Francis Mary Redwood

Francis Mary Redwood SM (born April 8, 1839 in Tixall ; † January 3, 1935 ; also Francis William Redwood ) was an English Roman Catholic clergyman and from 1874 until his death bishop or archbishop of Wellington .

Life

Redwood was born in the English county of Staffordshire and emigrated with his family to what is now New Zealand in 1842 . Prepared for a career as a priest since 1850, he was sent to France in December 1854 . In 1860 he joined the order of the Marist Fathers and was ordained a priest on June 6, 1865 . He then worked as a parish chaplain in County Kildare, Ireland . After suffering from pneumonia, Redwood was sent to Rome to recover , where he met the Bishop of Wellington, Philippe Joseph Viard , who was attending the First Vatican Council . He campaigned for Redwood's appointment as his coadjutor , but died before such an appointment could be carried out.

Pope Pius IX appointed him on February 10, 1874 as the new bishop in Wellington, which ended an almost two-year vacancy . He was ordained episcopal on March 17th of the same year in London by Henry Edward Manning , Archbishop of Westminster . Co- consecrators were James Danell , Bishop of Southwark , and William Weathers , Auxiliary Bishop for the Archdiocese of Westminster. In the following years the number of Catholic schools increased, and in 1885 Redwood initiated the opening of the first Catholic secondary school in New Zealand. He was also a member of the Senate of the University of New Zealand from 1877 to 1903.

Bishop's Golden Jubilee Celebrations Redwoods (1924)

With the elevation of the diocese to an archbishopric by Pope Leo XIII. on May 13, 1887, he became the first Archbishop of Wellington. In 1895 the ecclesiastical province of Wellington was separated from the Australian ecclesiastical province and established. Archbishop Redwood became metropolitan of this new ecclesiastical province. In January 1899 a provincial council was held in New Zealand under his leadership. In 1908 he got into public disputes with Protestant representatives over the restrictive mixed marriage provisions of the papal decree Ne temere (April 1908). Redwood was initially critical of the labor movement, but changed his mind in the 1920s. In 1922 he helped found the Catholic lay order Knights of the Southern Cross - New Zealand . In 1924, the year of his golden bishop's jubilee, Pope Pius XI appointed him to the papal assistant throne . Redwood died three days before his 96th birthday and was buried in Karori Cemetery in Wellington.

Web links

• Entry for Francis Mary Redwood on catholic-hierarchy.org
• Biography on the New Zealand Encyclopedia website

predecessor	Office	successor
Philippe Joseph Viard SM	(Arch) Bishop of Wellington 1874–1935	Thomas O'Shea SM