History of the College
Bishop Pompallier and his Marist brothers first arrived in Aotearoa in 1838, and the first Marist school on Pitt Street opened in 1884.
Sacred Heart College opened in Ponsonby in 1903 before relocating to Glen Innes in 1955. The Richmond Road site was then renamed St Paul’s. To meet the needs of the growing Onehunga community, Marcellin College opened in 1958.
The site was originally the Scholastica, used for training young Marist brothers as teachers. The building that now houses administration was once their residence, and the former shared bunkroom is now the staffroom.
The college began with two classes of Standard 5 and 6 boys (Years 7 and 8) and steadily grew from there. Early students recall the playing fields being a drained peat swamp that would occasionally catch fire, requiring the entire school to help extinguish the flames using wet sacks.
In 1982, St Benedict’s in Newton, a girls’ school founded by St Mary MacKillop, closed and its students joined Marcellin College, creating Auckland’s first co-educational Catholic school.
Further developments included the addition of the chapel in 1992, the two-storey MacKillop block in the early 2000s, and a new gymnasium in 2007.
The last Marist brothers teaching at the college, Brother Kevin King and Brother Peter Thompson, retired at the end of 2016. Today, dedicated Catholic teachers continue to uphold the educational vision of St Marcellin Champagnat.
History of the Marist Brothers
The proprietors of Marcellin College are the Marist Brothers. They named this school after their founder, Saint Marcellin Champagnat.
Joseph Benedict Marcellin Champagnat was born on 20 May, 1789, the year that the French Revolution began, in a farming hamlet in the south-west of France. He experienced little success in formal education until he was a more mature student at the seminary in Lyons. And it was here that the idea of establishing an order of teaching brothers to be responsible for the schooling of young people originated.
Ordained at the age of 27, Father Champagnat was assigned to the parish of La Valla, where the first volunteers to be teaching brothers joined him. A school master trained them in teaching methods and they then began giving instruction in the villages around their parish.
The brothers’ community at La Valla outgrew its small house near Marcellin’s presbytery and the men were directed by their founder in the building of the famous Hermitage, designed to accommodate 150 brothers. Champagnat was released from parish work to focus on his burgeoning order of teachers. When the Marist Fathers were entrusted with the new missions in Oceania in 1836, Marcellin selected some of his brothers to go as well.
Marcellin was not deterred by hard labour nor by the criticism of certain Church officials nor by the rebuffs of the French Government, from which he twice unsuccessfully sought official recognition for his order. However, in the late 1830s his health began to deteriorate. He died on 6 June, 1840, convinced that his Little Brothers of Mary would flourish after his death.
His legacy today is over 5,000 brothers in 74 countries and a countless number of lay people who uphold his ideals of selfless service in humility and simplicity inspired by the Mother of God, of commitment to spreading the Good News of Jesus Christ, of active involvement in the lives of young people, of open-hearted family spirit and of love of one’s work.
Marcellin Champagnat was canonised on 18 April 1999.