This coming St Patrick’s Day it will be 100 years to the day since Perth’s first Archbishop was consecrated a Bishop
By Fr Christopher Dowd OP
Browsing through the early twentieth century editions of The Record, one notices the frequent use – one might even say the over use – of the term ‘red-letter day’ to designate a special occasion in the life of the Catholic Church in Western Australia. There were few red-letter days redder than the one that occurred just on one hundred years ago – 17 March 1911. It was the feast day of St Patrick, patron saint of Ireland, an important day because the ethnic background of the Catholic population was strongly Irish.
There was something different about St Patrick’s day in 1911 for it was also the day of the ordination of a new Bishop for Perth. The day was chosen in recognition of the Irishness of Western Australia’s Catholics and also because St Patrick was the patron saint of both the one about to be consecrated – Father Patrick Clune – and the Bishop who would be the principal consecrator – Cardinal Patrick Moran, Archbishop of Sydney.
On 14 March, the liner Orsova docked at Fremantle, bringing Cardinal Moran and other distinguished guests, including four other Bishops. The days that followed were crowded with glittering liturgical and social events. The visiting prelates were welcomed at the wharf by Bishop-elect Clune, the clergy, a huge crowd of people and a guard of honour provided by the Hibernian Australasian Catholic Benefit Society and the Highgate Hill Irish Pipe Band. A motorcade took the dignitaries to a mayoral reception at the Fremantle Town Hall, after which all travelled by train to Perth and were greeted at the Central Station by the Mayor, Thomas Molloy, the members of the Hibernian Society in regalia, the Irish Pipe Band (again) and another great concourse of people.
The State Governor made his carriage available to conduct Cardinal Moran and Bishop-elect Clune to the Cathedral, the others following in motor cars, to meet Clune’s predecessor as Bishop of Perth, Matthew Gibney. After lunch, there was a municipal reception at the Perth Town Hall, which was ‘a veritable forest of palms and foliage’, the air filled with music supplied by an orchestra and a phonograph.
The Record’s description of the day of the consecration itself carried a headline which summed up the significance of the proceedings: “A Historic Day for Western Australia: Spectacular Display of Liturgical Splendour”. A crowd estimated at 10,000 crammed itself into Victoria Square.
Very few were able actually to enter the Cathedral where there was standing room only. Outside, people clustered tightly around doors and windows, stood on fences and watched from the windows and balconies of buildings around the Square.
At mid-morning, led by the Irish Pipers and cross bearer and acolytes, the procession emerged from the Palace. The long line of secular clergy in black cassocks and birettas and white surplices, religious priests in their habits, formally attired Catholic civic officials, including the Mayors of Perth and Coolgardie in robes of office and Timothy Quinlan, Speaker of the House of Assembly, in his uniform as a Knight of St Sylvester, and Bishops in purple choir dress were dominated by the tall figure of Cardinal Moran in scarlet, his train carried by two page boys in white tunics and knee breeches, black stockings and feathered hats.
Catholic school children sang hymns as the procession performed a circuit of the Square before disappearing into the Cathedral. Waiting for them were the Governor, the Premier, ministers, parliamentarians, consular representatives, municipal, judicial, military and business figures and their families and attendants.
The high altar and sanctuary were decorated with candles, flowers and coloured cloths. The walls of the nave were draped with hangings of cardinalatial red and gold. The liturgy lasted three hours. The Mass setting by the modern Church composer, Perosi, was sung by the Cathedral choir, augmented by monks from New Norcia Abbey. The Bishop of Goulburn preached. At the end of the Mass, the Cardinal conducted the now Bishop Clune, arrayed in pontifical vestments, episcopal ring on his finger and crozier in his hand, to the throne of the Church of Perth as the choir sang the Te Deum. The proceedings concluded with the Alleluia chorus from The Messiah and an organ postlude, the march from Mendelssohn’s opera, Athalia.
In the afternoon a gala banquet with background music and ‘daintily hand-painted menu cards’ was held in the gaily decorated Town Hall in honour of Moran, the visiting prelates and the newly consecrated Bishop. Many toasts were made and replies made. When Clune’s turn came, uproarious cheering, waving of handkerchiefs and a hearty rendition of ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’ erupted. In the evening a grand concert, attended by the Governor, was held at His Majesty’s Theatre in Hay Street.
The festive marathon continued into the weekend. A garden party was given at Government House on Saturday afternoon. On Sunday, the ecclesiastical and civil dignitaries were entertained at the Good Shepherd convent at Leederville. On Monday, there was a guided tour of Catholic educational, religious and charitable institutions. The following day, the eastern prelates and clergy sailed for home.
