The history of the Catholic Church in Australia, with its heroines and heroes, saints and sinners, politics and art, is mostly recorded in often-inaccessible books. Now, it can be accessed on YouTube. Source: The Catholic Weekly.
The Australian Catholic Historical Society has created a YouTube channel that draws together dozens of videos posted on the internet – talks, historical newsreels and documentaries spanning the last hundred and more years.
There are clips of Archbishop Mannix arriving in Liverpool in 1920 after the British arrested him to keep him from landing in Ireland, the close of the International Eucharist Congress in Sydney in 1928, and a moving requiem Mass for fallen Australian soldiers at the Lae war cemetery in 1944.
Papal visits are well documented. There are documentaries of missionary work in the Northern Territory, and clips from feature films about the Church, a positive view in the 2010 telefilm Sisters of War to the oppressive 1976 film The Devil’s Playground, directed by Fred Schepisi.
There is a growing number of talks and lectures. The latest to be added is “Crossing the Tiber: Australian Anglican Clerical Converts to Rome, 1840s-2000s.”
The YouTuber behind it is the ACHS vice-president James Franklin, a polymath at the University of NSW who is a mathematician, philosopher, and cultural historian.
“We (ACHS) want to extend the range of our communications to those who don’t read much or just prefer watching to reading, that is, the younger generation, but not solely,” Professor Franklin said.
“But also, video newsreel is special in that you can, so to speak, look directly into the past without the mediation of some historian’s interpretation. It’s the most immediate contact with the past you can have.”
The channel’s ultimate aim is to be part of the new evangelisation.
“The purpose of this and other communication by ACHS is similar to St Luke’s in the Acts of the Apostles: to tell the story of the past of the Catholic community so that present-day Catholics see what tradition they have been born or converted into – as role models, warnings, and just to understand what they’re carrying forward,” Professor Franklin said.
Details: Australian Catholic Historical Society on YouTube.
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YouTube is archiving Australian Catholic history (By Michael Cook, The Catholic Weekly)
