David Hilliard's address to the Friends of the Cathedral Church of St Francis Xavier, Adelaide, 25 October 2008

David Hilliard holds academic status as Associate Professor in the department of History at Flinders University where he taught for many years.

When we survey the people who have been associated with this cathedral over the last 150 years we looking at a vast company, numbering tens of thousands, of every class and occupation, nationality and ethnic background. In its composition it must surely be the most diverse of any Christian congregation in Adelaide. All we can easily discover about the great majority of cathedral parishioners and attenders are their names in church registers, on lists of donors and in the membership records of societies and committees. With time, working through directories, electoral rolls and other records, we could discover quite a lot about these individuals but this would be a major historical project, absorbing months of research. In this address my aim is rather less ambitious. I wish to focus on a selection of people associated with the cathedral who over 150 years have achieved prominence in the life of Adelaide, and South Australia.

First, we should survey the history of this building. The first Catholic bishop of Adelaide, Francis Murphy, purchased the land in 1850 from William Paxton, a director of the Burra Burra copper mine. The Catholic community in Adelaide in the 1840s was not numerous and certainly not wealthy. This site in Wakefield Street, close to but not fronting Victoria Square, was well away from the commercial centre of Adelaide. The Catholic Church could not afford the usual one-acre block but only half an acre, to be paid for over 18 months. Then there was no money for a building until finances improved in the mid-1850s when Bishop Murphy arranged for an English architect Charles Hansom to prepare a design. This was in the Early English style. The foundation stone was laid on 17 March 1856 and the first section, the first five bays of the nave, was dedicated on 11 July 1858, three months after the bishops’ death. Section 2 of Hansom’s design, the chancel and side-chapels, was carried out under Murphy’s successor Bishop Geoghegan and dedicated in November 1860. The next major addition, under Archbishop Reynolds, was a wide aisle on the eastern side completed in 1887. Further extensions, comprising two bays of the nave, an aisle on the western side, the Wakefield Street façade and the bottom stages of the tower, were initiated by Archbishop Spence and opened in 1926. The tower with its peal of bells was completed in 1996.

The worship at the cathedral was quite unlike that of Adelaide’s other major churches. Protestant journalists who wrote accounts of services they attended in 1895 and 1903 were struck by the social mixture of the congregation – ‘rich and poor sat cheek by jowl’. They were impressed by the reverence and rapt attention of the people, who prayed quietly beforehand and did not look around, and by the ‘gorgeous’ ritual of the 11 o’clock High Mass – ‘the most interesting service in the Church of Rome’. However, they were rather critical of the singing of the choir and the puny sound from the inadequate organ. These descriptions of services at the cathedral are in Quiz and the Lantern, 10 January 1895 and the Register, 10 August 1903.