Perth’s first Bishop is coming home, 140 years after he left in controversial circumstances, it has been confirmed.
Perth priest Fr Robert Cross, who is Executive Assistant to Archbishop Hickey and also a trained archaeologist, met with relatives of Bishop John Brady in Ireland in January and gained their permission to bring the remains of the Bishop home from a French provincial graveyard in the village of Amélie-Les-Bains in southern France.
He has actively been pursuing the return of Bishop Brady’s remains to Perth for the last six months.
Among the relatives Fr Cross met were a priest, Fr Eddie Brady, 82, a member of the Missionaries of Africa Order. Fr Brady is a great grand-nephew of Bishop Brady.
Fr Cross also met Bishop Brady’s great-great-grand-niece, Lorna Lavelle, her husband Paddy and two of their sons in Dublin, Ireland.
The family gave its permission for Bishop Brady’s remains to be exhumed and re-interred in Perth, the diocese he founded. Family members were also delighted that Archbishop Hickey wants this to happen, Fr Cross told The Record.
After the meeting, Fr Robert Cross travelled to France and visited the gravesite adjacent to the parish church of Amelie-Les-Baines.
The Record has established that Bishop Brady’s grave has also been visited on at least two other occasions, once by Bunbury priest Fr Noel Fitzsimons and on another by Vincentian priest Fr Denis Bourke CM, who wrote The History of the Catholic Church in Western Australia.
Archbishop Hickey and Mr and Mrs Lavelle joined Fr Cross on 20 January to visit the grave in southern France where they prayed three decades of the Rosary; one in Gaelic, one in French and one in English.
The family
told Fr Cross and the Archbishop that Bishop Brady, believed to have
been born in 1788, would have spoken Irish, also known as Gaelic, rather
than English.
When he came to Australia, he would have been more fluent
in French, given that he studied for the priesthood in France and spent
his early years on French-speaking Bourbon Island (now called Réunion
Island).
When Lorna and Paddy saw the grave for the first time, they were quite moved, Fr Cross said.
“There was a poignant, almost reverential silence,” he said.
The parish priest of Amelie-Les-Baines, Pere Elie Raubert, who was unaware that Bishop Brady was buried there, was extremely cooperative and hospitable, Fr Cross said.
He hosted the visitors for lunch, showed them around the town and took them to meet with the civic authorities and funeral director.
Neither the civic authorities nor the funeral director could foresee any difficulties in exhuming the remains and, likewise, Bowra and O’Dea, funeral directors in Perth, have said there should be no complications at this end either, Fr Cross said.
There is no certainty that there will be any remains after 140 years since Bishop Brady’s burial, Fr Cross said.
Amelie-Les-Baines, which lies within sight of the Pyrenees, is a spa town with high concentrations of groundwater. It is possible any human remains may have effectively been dissolved by chemicals in the groundwater.
“Given that, it is necessary for the exhumation to be conducted by an archaeological method to ensure that any human skeletal material and other funerary items are recovered,” Fr Cross said.
When whatever remains of Perth’s first Bishop is exhumed in March and reinterred later in the year in St Mary’s Cathedral Crypt, all but one of Perth’s previous Bishops and Archbishops will be together.
In 2006, Bishops Martin Griver and Matthew Gibney were exhumed from the 1865 section of the Cathedral ready to be re-interred in the new Crypt.
Archbishops Redmond Prendiville, Launcelot Goody and William Foley were exhumed from Karrakatta cemetery in October 2009 and reinterred in the Cathedral Crypt.
Places have been reserved for Bishop Brady and Archbishop Patrick Clune.
The controversy surrounding Bishop Brady is still unsolved.
The missionary who had previously served in the colony of New South Wales in the 1830s and won high regard from some for his saintly character, arrived in Albany in 1843 with Belgian priest Fr John Joostens and Patrick O’Reilly, a catechist.
He visited Rome the following year, asking that a diocese be created for WA, telling authorities there were approximately two million Aborigines in need of evangelisation.
Rome agreed to the creation of a diocese and appointed Brady as the first Bishop of Perth.
While in Rome, he recruited new clergy for his diocese including Benedictines Joseph Serra and Rosendo Salvado, and then other clergy and Religious from France and Ireland including Sisters of Mercy.
He returned to Perth with a total party of 28 but soon found difficulty in feeding and financing them.
One party of missionary priests sent to the south-west of WA nearly starved to death, but the seriousness of this was overshadowed by the dispute between Bishop Brady and Bishop Serra.
In 1851, Bishop Brady was suspended by Rome, Serra was appointed Apostolic Administrator and a series of violent legal disputes between the two and their supporters ensued, dividing the young Church in Perth.
The dispute forced Archbishop Polding of New South Wales to come to Perth to try and settle the issue.
Bishop Brady was at one point excommunicated and left Perth in 1852 for Ireland.
Brady family folklore holds that Bishop Brady was returning from the first Vatican Council in 1871 when he visited the natural springs health resort town of Amélie-Les-Bains for health reasons.
He subsequently died there.
However, Fr Cross said the issues were complex.
Armchair historians are quick to judge Brady negatively, he said, but a number of factors complicated the matter.
A papal letter from Rome appointing Serra to head the Church in Perth, sent to Port Essington near Darwin, was lost for 12 months and would have been unseen by Bishop Brady.
When in Rome arguing his case, the Vatican office in charge of missions ordered him not to return to Perth but the Pope apparently did.
The Church in Perth was divided along cultural lines between the Spanish and the Irish and it is thought Brady’s understanding of English was poor.
Although he never returned to Perth, he remained its Bishop until his death in 1871 in France.