Clune’s consecration was an intensely Irish affair but it was not a merely Catholic Irish tribal demonstration. In fact, it resonated widely through Western Australian society. The level of non-Catholic participation in the celebrations was high. Early twentieth century Western Australia was not free of sectarian tensions but they were less pervasive than in other States, a point remarked upon by Cardinal Moran. If anything, the consecration demonstrated the social acceptability of the Catholic community. The daily newspapers provided extensive and sympathetic coverage of the consecration and associated activities.
Who was this fourth Bishop of Perth? Like almost every other Australian Bishop at that time, Patrick Joseph Clune was an Irishman, born near Ennis, the capital of County Clare in 1864. His father, James, was a prosperous tenant farmer and businessman.
Young Patrick’s education was carried out at the local National School, Killaloe Diocesan College in Ennis and All Hallows College in Dublin. His religious upbringing was strongly influenced by his mother, Margaret, and he felt the call to the priesthood from as early as he could remember.
He wanted to be a missionary and enrolled at All Hallows, a seminary which specialised in training priests to serve the extensive Irish diaspora overseas. Ordained in 1886, he was assigned to the Diocese of Goulburn in Australia where he taught at St Patrick’s College and undertook pastoral work on the staff of Sts Peter and Paul Cathedral.
He was so moved by a mission given by the Redemptorist Fathers at the Goulburn Cathedral that he asked to be received into that Order. His work in Goulburn had been highly successful. His Bishop had great plans for him and tried to persuade him to stay but Clune could not deny his vocation to the religious life and entered the Redemptorist novitiate at Liverpool in 1893.
After further studies, he was sent to Ireland and, based first at Limerick and then Dundalk, worked at giving the famous Redemptorist parish mission all over the British Isles, again to great acclaim. When Bishop Gibney of Perth asked the Redemptorists to set up a foundation, Clune, in consideration of his talents and his previous experience in Australia, was chosen by his superiors to be a member of the pioneer community which arrived in 1899.
For the next five years, from a base at the North Perth monastery, he laboured all around Western Australia – the timber country, the wheat belt and the gold fields as well as the capital – giving missions. Conditions were often primitive in the more remote districts. He rapidly acquired a reputation for eloquent and persuasive preaching and was much in demand for missions and retreats.
In 1905, his superiors sent him to New Zealand to establish the Redemptorist Congregation in that country. He founded St Gerard’s monastery in Wellington and again enjoyed great success as a missioner. Five years later he was re-assigned back to Perth as the superior of the Redemptorist community.
He was settling back into his previous Western Australian routine, again to the usual chorus of praise, when it was announced in January 1911 that, at the age of 47, he had been chosen by the Pope to be Bishop of Perth on the recommendation of the majority of diocesan clergy entitled to vote in the process, the majority of the Bishops of the ecclesiastical Province of Adelaide, to which the diocese of Perth then belonged, and Cardinal Moran.
The circumstances of Clune’s promotion as a Bishop were unusual. When he returned from New Zealand, the diocese of Perth was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, a state of affairs that had its origins in the discovery of gold in the 1890s and the attendant economic boom and population explosion in Western Australia. The then Bishop, Matthew Gibney, moved quickly to put in place an extensive network of pastoral, educational and social welfare services and imported large numbers of Religious men and women to staff them. Unfortunately, he over-reached himself financially. He employed entrepreneurial methods to raise funds. Many of his business ventures were reckless and imprudent and, by 1910, the diocese was in debt to the tune of £200,000, a vast sum of money for those days.
At the urging of Cardinal Moran and other Australian Bishops, Rome insisted that Gibney resign to make way for someone who could deal effectively with the crisis. The one thing necessary was a dynamic, charismatic leader who could restore confidence in the ecclesiastical government of Perth. On account of his wide travels and mission work, Clune was very well known and popular in Western Australia. This factor, combined with his attractive personality and legendary powers of oratorical persuasion, made him an ideal figure to arouse the monetary generosity of the Western Australian laity which was the only way to save the diocese of Perth from the imminent peril of financial collapse.
Fresh from his consecration, Clune took to the road travelling all over his diocese in ‘the guise of a beggar’, as he put it. The people responded to his appeals magnificently. He raised approximately £50,000 in the first year and had beaten the debt down to £10,000 by 1922. Sadly, the financial crisis destroyed what had previously been a close co-operative relationship between Clune and Bishop Gibney who accused Clune of misrepresenting his administration.
