Brian Condon: Letters and Documents in 19th Century Australian Catholic History
[Source: Adelaide Archdiocesan Archives copy. Incomplete]
Sydney
24 July 1826
Sir,
Having been occupied in the performance of my professional duties at Liverpool, Parramatta and Windsor for the greater part of last week, I had not till yesterday, on my return to Sydney, the honour to receive your letter of the 18th. inst. in which you are pleased to notify me that 'His Excellency the Governor, can not avoid expressing his surprise and displeasure at the injurious opinions I had so unreservedly avowed in my letter of the 24th. ult. respecting His Excellency's conduct, and at the very unbecoming language I had made use of in speaking of the public Institutions of the Colony, the Orphan Schools, and that no other system than that which is at present pursued in them, and to which I had applied in my letter such indecorous epithets, can be adapted consistently with His Majesty's instructions, as signified by his Royal Letters Patent'.
In reference, Sir, to this notification, it is my duty to submit that it cannot but excite my astonishment to learn that a personage of His Excellency's distinguished endowments, both natural and acquired, should have construed any part of my letter into 'an avowal of the injurious opinions entertained by me regarding His Excellency's Conduct'. I am not, I beg most respectfully to state, in the habit of expressing opinions which I do not conscientiously feel to be correct, but the opinions which His Excellency has been pleased to ascribe to me I have never even once entertained.
With the public Institutions of the Colony I never interfere except as far as they are connected with my Spiritual, official duties, and so far I have not been, I can safely affirm, an unprofitable Servant to His Majesty. Much more profitable, I shall take the liberty to add, I consider myself to have been than many who are better paid for their services, but as the utility of a Catholic clergyman consists principally in the prevention and not in the discovery and punishment of crime, his services, however important, are often either unnoticed or undervalued.
When His Excellency shall have recollected that the epithets 'abominable', 'idolatrous' and 'damnable' are sometimes applied to the unaltered and unalterable Religion of the Redeemer he will not attach much blame to me for having applied the epithets I have used to a system intended to withdraw the children of the poor from that Religion which is the best inheritance that can be bequeathed, the only one to which they can have a claim.
The lambs are allured abroad and forcibly prevented from returning to the Fold of the Good Shepherd, Christ Jesus Our Lord, and must his humble watchman hold his peace? Is he to be silent? Is he to be worse than a dumb dog? Is he, by consulting his personal interests or his personal safety, to betray his precious, his sacred trust, purchased as it is by his Divine Master's Most Sacred Blood! No, may he through Heaven's mercy be rather deprived of his temporal existence! His Majesty is known, universally known, to be a decided friend to liberty of conscience as far as it is consistent with morality and social order; the benevolence and rectitude of his paternal heart would not permit him to patronize a system calculated to alienate from him the affections of a great portion of his Subjects.
The illiberal charter schools of Ireland were for a long time liberally supported by the Legislature, and had an influence similar to that which now governs our Orphan Schools, and yet they are now declared by His Majesty's Commissioners to have been in a great measure nurseries of disease, ignorance, and cruelty, circumstances of which neither His Majesty, nor his Ministers, nor his Parliament had any accurate information prior to the report of the Commissioners. His Majesty has been recommended gradually to withdraw his support from these Institutions and to reestablish them on better and more liberal principles, which recommendation has been most graciously attended to, and I have no hesitation in asserting that a similar recommendation from His Excellency the Governor to the Right Honourable Earl Bathurst would be attended with equal success.
It is now acknowledged by the wisest and most experienced Statesmen both in the Ministry and amongst those who are opposed to some of its measures that neither the safety nor the prosperity of the State any longer requires the aid of Proselytism from the Catholic Church, the loyalty of Catholics to their Sovereign and to the British Constitution having been satisfactorily proved to be as steady, ardent and unqualified as that of the people of any other Community.
I am therefore the more inclined to believe that His Excellency might, with the utmost propriety and without any risk of giving cause of displeasure to His Majesty or My Lord Bathurst and without an infringement of His Majesty's letters patent, order a separate Asylum to be provided for the Orphan Children of Catholic prisoners, or at all events that His Excellency should allow or rather order a facility to be afforded to the parents, relatives and friends of such Catholic children as may be confined in the Orphan School establishment to withdraw them from it.
During the last administration, I had the honour to solicit, in an official letter, His Excellency Sir Thomas Brisbane to order an abridgement of the New Testament particularly adapted to the capacity of children and of the unlearned to be reprinted for the benefit of the Catholic children in the Orphan School, of the prisoners of the female factory, Carter's Barracks and Jails and to propose to give security to pay half of the expense that should be incurred by the due execution of the work, and the object of my solicitation was granted in an official communication from Major Goulburn, on the proposed conditions, and on my having subsequently expressed a wish to know on which of the Crown Solicitors I should wait in order to fulfil my part of the engagement.
I had the honour to learn by another official communication that my letter was considered by His Excellency to have been sufficiently satisfactory, and as I have not since heard anything regarding this little work, and apprehension is excited in my mind that this measure must have been comprised in the many benevolent ones which His Excellency contemplated for the benefit of the Catholics, or rather for the advantage of the State, and with which he was afterwards advised by a clerical gentleman not to embroil himself but to leave their arrangements entirely to his Successor. I hope a similar advice may not now be given, but I have a better founded hope that it would not now be received, and I further hope that the useful, the excellent, the admirable establishment contemplated by the Governor's Lady, the bare conception of which, as it is publicly [spoken] of, reflects on her the highest honour, may not be contaminated by being made through any influence, or advice, the mere instrument of proselytism.
Lest any zeal which I may occasionally manifest for the preservation in this Colony of the Holy Religion of which I am but a very humble minister should excite in your mind a suspicion that I dislike persons of the other persuasions, I beg, Sir, most solemnly to assure you that I love all mankind, that if I know my own heart, I have no hatred of anyone, that I endeavor as far as it is possible, that is, as far as it is consistent with paramount duties, to be in peace with all and to give offence to none, that I dislike no man on account of his religion, that I respect a moral man whatever religion he may belong to. Some of my nearest and dearest friends are protestants and although I wish all mankind to be in the one fold, under the One Shepherd, I would not feel justified in having, in any case whatever, recourse to force or fraud to induce anyone to come into it, and that I feel convinced there are not many men who would make a greater sacrifice to serve, please and gratify the King or his Representative, although I avow that, coram Deo [In the sight of God] , I would not, to please either, compromise a single essential principle of my religion. And I beg to add that it is my opinion that the man who would, to please the Government, abandon the religion in which he firmly believes could have no hesitation to sacrifice the allegiance due to his Sovereign at the Shrine of his own interest.
I have the honour to be Sir,
with undiminished respect
Your obedient humble Servant
John Joseph Therry
[Note: The most extensive collection of transcriptions of Fr Therry's correspondence remains Eris O'Brien's The Foundation of Catholicism in Australia; life and letters of Archpriest John Joseph Therry, Sydney, Angus & Robertson, 1922]