early years of Australian and South Australian settlement, focusing on the establishment of a Catholic presence in Adelaide and, in particular, Salisbury.
Rachele outlined the successes and failures, the struggles and small victories that enabled the parish to survive.
As part of her interactive presentation, she identified key people who assisted in that development and survival – including the Rev James Harold, an Irish priest transported in 1800 for complicity in rebellion in Ireland, Fr Benson the first Catholic priest in Adelaide, Fr Murphy from Sydney who was appointed first Bishop in 1841, and Mr Leigh, an English convert to Catholicism who donated 4000 pounds.
The participants identified the significant pressures on the small Catholic community in Salisbury: the English Act of Parliament 1834 which proclaimed the settlement of South Australia expressly forbad the inclusion of Papists and pagans; poverty – Catholics were only able to work as labourers; and the 1851 gold rushes which took men away from their homes – for years there was no church, no school, no presbytery.
After lunch the participants were taken on a tour of the old chapel, the first presbytery and the present St Augustine’s Church.
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