The rest of Clune’s episcopate was marked by dramatic events. In 1913 the Holy See raised Perth to Archdiocesan status, the head of a new province of the Church embracing the diocese of Geraldton, the Abbey Nullius of New Norcia and the Vicariate Apostolic of the Kimberley. Clune was the first Archbishop of Perth. He was a strong supporter of the war effort between 1914 and 1918 and declared himself in favour of conscription in contrast to his controversial Melbourne colleague, Daniel Mannix. In 1916, Clune himself saw war service on the western front and in Egypt as Catholic Chaplain General of the AIF. At the end of 1920, he was briefly projected onto the international stage when he was approached by the British Prime Minister, Lloyd George, to act as intermediary with the Sinn Fein leadership to help bring to an end the brutal Anglo-Irish war. Clune’s mission failed because of unreasonable British preconditions but brought London to the realisation that the only path to peace was through negotiations. Clune also helped to block a possible papal condemnation of the violence which might have been interpreted as singling out the Irish rebels.
Back home, Clune worked to develop the diocesan apparatus of schools, hospitals, social welfare agencies and Religious institutes. He built upon the infrastructure put in place by Gibney. Clune took important initiatives in the areas of early childhood education, scholarships for needy children, special schooling for intellectually disadvantaged children, religious education for children living in remote districts, in-service professional development for teachers, adult education, aged care and migrant chaplaincy.
He re-founded the St Vincent de Paul Society in 1911 and invited the Knights of the Southern Cross to set up in Perth in 1922. His foundation of the Newman Society in 1924 marked the entry of the Church into the tertiary educational sphere in Western Australia. He sponsored the scientific study of social work based on the latest American model. He introduced the first contemplative Religious Order into Perth, the Carmelite nuns who arrived in 1935. His great personal monument is the sanctuary and transepts of St Mary’s Cathedral rising above Victoria Square and opened with great fanfare in 1930.
Clune was a well known and well respected figure in public life. At one of the receptions given at the time of his consecration, he announced that, consistent with his Catholic principles, his policy would be to avoid any statements or actions which might cause strife or divisiveness in the community generally. As a result, he was cautious, even reticent, about commenting on controversial political and social issues except when he believed his guidance was needed. He tended to the middle way. For example, he was a moderate Irish nationalist but also a man of Empire, which went down well in Western Australia, that most British of States. He was a great supporter of the Returned Servicemen’s League. He maintained harmonious and co-operative relations with the heads of other denominations and religions, especially with his Anglican counterpart, Charles Riley, and the Chief Rabbi, David Freedman.
The measure of a man is often seen in death. Archbishop Clune died at the age of 71, on 24 May 1935, the feast of Our Lady, Help of Christians, patroness of Australia, after some years of very poor health and continual hospitalisation. His passing elicited an extraordinary outpouring of tributes from all walks of life in Western Australia, interstate and overseas. The list of representatives from all levels of State and society at the funeral Mass required two tightly-printed columns in The Record. The city came to a standstill on a grey and rainy day as the mile-long cortege made its way along silent, crowded streets bearing the late Archbishop’s body to its place of interment, as he wished, the Redemptorist section of Karrakatta Cemetery.
What of Clune, the man? He was outgoing, affable and gregarious. Recreations at the Redemptorist monastery and the Palace saw him joining lustily in the Irish singing and the story telling. He was a smoker and fond of a whiskey or two. He was not a scholar but loved English literature and was something of a minor authority on the novels of Thackeray. He was passionate about Christian art and architecture. He kept poultry and grew vegetables, skills he learned growing up on the family farm in Ireland. He was an enthusiast for motoring and acquired an Italian automobile in 1911, replacing it with a Daimler in 1915. Despite his impressive physical presence, his constitution was not strong and his health was further undermined by over-work. He compensated by taking the restorative sea voyages he enjoyed so much, to such places as Colombo, Singapore and Noumea.
As a diocesan priest, teacher, preacher, Redemptorist missioner, diocesan administrator and Bishop, Clune was a man of action rather than contemplation. His philosophy was that if there was a task to undertake he would give it his all.
Whatever he did he did well. He once said that God’s greatest gift is faith. He was not the kind of person to doubt his own Catholic faith and, from that secure foundation, he spent his life in its service and the service of those with whom he shared it.
Fr Dowd OP is currently preparing a biography of Archbishop Patrick J Clune, the first Archbishop of Perth.