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SHORTLY BEFORE the 1928 International Eucharistie Congress in Sydney, someone called at St Mary's Cathedral and asked what a 'eucalyptus congress' was. As a result, congress organisers arranged for a priest, then little known, to appear on radio station 2UE and explain what the congress was all about. In this way was launched the astonishing public career of Dr Leslie Rumble, the world's first regular priest-broadcaster, author, and for nearly half a century the English-speaking world's most outspoken apologist for the Roman Catholic faith.
Dr Rumble, who was 83, died last Sunday. Overseas, he was Australia's best known Catholic cleric. He shunned personal publicity yet was, in his heyday, as much of an international figure as Archbishop Daniel Mannix, with whom he once clashed.
At Dr Rumble's Requiem Mass on Tuesday, Father E. J. Cuskelly, superior general of his order, who is visiting Australia, confessed that he told colleagues in Rome: ? belong to the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart: you know - Dr Rumble's crowd' .
That early radio program, intended to run four weeks, was turned into a Question Box (its actual title) which lasted four years. It was then transferred to the newly established 2SM - owned by the Sydney archdiocese - where it continued for a further 36 years.
Dr Rumble's Radio Replies were re-printed and slightlyexpanded in Church newspapers and in four book versions (the latest issued only two years ago) which achieved the staggering circulation of more than seven million copies.
There were no 'separated brethren' in the era in which he rose to fame. Protestantism (linked with freemasonry and modernism) was a 'damnable heresy'. Catholic mayors were told from the pulpit that they had committed mortal sin by attending non-Catholic civic services, and Jesuit theologians pondered whether the soul of a 'good Hindu' could achieve eternal salvation.
In return, Protestant controversialists depicted the Roman Catholic Church as a neofascist global conspiracy, a 'scarlet woman,' whose cathedrals (including St Mary's) were built on the proceeds of gambling and donations from brewers.
Question Box on 2SM was answered by The Protestant Faith on 2CH (owned by the NSW Council of Churches). The two programs shared, astonishingly, the same transmitter and technical staff.
Archdeacon TC. Hammond, a low church Anglican,...