Christian Brothers in Australia

Among the Christian Brothers in Australia and New Zealand, none is held in higher esteem than Br Patrick Ambrose Treacy, the founding Provincial. His faith, energy and dedication underpinned the beginning and growth of the Brothers in Oceania. In the space of 30 years and without any government assistance, he established communities and schools providing education for Catholic boys in the main centres of what were then the colonies, often undertaking arduous collecting tours on horseback to finance the work. When the Brothers in Queensland celebrated the centenary of their first foundation (Gregory Terrace, 1875), they gathered at Br Ambrose’s grave in Nudgee Cemetery, Brisbane to honour his memory. The homily at the Mass, given by Rev Dr T Boland, captured the spirit of this great man. Here is the text of Dr Boland’s tribute.

Br Patrick Ambrose Treacy

The souls of the just are in the hand of God. If we reflect on the theological meaning of ‘just’ – right, straight, properly squared off with God – and so with men – we know that Patrick Ambrose Treacy was a just man, that he rested, rests now and will rest forever in the hand of God.

One who is uniquely in a position to know the Brothers of every age and province of the Order since Edmund Rice, has declared that Ambrose Treacy was the greatest Christian Brother, after the Founder, who ever lived. His record in Australia suggests a great man – a man of scale, of energy, daemonic in its intensity. St. Peter Damian once referred to his friend Hildebrand, who became St. Gregory VII, as Sanctus Satanas, holy Satan, a paradox by which he meant that Hildebrand pursued the good with the relentless power, the determination of Lucifer, Son of the Morning.

He was born in Thurles, Co. Tipperary, in 1834, to a family of strict principles and strict observance, the kind of discipline that could stifle initiative or channel it with explosive force. The trajectory was in the direction of the Christian Brothers, where he was taught by Brother Larkin, one of the first Sydney Community, who like Treacy, returned to Australia; he taught at Terrace, was known to James Duhig, and is buried here, two places from Brother Treacy. Entering Christian Brothers at 18, Patrick became Ambrose, named for another practical man of talent who found it all worth nothing beside the talent hidden in the field. He spent 14 years as a dynamic teacher, a career in itself. At the age of 34 he was commissioned by the Superior General to take a young community and carry the Order to the Antipodes. What the Superior General had in mind beyond a school in Melbourne is not recorded, but what Brother Treacy did is incredible. He travelled constantly from Dunedin to the Hodgkinson River in North Queensland. He was a founder on the move, planner, builder, financier, traveller, teacher – a career of Renaissance variety. At the age of 66 he entered on yet another, 10 years as Consultor, administrator and overseer of a world, but with a special love still for Australia. One man in his time plays many parts, but rarely with such style and consuming energy as Brother Treacy.

Yet it is not the extraordinary range and achievement of those careers that inspires us. It is the spirit in which they were pursued. We know it is the Spirit of Christ; but Vatican II has reminded us that for a Religious Order, the Spirit of the Gospel is specified by that of the Founder. They were both realists – whether hard or soft headed. If an outside – though far from detached – observer may comment, I think realism is prominently a part of the Christian Brother charism. This does not exclude either dreams or visions – any of the human talents – but the capacity to see the world, men, God, straight, whole without extraneous additions is part of the legacy of Brother Rice and Brother Treacy. Both of them were business men as were many of the first Rice companions. Brother Rice, of course, had his own business, and a remarkably successful one. Had he never founded an Order, he would have been a notable man, local boy makes good, a born President of Rotary. Brother Treacy entered the Order at 18. He had no life in commerce, but his letters are those of a shrewd and competent man of affairs. He always refers to exact figures, whether it is of prices or of areas of properties. When he and Brother Barrett give descriptions of Terrace or Nudgee, the latter is satisfied with round numbers; the former gives exact figures, to a fraction of a rod, pole or perch. He sent sketches, even though the exact relation to Cabbage Tree Creek would mean little in Dublin. His estimates of men, bishops, brothers, or casual travellers, met on his extensive travels are shrewd, practical, without prejudice or animosity. If we were to make comparisons, we might see Brother Rice as softer, more volatile, more vulnerable. Left to nature Brother Treacy might have been perhaps unyielding; but this is where grace has worked on nature, and the grace of the Gospel worked through Brother Rice. He learned that the service of Christ through Christ in youth was the goal, not business efficiency or the grandeur of the Order.

Flouting normal business principles called for sacrifice and faith in one who so obviously respected them; and he did more than once. When he and his first community arrived in Melbourne in 1868 they had to borrow ten shillings from a priest fellow passenger to get their baggage ashore. This confidence in God’s providence is staggering. He sailed for the other side of the world— the other side of the moon – without cabfare; that would not faze him, since his sense of poverty would not allow him to take cabs; but he had come to found an Empire.

