November 25, 1956, is a day that has stayed in Fr Brian Cosgriff’s memory – it was the day he joined 70,000 people in attending the official Olympic Mass for the Melbourne Olympic Games. Source: Melbourne Catholic.
Fr Cosgriff was a second-year seminarian at Corpus Christi College in Werribee and remembers being bussed across to Como Park in South Yarra with other seminarians to attend the Mass.
“You had a kind of an appreciation of the effect that the Catholic Church had,’ he said of the Mass.
Five hundred athletes and officials and 500 personnel from visiting warships were among the 70,000 people who attended the Pontifical High Mass, according to a story the following day in The Argus newspaper, which described the celebration as “the Roman Catholic Church’s contribution to the Olympic festivities”.
The archdiocese’s own newspaper, The Advocate, had been promoting the Mass for months, and special souvenir programs had been on sale in parishes – at 2 shillings a copy – to help cover the cost of the Mass and the “spiritual facilities” that the Church had committed to providing for athletes at the Olympic Village in West Heidelberg.
“May the smile of Christ be on the Olympic Games,” Melbourne Archbishop Daniel Mannix wrote in a handwritten message reproduced in the program. “May the world’s athletes gathered in the bond of their common humanity find in our city the peace that lies in the shadow of God.”
Archbishop Guilford Young of Hobart preached a rousing sermon at the Mass , speaking of the ways humans though the centuries have tried to achieve “mastery and harmony” through “organised play”.
Fr Peter Carrucan was another of the seminarians there that day, “all dressed in our soutanes and surplices”.
Recalling Archbishop Young’s sermon, Fr Carrucan admits, ‘I don’t remember anything that he said, except when he came to the end of his sermon, he wished all the athletes ‘a bonza time in Australia’.”
Archbishop Mannix said Melbourne was the “first to set an example of associating religion with the modern Olympic Games”.
“I think Melbourne has something to be proud of,” he declared, and “a lasting benefit has been done to the Games.”
FULL STORY
‘Something to be proud of’: remembering Melbourne’s 1956 Olympic Mass (Melbourne Catholic)
