Not Forgotten: Australian Catholic Educators 1820-2020
Anne Benjamin and Seamus O’Grady (ed)
Not Forgotten: Australian Catholic Educators 1820-2020 describes what followed from the decision to opt out of the state educational system and to establish a system of Catholic schools for Catholic children. This was perhaps the most significant and formative decision taken by the Australian Catholic Church before federation. Although we can still debate its wisdom, we must also recognise the energy it freed, the sacrifices it demanded and, the extraordinary generosity of struggling Australians in meeting the demands made on them.
It brought thousands of Religious Sisters and Brothers to Australia to open and staff the new schools, and ensured that for the majority of Catholic children their first and formal contact with faith was through women. Although the stories of faith may have been told by men, they were interpreted through a feminine lens. The structure of the church may have been clericalist, but Catholics’ experience of it was more nuanced.
Not Forgotten tells the stories of the foundation and crises of Catholic education over two centuries through brief surveys of the periods under discussion followed by thumbnail sketches of significant educators over the past century and a half. In doing so it necessarily focuses on Religious and clergy – they formed the administrators and the majority of the unpaid and devoted workforce who kept the schools going in times of crisis. Of equal significance, they were those most represented in the written archives of schools, Religious Congregations and parishes. The book is a family history, mostly told by companions in the Religious Congregations of those mentioned. It evokes the courage of young women sailing to Australia to found schools at the end of railway lines in a strange nation, a strange climate and among strange children, recruiting people from the same remote places to carry on the schools. The book highlights how passionately Catholics wanted a Catholic education for their children. The rural origins of many of the contributors testify, too, to the central part that the schools played in the life of the communities they served.
The Catholic Education system remains a precious resource available to the Catholic Church today. Its solidity is a tribute to the commitment that Catholic parishes and individual Catholics made of their time and of their gifts to sustain it in testing times. It is a central building block in any renewed Catholic Church.
COVENTRY PRESS
ISBN 9780648725152