Bede Polding

Who was Bede Polding?

Bede Polding, OSB, was the first Roman Catholic Bishop and then Archbishop of Sydney, Australia.

Experiences in Sydney Polding and party arrived first in Hobart on 6 August 1835 leaving a priest and a student there and arrived in Sydney on 13 September 1835. Polding travelled widely throughout Australia and was regarded as hard-working; a letter in the Weekly Orthodox Journal quoted a letter from Sydney: "His labors are incessant, his zeal unbounded, Protestants as well as Catholics revere him as a saint". Polding travelled to Europe in November 1840, during his absence Francis Murphy was appointed vicar-general of the diocese.

Polding was appointed the first bishop of Sydney on 5 April 1842, and Archbishop on 22 April 1842. Despite his many successes as a founding bishop, Polding experienced a degree of resistance from his largely Irish Catholic church in Australia. Even after the English Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, the Irish understood any English leadership in sectarian terms.