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Australia and the Popes

Introduction

Since Australia became a nation on 1st January 1901 there have been a total of ten popes serving the Church in Rome. Since the arrival of Captain James Cook in 1788 there have been seventeen popes.

The indigenous history of Australia though goes back from before the time of Jesus and the founding of the Church.

In the total history of the Church since the time of the first Pope, St Peter, there have been 265 popes.

In these pages we will endeavour to bring you a summary of the more recent popes whose periods as Pontiff have coincided with the history of the Australian nation. We will also provide links to more information about all the popes.

The interactive timeline below is reproduced on all but the last page of this series. It will give you a quick overview of who was Pope during the significant events in the history of our nation and provides a way to navigate in a non-chronological way through the information contained in this overview.

Use your mouse to cause the timeline to scroll forwards or backwards and you can click on the textual information which is hyperlinked to where more detailed information is found in the 105 webpages (more than 150 printed A4 pages) in this series.

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The textual material on these pages was sourced from a large number of places all of which can be found through the links on each page. The material was researched, assembled and produced by Brian Coyne for Catholic Australia. The images used in the Flash animations are in the public domain. Other images used are in the public domain or sourced from the webpages to which they are linked.