John Crockett: The autobiography of Dom Felice Vaggioli

By JACK LEIGH

When the highly regarded Father Vaggioli heard that Auckland's fine, gothic-style Church of St Benedict had been destroyed by fire, he was ecstatic.

"I raised my eyes to heaven exclaiming thank you Lord ... you have truly blessed us," he writes in this revealing memoir of late-19th century colonial life.

He was joyful because he had negotiated a £5000 insurance policy on the church which had a hopeless debt burden of £3100. Now this could be cleared with enough left over to build another church - the 1888 brick one still on the site on the corner of St Benedicts St, Newton.

The original kauri edifice of 1882 was the folly of the Benedictines' local head, Father Adalbert Sullivan, who fancied that if he was made bishop, this would be his cathedral.

Then one day in 1887 sparks from a distant house fire set light to a sparrow's nest on the roof. Jets from the fire hoses drooped for lack of water pressure. The church was destroyed.

Vaggioli emerged in 2000 as a post-colonial hero when Otago University Press published the volume of his History of New Zealand and its Inhabitants, which the British once wanted suppressed for its criticism of how colonial rule affected the Maori.

This present book shows Vaggioli to be combative by nature, attacking the religious and the godless alike. Few escape his asperity. He castigates fellow priests, a trio of nuns, Protestants, the Anglo-Saxon race, Freemasons and a whole range of individuals. He is always saddened to discover more drunkards, lechers, cheats, liars and adulterers but alas, the truth has to be told.

He is absolutely straight within the constraints of his world view but, as a disciplinarian with limited power, he is often reduced to mere carping. Prefaces by the translator John Crockett and historian Rory Sweetman give a good account of the man.

Crockett calls him "opinionated, patronising, garrulous" and a formidable personality. He had "surety, sharpness" and a clear mind. Some found his individualism alarming in a Benedictine monk, but many admired him for it.

Sweetman finds him "fiercely partisan" and community-minded, and the hero of his own story in which he confounds his foes, instructs his superiors, performs financial miracles and wins converts. In fact, Vaggioli was often the Catholic Church's backstop to the financial fumblings of lesser men.

He rescued Gisborne from the red, conjured funds from the mission field at Coromandel and redeemed the St Benedicts disaster.

His 1879 arrival in Auckland (population 52,000) was at 2 am, with the town "illuminated by gas-lighting, spread out over dark hills".

Roading was incomplete and settlement thinned out across the isthmus for about 6km. The 34-year-old missionary spoke no English but addressed a meeting of 16 priests in French, which all understood.

The bishop's residence in New St, Ponsonby, he calls "an old wooden house". It is now older by 122 years, having been relocated to 57 St Marys Rd to make way for the present brick mansion, built in 1894.

Vaggioli got around by horse tram, on foot or on horseback. He makes no comment on sights along the way, but later in a Gisborne street is "startled" when an old washerwoman discerns a priest not dressed as one, and genuflects as he goes by.

Parishioners seek to kiss his hand when he finally quits New Zealand after more than seven years, his "return to the cloisters" in Europe ostensibly for his health but more likely because his superior's mismanagement was threatening the mission's survival.

He lived another 34 years and died in 1921, aged 76, leaving this invaluable record of daily life and Catholic politics on a raw, colonial frontier.

The "deserter" term of the book's title refers to his avoidance of military call-up as a young man in favour of a sterner, monastic discipline.

University of Otago Press

$49.95

* Jack Leigh is an Auckland journalist.