St Joseph’s Church Penola

This church, which was consecrated and opened in August 1924 and stands on the site of the first St Joseph’s Church, completed by Father Tenison Woods in March 1859 and dedicated by him to the loving husband of Mary and foster father of Jesus.

Prior to that, Mass had been celebrated on the same site in a former store, later designated ‘the first place in the township where public worship was held’ and ‘where the first footstep of civilisation was stamped on the South Eastern district’.

Penola is the place where Mary MacKillop and Julian Tenison Woods co-founded the uniquely Australian Sisters of Saint Joseph in 1866. The Penola district was settled in the 1840s by those whom Mary described as ‘staunch old Catholics – most of them Scotch’. Adelaide priest Father Michael Ryan ministered to them on six visits made between March 1848 and November 1854, when another Irishman, Father Peter Powell, was appointed first resident priest. A ‘roughly built wooden store’ became his presbytery and church. 

His successor, Father Woods, arrived on March 19, 1857 the feast of St Joseph, and two years later completed a stone church that he named St Joseph’s. This ‘beautiful little edifice, with its neat belfry’, was deemed to be ‘quite an ornament to our bonnie little town’.