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Welcome to Annals Australasia

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Annals has been published from Sydney by the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart since 1889 when French missionaries arrived on their way to Papua New Guinea.

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The Bishop with 150 wives

Decades of disaster ... In place of Gsell's sawmill, the collapse in 2009 of the timber scheme in the Tiwi Islands. In place of schools teaching literacy in English, a generation of children too tired from noise all night to even get to school. In place of vegetables and melons, alcohol and kava. In place of relative peace, endemic violence.

THE BISHOP WITH 150 WIVES

By Jim Franklin

IN 1956, the year of Quadrant's founding, Angus and Robertson published a remarkable memoir, The Bishop with 150 Wives. It is as anti-communist as Quadrant itself. The author, François Xavier Gsell, describes in vivid detail his decades as a missionary in the Northern Territory. In view of the gross and continuing failures of aboriginal policy since the time of the missionaries, it is well worth a look to understand how the missions created oases of peaceful and productive activity where others have failed.

Gsell was born in Alsace in 1872, apprenticed as a cotton-spinner, joined the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart and studied in Rome. After a dispiriting time in administration in Randwick, he spent a few years in Papua before being appointed Apostolic Administrator of the Northern Territory, charged with re-founding the Church there. He did so with success but was keen to move on to strictly missionary work among aborigines. In 1911 he established a mission at Nguiu, Bathurst Island (fictionalised in the movie Australia). Naturally conditions were at first very difficult, but he made it a success. In contrast to the failures of recent times in those regions, he ran a peaceful settlement with children attending school and with real economic activity, including a market garden and a sawmilling business.

The Catholic Church and the Pagan State

Reflections on the rise of paganism in today's world

by English historian Christopher Dawson who foresaw it in the last century

The Catholic Church and the Pagan State

Presented by Paul Stenhouse, MSC

IN THE 1930s English Catholic historian Christopher Dawson [1889-1970] described the world of his day on the eve of World War II. His analysis of what had led it to that point, his view of its flaws and strengths, and where the Catholic Church stood in relation to it, inspired what follows. Almost all the words and insights are his. The timelessness of his logic will not be lost on Annals readers.

THE CATHOLIC FAITH obliges us to protest against any social system that claims the whole of man and sets itself up as the final end of human activity. Christianity asserts that man's essential nature transcends all political and economic forms. His true home, his true destiny, is elsewhere than on this earth.

Our Lord drew this distinction between the two worlds, the two kingdoms, the two orders of reality in his famous reply to some Pharisees and Herodians when they asked him:

'Master, you are an honest man, we know; you teach in all honesty the way of life that God requires, truckling to no man, whoever he may be. Give us your ruling on this: are we, or are we not permitted to pay taxes to the Roman Emperor?' Jesus was aware of their malicious intention and said to them, 'You hypocrites! Why are you trying to catch me out? Show me the money in which the tax is paid.' They handed him a silver piece. Jesus asked, 'Whose head is this; and whose inscription?' 'Caesar's,' they replied. He said to them: 'Then pay Caesar what is due to Caesar, and pay God what is due to God'. This answer took them by surprise, and they went away and left him alone.