Brian Condon: Letters and Documents in 19th Century Australian Catholic History
[Source: Adelaide Archdiocesan Archives copy. Incomplete?]
Hyde Park
Sydney
20th. December 1826
My dear Sir,
With great pleasure I avail myself of your kind offer to forward in England by your exertions and influence my views with respect to the promotion of the interests of Religion and Morality in this Colony, and as your personal observation has enabled you to form very correct ideas of the state of the Catholics here, I confidently anticipate the most desirable effects to result from your cooperation with me in endeavoring to ameliorate it.
You have perceived Sir, that altho' the Catholics are acknowledged to be nearly as numerous as the Protestants; that the former are not provided with a Church or Chapel in any part of the Colony; that in Sydney on Sundays a very numerous congregation are crowded almost to a state of suffocation in a Court house from which persons of a delicate or infirm constitution are obliged to absent themselves as they cannot attend without considerable danger; that in Parramatta and Liverpool the Catholics have no place to assemble in on Sundays but the prisoners' Barracks in the open air; that they are no better circumstanced in any part of the Country; that they have but one Clergyman altho' it is well known that the interests of Government as well as those of Religion would require that there should be teachers employed in this place and its dependencies; that the education of the children of the poor for want of proper support is greatly neglected and that the Church which they commenced more than five years ago under very favourable auspices is, owing to a combination of various disappointments, rapidly verging to, if not already in, a state of decay and dilapidation.
When, Sir, you shall have made a representation of these inconveniences and the other serious ones under which the Catholics labour to the Right Reverend Dr. Poynter, to His Royal Highness the Duke of Sussex, to His Grace the Duke of Norfolk, and to the other distinguished Advocates and friends to Religion and liberty of conscience, I have reason to hope that proper means will be devised to bring our situation and circumstances under the consideration of His Majesty's Government and to obtain from them or from the Public, or perhaps from both, such assistance as may efficiently contribute to remedy the numerous evils of which we unfortunately at present have so much reason to complain.
[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]