PARISH PRIESTS & Administrators
Katoomba
Rev James McGough 1890-1900
Rev St Clair Joseph Bridge 1900 –
Rev John McCulloch
Upper Blue Mountains
Rev Peter Dowd 1992-1994
Rev James Dooley 1993-1996
Rev Robert Anderson 1994-2004
Rev John Smith 2004-2011
Rev Edward Tyler 2011
St Canice’s Church forms part of the rich history of the Blue Mountains going back as far as the 1800s, when pioneering priests discovered that escaped convicts from Emu Plains had settled among the Aboriginal communities in the Megalong Valley.
Many of the escaped men, some of Irish descent, intermarried with the Aborigines and lived a tribal life until the end of the 19th century. They were among the first parishioners of the area.
One was Billy Lynch, recognised as leader of the Aboriginal community and referred to as ‘King Billy’. His wife, Fanny Lynch, a fullblooded Aboriginal and member of the Gundungurra people, died in 1900 some years before him.
Both are buried in the Megalong Valley where Fanny has a headstone. Billy was buried upright, though, the last person to be buried in a traditional way, in the riverbank “north of a Stringybark, next to a Bluegum”.
‘King Billy’ was the great-great grandfather of Gundungurra elder Dawn Coltess who, as it happens, is an ex-pupil of St Canice’s Primary School, as was her mother.
The first Mountains’ parish was established in 1841 as the Bathurst Mission, served from Hartley.
St Canice’s was preceded by a small weatherboard church, which was begun in 1887. The tiny church (14 metres x 7 metres) cost £160 ($320).
In 1890, Fr James McGough, an Irish priest in his early 40s, who had been ordained at All Hallows, departed for the “foreign mission” of Australia.
He spent two years in Maitland, NSW, before going to Katoomba, where he became pastor of Katoomba, the centre of the Parish of the Blue Mountains.
He named his new church St Canice’s after a Gaelic saint born in County Derry about 516. St Canice had studied in Wales at St Cadoc in Liancarvan and, later, at the monastery St Finian founded at Clonard.
There he met Columcille and Comgall and Mobhi and the other great saints who became known as the “12 Great Apostles of Ireland”. Canice, along with Mobhi, Columcille and Comgall, then went to Scotland where Mobhi founded a monastery on the banks of the River Tolka at Giasnevin.
Canice’s name, in the form of Kenneth, has been borne by many Scots from his day to our own; his memory is enshrined in place names like Laggan-Kenny (at the foot of the Grampians), Cambus-Kenneth (near Stirling) and Kitchamnoch (in Iona).
Fr McGough was faced with many challenges in the early months of his tenure at Katoomba, such as the indifference of local Catholics to going to church. Even when the bishop visited, Fr McGough could think of barely 10 parishioners who would want to attend Mass.
His parish was 30 miles (48km) from one end to the other, Penrith on one side of the Mountains and Lithgow on the other. His biggest obstacle was communication.
Fr McGough had to travel on horseback spending many days and nights in the saddle, in sometimes inhospitable weather on tracks that were often impossible to negotiate even on horseback, to alert his parishioners to the fact that his small weatherboard church was waiting and welcoming.
After 10 difficult years, Fr McGough resigned in October 1900 to be replaced by a larger-than-life character, Fr St Clair Joseph Bridge, a 40-something priest who took the parish by the scruff of the neck and reputedly “pulled it alongside the hooves of his thundering horse”.
Fr Bridge, the son of a wealthy wool merchant, was described as “a bit unstable”, a “little odd” and “eccentric on a large scale”.
He had been born in Dundee Scotland, and claimed kinship to Cardinal Moran.
The eccentricity of the new incumbent soon became evident. At services men sat on the left side of the church (with boys at the front) and women on the right (girls at the front).
The doors were locked when Mass commenced and were not re-opened until the Mass was over.
Fr Bridge was popular though, and generous; he always remembered the collectors and wardens every Christmas and was meticulous in giving his altar boys some pocket money every Saturday night.
During his tenure he oversaw a frenzy of building, culminating in the laying and blessing of the foundation stone of St Canice’s by Cardinal Moran in 1902.
The Blue Mountains Parish thrived in the early 1900s with churches in Mt Victoria, Springwood, Blackheath, Wentworth Falls and Megalong; there were ceremonies every week to do with new schools, churches or convents.
The parish thrived because the mountains thrived.
It has been said that Katoomba was in “a fascinating stage of change” in 1889.