Closer to home, in 1889 he planned to build Nudgee College. He wrote to the Superior General: “I commenced without either the money for the building or even the promise from you of a staff of brothers to work it. I have confidence however that God will provide the means as heretofore . . .” How many of us are still relying on what he had learned of faith in his Christian Brother training. What a disaster for us, if he had not been a man of such faith.

I believe that a lot of Brother Treacy went into the building of Nudgee College and not just his hopes and dreams. The style of the building was Treacy himself – grand, solid and strong, meant to endure the shock of storms and the heat of the blazing sun; yet with a touch of grace and beauty. The lines are straight, definite, a construction of strength and purpose – and that was Treacy. There were no convolutions of confused ideals and motives. A psychiatrist would have worn out his couch waiting for custom.

There was no dissipation of the heart. His lines were clear – God, Christ, Church. Order, schools, boys to serve. Life was simply – if sacrificially – resolved, by Rule in the Church. He was no mere conformist; his letters to and about authorities are quite blunt and fearless; but he lost no time in regrets and hankering that could have no result. That was not the way to bring a hemisphere to Christ. There is little doubt that he was a Crusader in Mission; but there was so little egotism in him that his Crusade did not stop his also being a guest. He was a man of his times and he had no doubts of what he had to do or what he had to offer.

Yet he was not a figure of hard right angles. From somewhere – and we suspect that it was from Brother Rice – he learned the humane principle of power, the strength of a rounded arch, the curvilinear grace that softens the rectangles of Nudgee’s Italianate pile. Though a few contemporaries saw him as an autocrat in the nineteenth century, you will search his letters closely without finding a trace of malice or ill nature. He thought always of his Brothers and all he met. He had particular concern for the lay brothers, that they should not be overtaxed in their work or their diet. Brother Barrett tells us that he regularly carried on his travels a bottle of wine and a little whiskey – for the steerage passengers, who had nothing. On the “Donald Mackay” on the long journey to Australia he revelled in the company and was tolerant of the ship’s doctor who drank too much, but told good stories. He brought his prized possession with him – his Cremona Violin – one of the 50,000 survivors of the 500 Stradivarius made! Beauty he loved and the healing peace of nature, witness the gardens he planned and helped to plant in Nudgee and elsewhere.

In the middle of these gardens he liked to place a statue of Our Lady. This, too, he had learned well – the place of Mary in the lives of the brothers of Christ. He took with him everywhere a picture of her as Mater Amabilis, our Mother so worthy of love. He had special reason to love that picture. He saw it on the wall in Thurles when he went to consult Brother Larkin about his vocation, and it spoke to his thoughts. Brother Larkin gave it to him to bring to Australia, since it had hung in the first Sydney house. Brother Keenan told me that not long ago it was still in Parade, but now is gone. To find it would be to rediscover the history of the Order. The Marian links, the piety of the Australian founder is contained within its frame. The first thing he did on being told to go to Melbourne was enter the Chapel and pray the Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The Southern provinces were founded in prayer – and that to Mary. When he came to die he was commemorated with a prayer to Mary Immaculate.

One thing we can say of Brother Treacy is that he loved Australia and he loved the Brothers. When in 1900 he found himself suddenly returned to Ireland after 32 years, he wrote: “It is hard on me to be torn away from the Brothers with whom I have worked so long a time, and from the country and the work that seemed to suit me so well. I loved the Brothers, the place, the work, and it is with considerable reluctance that I separate myself from all . . .” When his time as Consultor was up, he chose to return to Australia to see the men, the schools and the country his heart had never left. He came back to Nudgee to tend the lawns and the gardens he had planted. He did not long enjoy them. Cancer soon put him in the Mater Hospital. Since there was no chance of recovery he asked to be taken to Terrace, his first Foundation in Queensland, there to die. It is pleasant to recall that there he was received with the charity, the humanity touched by grace, that he had taught. Only yesterday Monsignor Roberts told me that in 1912 he was a boy at Terrace and he recalled that they were told of Brother Treacy and urged not to make a noise near his room. The Brothers hosed down the lattice outside to cool the room in his last days. On Oct. 12, 1912 he rendered his noble soul to God. He had been 61 years a Christian Brother, 44 in, or in the service of, Australia and New Zealand. It might be appropriate to identify the room in Terrace where he died and mark it with some commemoration, even a shrine; for he was the Founder of this Province as of the others here in Australasia.
Father O’Shea (one of the speakers at the Centenary Religious Life Seminar) added a new Beautitude to the list; Blessed are those who see straight! Their reward is to see God here as well as hereafter. Read the Beatitudes as we heard them in the Gospel today. They are the Charter of Christianity. None of us can say he lives up to them. The attempt is the way of sanctity. In scale. grandeur, human and divine grace, they are the biography of Patrick Ambrose Treacy.