By PHILIP ENGLISH
The hierarchy of the Catholic Church, from parishioners to bishops and trainee priests met in Ponsonby yesterday to celebrate 100 years of the Holy Cross Seminary.
The national seminary, a training college for priests, was originally founded in Mosgiel on May 3, 1900, and back then incorporated the house
of a nephew of Robbie Burns - the Taieri district's first Presbyterian minister - before it moved to a new building in Auckland in 1998.
Now one of several Catholic institutions on the old St Columba's Primary School site in Vermont St, Ponsonby, the seminary was shifted to Auckland for staffing reasons and because of the church resources that were available nearby.
"The weather didn't come into it," the seminary rector, Father Brendan Daly, joked yesterday after a centennial Mass at the Vermont St Sacred Heart Church.
This year 21 prospective priests are studying at the seminary, which takes trainees from all over New Zealand. Aged from their 20s to their 50s, they take more than six years to graduate to the priesthood.
A common occupation for men before they entered the seminary was accountancy, said Father Daly, but the priesthood drew from all walks of life.
During the past 100 years, 1320 students have attended the seminary, with about half being ordained.
"They have all been attracted, fundamentally, by a calling to continue the work of Jesus in a special way," said Father Daly, since Catholics believed priests carried on the work of Christ.
In a sermon during the Mass, Bishop Peter Cullinane from Palmerston North likened the seminary to a community of the Lord's disciples.
A prized relic belonging to the seminary, said to have come from the cross on which Jesus was crucified, was brought out and carried in a procession for the celebration.
The relic in the form of a cross is known to have been worn by St Laurence Justinian in the 15th Century.
It was obtained by the founder of the seminary and its first president, Bishop Michael Verdon, an early Bishop of Dunedin.
