A GROUP of fundamentalist Catholics is trying to block sales of a
new, controversial biography of the University of Sydney’s first
chaplain.
Author Francis Harvey, 80, of Freshwater, said the group, dubbed
“Temple Police”, were part of a Catholic resistance to his book
Traveller to Freedom.
Harvey said its subject, Roger Pryke, had a troubled relationship
with church authorities and quit the ministry in the 1970s to protest a
Catholic ban on the contraceptive pill.
“My main beef over this book is with the Temple Police,” Harvey said.
“They are a group of Catholic people trying to stifle the reforms of
people like Roger Pryke. The book is selling well.
There’s a need and desire for the book, but there’s also a desire to stifle it.”
Pryke received his first posting as a curate of the church of St Joseph, Newtown in 1944.
He was appointed the University of Sydney’s first chaplain in the late 1950s.
Harvey, a former Anglican and subsequent Catholic convert, said he
met Pryke after Pryke was “banished” from the university for his views
in the late 1960s.
Harvey said the antagonism to Traveller to Freedom - which took him 15 years to write - was “unhealthy”.
“It’s about time people started to think about this,” he said.
“People are not stupid. They question things today.”
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