Motor Mission 1968-73

In the late 60s, when it was found that many Catholic children were not able to attend Catholic primary schools and as a result were missing out on vital religious instruction, “many priests from the areas most affected approached the Catholic Education Office for… the great problem facing them”. 

Archbishop Knox, who had spent time in the missions in India, presented priests with the opportunity to “volunteer to spend some of their priestly ministry in the mission fields of New Guinea and South America. In a similar way, the home missions very soon came within the radius of his missionary eye. Fr Frank Martin, Director of Catholic Education in the Archdiocese, with instructions from Dr. Knox, approached the Major Superiors to free some of their sisters from the Catholic schools to work in parishes.” Their work was to organize the catechetical programme for Catholic children in State Schools during school time and on the weekends especially for children preparing for their First Communion and Confirmation.

This brought about the beginnings of what was called, the “Melbourne Motor Missions”. Two Brigidine sisters, Agnes Lyng (the writer of the notes) and Loretta Brennan, a past pupil of Kilbreda, established the Peninsula Motor Mission, travelling from the Mentone convent to Chelsea, Seaford and Frankston, where they worked with these students. “Mother Thaddeus (Superior of the Mentone Convent), in her usual cheerful and optimistic manner, said she would ‘find’ us a room to set up as an office-work room for the Motor Mission. Perhaps St Anthony may be given some share of the credit in the ‘finding’ because a well-furnished, though small, room was found through the skillful and artistic conversion of the old coke house, now no longer needed for its original purpose.”

“Unfortunately, owing to some delay at General Motors Holden, not all the cars were available so Sr Marina (Loreto) and I began, not as Motor Missioners, but as Train Missioners for the first couple of weeks. When our car did eventually arrive, it was given a very special blessing by Fr Flanagan of Chelsea”. The sisters received a very warm welcome in all of the 28 schools in which they worked. This included four High Schools, two Technical Schools and 22 Primary Schools.  Loretta’s text “Let’s Go Together”, created for the Catholic Education Office especially for this purpose, was adopted widely for use in Catholic schools too, as I recall using it at OLA myself.  By 1973, they were working in 5 parishes with 33 schools and vast numbers of students. Later Brigidine Sisters who took on this work included Delys Baldwin, another former Kilbreda student, Helen Field, Anita Le Clerq and Marie Feiss.

Circumstances were trying to say the least and often it was difficult to find a suitable place to instruct these students. . “Owing to lack of accommodation in the State Schools this ‘place’ is most often a small sick bay, very often with a patient in bed, a corridor with its usual stream of traffic, a store room, shelter shed or some such place.” Sr Agnes remembers being “overawed at the vast area for which we were responsible and with the immensity of the task. The long hours of driving, the rushed lunches eaten in a car which had stood in the hot sun for hours, the endless round of meetings by day and by night were most demanding and often very exhausting”.

Eventually the work fell to Catechists like my mother, who worked with students in the local schools after hours.

Sr Agnes died aged 66 in 2001, Sr Marie in 2017 and Sr Delys in 2022. Loretta has for many years worked in Nairobi Kenya and Anita lives locally at Bonbeach.

Damian Smith
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