It was Winston Churchill who said, “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us”. He echoed the words of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, “We create our buildings and then they create us”. In this sesquicentenary celebration we tell the story of the shaping of a building, the creation of this cathedral; but we also tell the story of the ways in which it has shaped us, helping to create not only the Catholic community in Brisbane but the city of Brisbane itself.
The story tells of time and place and people. It tells of the time between 1874 and 2024 – and what a time it has been, with the world changing in ways unimaginable 150 years ago: the emergence of a federated Australia, the twin apocalypse of the two World Wars and the many conflicts since, economic depression, the Second Vatican Council and the changes it brought to the Church, the birth of the digital age and so on. Through it all this cathedral which began as the biggest building in town has evolved, rising from the earth but dwarfed eventually by the towers of glass and steel in the midst of which it now sits.
The story also tells of the place, down by the river, on which the cathedral was built, Turrbal land for thousands of years before ever a sod was turned to begin the works. The penal colony of Moreton Bay was established in 1824 and opened to free settlers in 1842, with the first Catholic priest arriving the next year. Land was granted for the building of a church, which was opened in 1850. It became a cathedral in 1859 when the first bishop was appointed, though he didn’t arrive till 1861. When he finally made it to Brisbane, the bishop decided that what is now the Chapel wasn’t fit for purpose; and on the feast of St Stephen 1863, he laid the foundation stone of this much grander building. But lurching from one financial crisis to another, he was unable to open the cathedral, or some of it, until 1874. Since then, St Stephen’s has had additions and reworkings; but it will be complete only at the end of time. Buildings like this are never finished; to think that they are or can be is an illusion. Like the Church, a cathedral is always a work in progress.
The story also tells of the people who have shaped the cathedral through its 150 years, perhaps them above all who have become the temple of living stones. This gathering today is quite something, but it is much greater than meets the eye. Gathered with us here unseen are all those who have shaped St Stephen’s and who have been shaped by it through the years. The Indigenous inhabitants are here on the margin, almost invisible as they usually were, perplexed by the arrival of the settlers, and even more by what they were building on the land. Here too are the first non-Indigenous settlers, all struggling to build a life in what was hardly more than a shanty town.
With us is the first priest, James Hanly, who helped build the Chapel with his own hands, and who is mightily impressed now by the scale of what he sees and the city in which it stands. With Fr Hanly gather the many priests, living and dead, who have served in so many ways at St Stephen’s through the years. Theirs has been an often hidden but indispensable part of the story. Here of course is the first bishop, the Rome-educated Dubliner James Quinn, determined to build a cathedral to match his vision of the Roman Catholic Church and his exalted sense of his own office, even if the diocese couldn’t afford it. Here too is Robert Dunne, his mostly loyal adjutant and eventual successor, who disagreed with Quinn’s plans to build at whatever cost and didn’t attend the opening. Dunne wanted to build the community rather than the cathedral. Yet as Archbishop he would add the gable and towers in 1884 and many of the windows. He would also leave five thousand pounds in his will for the completion of the cathedral.
Among us, though on the sidelines, are the Mercy Sisters, Mother Vincent Ellen Whitty and her companions, who came to Brisbane with Bishop Quinn and at his beseeching, though he treated them poorly once they made it to Brisbane where the Sisters discovered there was no house for them and their bags had been lost in transit. It wasn’t a good start for the Mercies who became nonetheless a power in the land and in this precinct. St Mary MacKillop was driven from the diocese by the Bishop, but she’s here all the same, self-effacing as ever in a back corner but looming over all.
Here too is a less than satisfied James Duhig. He dutifully spent the money bequeathed by Archbishop Dunne for the cathedral’s completion – in 1922 adding a new sanctuary and the transepts with their windows, one in memory of the pioneering clergy, the other in memory of the pioneering nuns. But his heart wasn’t in it, because from early on Duhig had dreams of building a much grander cathedral up next to All Hallows School. The plans for Holy Name Cathedral were prepared, the crypt was built and the foundation-stone was laid with great fanfare. But striking the Depression, Duhig never raised funds enough and even lost large sums on increasingly desperate schemes. Holy Name was never built, and I have to say I’m grateful for that.
