Out of Time, Out of Place: Henry Gregory and the Benedictine Order in Colonial Australia by Mary Shanahan

Book Description

Secondhand. Good condition. Sticky tape remnant on front blank endpage. Marks on top and right foredges. Dust jacket front cover has red pen on it and spine top edge is missing. Dust jacket is now in protective plastic cover. Interior and binding are still very good.

The Catholics in Australia in the early nineteenth century were mainly Irish and were served by a handful of Irish priests. In 1835 the English Benedictine John Bede Polding became the first Bishop, and eight years later, founded a Benedictine monastery in Sydney, with Henry Gregory as Prior.

English Benedictine authoritarianism, conservatism, and culture were foreign elements imposed on Churchmen whose problems were largely practical and whose thinking was becoming less conservative following the liberalising changes in Europe.

The monastery was therefore founded out of time and out of place, and this book traces its vicissitudes, and those of its Prior, to 1861, when Rome intervened, restoring peace to the troubled diocese by recalling Gregory. This recall spelled the failure of Benedictinism in colonial Australia.