John Bede Polding

John Bede Polding OSB (18 November 1794 – 16 March 1877) was the first Roman Catholic bishop and archbishop of Sydney Australia.

Polding was born to a Roman Catholic family in Liverpool, England, albeit a recusant one rather than an Irish one. 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 at Acton Burnell and received the religious habit at the age of 16.

Polding was an English Benedictine monk of Downside Abbey, He received minor orders in 1813 from Bishop Milner at Wolverhampton, was ordained priest by Bishop Poynter on 4 March 1819.

He was appointed Vicar Apostolic of New Holland and Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) on the 3 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 current 2nd St Mary's Cathedral, Sydney in 1868.

John Bede Polding died on the 16th of March in the year 1877 in Sydney.

Experiences in Sydney

Polding was appointed the first bishop of Sydney on 5 April 1842, and Archbishop on 22 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 English Catholic 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 the English Reformation had left Polding deeply committed to the primary vision of restoring monasticism 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 .

his father and mother died when he was 8.

External links

• John Bede Polding O.S.B. on the Australian Dictionary of biography
• John Bede Polding O.S.B. on Catholic Hierarchy.org
• Serle, Percival (1949). "Polding, John Bede". Dictionary of Australian Biography. Sydney: Angus & Robertson.