Among us too are the wealthy Catholics of Brisbane like the Maynes who spent large sums on building a new residence for Archbishop Dunne which Duhig, once he became Archbishop, promptly demolished to make way for his cathedral. The wealthy Catholics never got over that and refused to give a penny for the new cathedral, which was another reason why Holy Name was never built.
Somewhere here in the wings, as he was for so long, is Patrick O’Donnell, who was past his best when he became Archbishop and was only a few years in office before retiring. Here in St Stephen’s he made some temporary changes to accommodate the liturgical reforms of Vatican II, but nothing more.
However, this was not the case with Francis Rush, the first Australian-born Archbishop, who was responsible for the dramatic reworking of the cathedral and its precinct in 1988-89. He is certainly here, and not in the wings. The works were paid for by the sale of the property on which Duhig wanted to build Holy Name. What was done was a genuine renovation rather than a refurbishment, and for the most part it was a triumph in both the cathedral and the precinct. Francis Rush was very much a man of the Second Vatican Council, every session of which he attended; and the renovated St Stephen’s remains a monument to his deep sense of the Council and his commitment to its implementation.
John Bathersby is also among us, not quite in the shadow of Francis Rush but close by. He added the organ in 2000 and the Francis Rush Centre; he was also responsible for the renovation of the Chapel and the purchase of what has become Cathedral House. By comparison with my two predecessors, my own contributions to the cathedral and its precinct have been modest, more than cosmetic but minor by comparison.
The story of St Stephen’s, however, is not just a story of bishops and what they have done. It’s also the story of the millions of Catholics who have worshipped here through 150 years, bringing their joys and sorrows, their fears and desires, their hopes and disappointments, their children to baptise and teach, their young people to marry and ordain, their dead to farewell and commend to God. They are all here. But so too are the millions of others, not Catholics, who have come to the well like the Samaritan woman, seeking peace or pouring through the precinct on their way to somewhere else or having their lunch in the cathedral’s shadow. Then there are the homeless who in more recent times have sought shelter in the precinct. On this day, St Stephen’s teems with presences seen and unseen. What a gathering this is: “In you all find their home”, as the psalmist says (87:7).
This, then, is a story of time and place and people. But it is also a story of purpose, because the cathedral was built for many purposes: to glorify God; to witness to eternal values at the heart of the city; to accommodate a growing Catholic community; to make a statement of the dignity of the Catholic Church and the Catholic community; to forge a link with home and its familiar religious forms. But there is more.
In his poem The Invention of Fire, Andrew Taylor has this:
Under every cathedral
there’s a spring of pure emptiness
architects and priests search out these springs
wherever they find one a cathedral is built
So here, it seems, they found a spring of pure emptiness and built this cathedral. What they found was the pure emptiness of God who had always been here, the emptiness celebrated in the hymn in St Paul’s Letter to the Philippians which proclaims the self-emptying of Christ, his kenosis that led to the Cross (2:6-11). This is the absolute emptiness of perfect love which becomes the absolute fulness of perfect love; and if this building stands as a monument to anything it stands as a monument to that love, a monument therefore to Easter.
Without that spring of pure emptiness, identified and offered to everyone here, all the stories of time and place and people would be emptiness of another kind. But because the spring of pure emptiness wells up here and flows freely into the stories of time and place and people, this is a moment not only of remembrance but also of prophecy, announcing that the self-emptying love, which brought this cathedral to be and has not ceased to sustain the people who come here, will carry us and many others into a future where the spring will never fail and the pure emptiness will have the last word. The cathedral of St Stephen will always be in Wendell Berry’s words “the high restful sanctuary / that keeps the memory of Paradise” (Sabbaths, 1979, VII). But if the memory is kept here, then so too is the promise of Paradise. Amen.