Rome in Australia

The founding of the Catholic missions in Australia coincided with the defining drift of power and prestige within the nineteenth-century Church. This was a period of chronic dissension among Australia's Catholic communities, powerfully drawn by the ultramontane impulse and political manoeuvring to refer their problems to the Pope. Roman bureaucratic control, exercised through the Sacred Congregation de Propaganda Fide, was the single most important factor in the resolution of these problems and,