‘Something to be proud of’: remembering Melbourne’s 1956 Olympic Mass

Fr Brian Cosgriff was a second-year seminarian at Corpus Christi College in Werribee at the time of the Melbourne Olympics in 1956. On Sunday 25 November—the first Sunday of the Games—he remembers being bussed across to Como Park in South Yarra with other seminarians to attend the official ‘Olympic Mass’, joining 70,000 others who gathered at the park that day.

It’s a day that has stayed in his memory. ‘You had a kind of an appreciation of the effect that the Catholic Church had,’ he said of celebrating Mass among so many people.

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, which described the celebration as ‘the Roman Catholic Church’s contribution to the Olympic festivities’.

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.

The Archdiocese’s own newspaper, the Advocate, had been promoting the Mass for months, and special souvenir programmes 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,’ Archbishop Daniel Mannix wrote in a handwritten message reproduced in the programme. ‘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.’

With most of Melbourne’s large venues already being used for the Games, Como Park’s ‘natural setting’ provided both ‘ample accommodation for a huge crowd’ and adequate parking nearby, according to the Advocate, which reported that a ‘five-minute bus service from Princes Bridge will run direct to the Park’, along with another 10-minute service from the corner of Glenhuntly and Kooyong roads.

The planning for the Mass almost rivalled that of the Games themselves, with a choir of 200 seminarians and 600 schoolgirls ‘attired in blue cloaks and white veils’, joining the St Patrick’s Cathedral Choir, the St Vincent de Paul Boys’ Orphanage Band, the Xavier College Band and the Bendigo Marist Brothers’ Old Boys’ Band to provide the music.

‘Two-thirds of the oval is to be taken up with the formation of a living cross,’ the Advocate reported. ‘The cross will be outlined by members of school Cadet units, and will be filled by members of the YCW [Young Christian Workers] and NCGM [National Catholic Girls Movement]. A circle around the cross will be formed by over 1000 Catholic Scouts.’

Everything was planned in minute detail—or almost everything. Addressing members of the Victorian Catholic Lawn Tennis Association in the lead-up to the Mass, Archbishop Mannix said, ‘I hope that we are all praying for good weather on that day. Our organisers have provided for everything else.’ The prayers must have been answered, with photos of the day showing clear skies.

Fr Cosgriff remembers going to the Mass with his fellow seminarians, saying it was ‘a bit of a day out’ and ‘a bit of a thrill for us’. He was part of the choir, which ‘seemed to be seminarians from Manly as well as Werribee, and maybe they came from other places too’. He also remembers that the conductor wore white gloves, which made him ‘stand out pretty well’.

While he doesn’t remember the music itself, he does ‘remember the crowd, the size of it, and it was very attractive in that particular place, Como Park,’ he says. ‘It was great just to be part of it.’

Among the official party at the Mass were Victorian Governor Sir Dallas Brooks, Prince Jean and Princess Josephine of Luxembourg, the Premier Mr Bolte and the Lord Mayor Cr Sir Frank Selleck, along with members of various Olympic committees, the Melbourne and Prahran city councils, and officials and consular representatives of more than 30 nations. According to the Advocate, ‘several hundred officers and men from visiting Navy ships’ were also transported to the park and ‘seated in a huge semi-circle around the eastern end of the oval’.

As you contend for victory in the meeting of champions at this Olympiad, let your bodies express and serve a Christian soul.

Cardinal Norman Gilroy, Archbishop of Sydney, presided and read a special letter from Pope Pius XII addressed to Catholic athletes at the Games. Archbishop Justin Simonds, Coadjutor Archbishop of Melbourne, celebrated the Mass—a Solemn Votive Mass of Our Lady Help of Christians, Patroness of Australia—in the presence of the Apostolic Delegate Archbishop Romolo Carboni, Archbishop Mannix and other members of the Australian hierarchy, including fourteen bishops and archbishops from around Australia.

Archbishop Guilford Young of Hobart preached a rousing sermon, speaking of the ways humans though the centuries have tried to achieve ‘mastery and harmony’ through ‘organised play’.

‘It has been man’s dream to conquer his own weight and escape like an Icarus from its servitude,’ he declared. ‘The jumper has trained to trigger his muscles and tear himself from the pull of the earth. The swimmer has made an ally of fluidity and a consequent new grace and cadence have been given to human movement.’

In this pursuit, however, he said, we are ‘always balanced on a razor edge of great peril’, at risk of making an idol of the body. Instead, he exhorted the athletes, ‘As you contend for victory in the meeting of champions at this Olympiad, let your bodies express and serve a Christian soul—a soul united to Christ in truth and justice, fairness and modesty, probity and honour.

When he came to the end of his sermon, he wished all the athletes ‘a bonzer time in Australia’.

‘We, in our thousands, proud citizens of a free city that this year celebrates its centenary of responsible government, will watch and admire, with our welcome guests, your feats of prowess during these Games.’ It will be, he said, a foretaste and a mirror of ‘that destiny, the glorious plenitude of physical harmony, to which the Christian body is called’.

Fr Peter Carrucan was another of the seminarians there that day, ‘all dressed in our soutanes and surpluses’. Recalling Archbishop Young’s sermon, he 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 bonzer time in Australia”.’

Mgr Peter Kenny was also there. ‘I wasn’t playing any special part,’ he says, but he recalls the size of the crowd and the number of different groups involved in the proceedings: ‘youth groups and so forth, the YCW, … the Biblical Guild, the Knights of the Southern Cross—all those sort of organisations were there.’

The seminary year usually ran from the beginning of March to the beginning of December, ‘but that year, in 1956, we started a week earlier and finished a week earlier,’ Mgr Kenny recalls, allowing seminarians and staff to attend the second week of the Olympics if they wished to.

Mgr Kenny chose to return home, where he watched the marathon on TV. ‘It was the beginning of television in Melbourne,’ he explains, ‘and they were testing out their equipment, so people who had TV sets could watch it.’

Fr Cosgriff attended a basketball game and some of the athletics. His uncle, who was in charge of supplying fruit and vegetables to the Olympic Village, had a couple of well-connected mates from his Navy days who were able to help him secure 20 tickets for some of the seminarians to attend the final day of the athletics.

‘That was the day that John Landy ran in the mile,’ he recalls. ‘The women—Betty Cuthbert and others—had won sprints, but they ran in the relay that day and they won the relay. And that was terribly exciting.’

Fr Carrucan was also there to see John Landy run, and even though Landy didn’t win, the day stuck in his mind because the celebrated Australian athlete had come to the seminary earlier that year to talk to the seminarians about his expectations for the Olympics.

We Catholics are justly proud of the fact that we injected into the feverish carnival of sport a spiritual note of such strength and magnificence that it has also made history.

High expectations and a sense of nervous anticipation had been building in Melbourne for some time—years even—as the city had prepared to be in the global spotlight, something that Archbishop Simonds remarked on after the Games had concluded.

‘The people have risen magnificently to the challenge that this young city was too immature to stage the Olympic Games in a manner worthy of their historic traditions,’ he said in Malvern a few weeks after the closing ceremony. ‘But Melbourne has completely confounded the prophets of gloom, and we Catholics are justly proud of the fact that we injected into the feverish carnival of sport a spiritual note of such strength and magnificence that it has also made history.’

Archbishop Mannix, speaking in Coburg, echoed his sentiments, going even further when he suggested that ‘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.’