St Patrick's Seminary

St Patrick's Seminary
St Patrick's Seminary, circa 1900.
Location	Manly, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Founders	Archbishops of Sydney Roger Vaughan and Patrick Cardinal Moran
Established	23 January 1889
Architect	Joseph Sheerin and John Hennessy
Architectural style	Perpendicular Gothic
Status	Closed (November 1995)
Gender	Male only

St Patrick's Seminary, Manly, a former seminary of the Australian Roman Catholic Church, was the principal training facility for priests in Australia from its foundation in 1889 until its relocation in 1995 to Strathfield where the teaching institute has become distinct from the seminary. The Catholic Institute of Sydney is now the ecclesiastical theology faculty. The Seminary of the Good Shepherd is the house of formation.

Conceived by Archbishops of Sydney Roger Vaughan and Patrick Cardinal Moran, the seminary was built from 1885 in Perpendicular Gothic style by Joseph Sheerin and John Hennessy on a spectacular site overlooking the Tasman Sea on a hill above Manly on Sydney's northern beaches, located towards North Head. The seminary opened on 23 January 1889. Though intended as a national seminary, it never entirely achieved that ambition.

An early student was Patrick Joseph Hartigan, author of the "John O'Brien" poems on Australian Catholic rural life. Two of the first novels of former student Thomas Keneally, The Place at Whitton (1964) and Three Cheers for the Paraclete (1968) are set in a fictionalized version of the seminary. Tony Abbott is a former seminarian.