After spending 70 years under the rule of the Communist Party, the small country of Mongolia found itself isolated from the world and religion. That was until Bishop Wenceslao Padilla and two other missionary priests brought Catholicism to the nation, as Matthew Biddle explains…

We have recently tried to reintroduce the family Rosary but my sons, aged 11 and 13, say they find it boring. I have not been able to convince them otherwise. Can you help me?

While the fledgling Catholic community in Western Australia was struggling with its own problems, the papacy of Pius IX – the longest in Church history – was getting to grips with revolutionary terror and the rise of modern philosophy and theology, writes historian Dr Robert Andrews.

Ursula Frayne was no newcomer to missionary work when she stepped ashore in the Swan River Colony in 1846. Back in Ireland, the bishop of Perth had told her about more than 5,000 European children and millions of Aboriginal ‘heathens’ awaiting ministry and conversion. It was nothing like the reality, writes Dr Catherine Kovesi.

When an anti-clerical government prevented his ordination, Martin Griver turned to studying medicine. Before that, he worked as a clerk in an accountancy firm. They were skills which would hold him in good stead, more than a decade later, when he was called on to helm a rather difficult diocese, writes Odhran O’Brien.

Construction of Perth’s first cathedral began on 27 December 1843. It was originally a chapel, school house and dwelling. The chapel was designated a cathedral on 6 May 1845, on the elevation of Bishop Brady to the episcopate.

The first monks to reach Western Australia were, to the best of our knowledge, the Benedictine members of the first missionary party that came with Perth’s first Catholic bishop, John Brady.

In the middle of the 19th century, the Roman Catholic community of Perth erupted in bitter and violent division as two zealous but ultimately flawed bishops fought it out for control of the diocese. It was a battle fought not only in the congregation but in the colony’s fledgling courts and eventually on its streets as instructions from Rome – each time, nine months in the coming – were mischievously ignored or only selectively received. How had Bishop Brady’s optimistic if impractical vision for a mission in Western Australia gone so badly awry, and who was to blame? Historian and Adelaide-based Dominican Father, Dr Christopher Dowd OP, explains.

Hal Colebatch writes on the early traces of Catholicsm in Western Australia in this introductuon to The Record’s Historical Edition.

The Archdiocesan Historical Commission plays an important part in researching and celebrating the history of the Perth Archdiocese, according to its chairman, Monsignor Brian O’Loughlin.