page_title: St Peter's College, Auckland
section_title: James Liston
hierarchical_section_title: St Peter's College, Auckland / History / James Liston
caption_attribution_description: English: Bro B E Ryan Building
context_page_description: St Peter's College is a Catholic secondary school for boys, located in Auckland, New Zealand, in the central city suburb of Grafton. With a roll of over 1300, the school is one of the largest Catholic schools in New Zealand. St Peter's College was established in 1939 as a successor of Auckland's earliest school and of St Peter's School, founded in 1857. The Outhwaite family, who acquired the land around 1841, donated the site of the college. The Christian Brothers provided staff for the college for 70 years.
  It is the oldest Catholic boys' school in Auckland still on its original site. For nearly 50 years, the school had direct access to an adjacent railway station, specifically created for the college and known initially as the "St Peter's College station". The school was integrated into the state system along with 240 other New Zealand Catholic schools in 1982.
  The school aims to achieve a diverse, family-oriented, community and good exam results.
context_section_description: Archbishop Liston, the founder of the college in 1939, presided at all the school prize-giving ceremonies from the first until his retirement in 1970.
   At the 1970 ceremony Brother B E Ryan, the headmaster of the college, said, in the final presence of Liston, that St Peter's College might not have been created without Liston's decision, for which he was criticised (see above).
  Liston often expressed gratitude publicly to the Christian Brothers' School in Dunedin where he had been a pupil on occasions involving Christian Brothers Institutions. However, Liston's gratitude did have its limits. There is a well-known story at St Peter's College concerning the large Christian Brothers emblem above the main northern entrance to the original school building. In the course of the creation of that emblem in 1938 or 1939, Bishop Liston arrived to survey progress on the building of the school. He ordered work to stop on the emblem because the school was "his" and did not belong to the Christian Brothers; the emblem was completed in 2014. The college was "his" in the sense that it was (and is) owned directly by the Bishop of Auckland.
  Liston often acknowledged his debt to the Christian Brothers for establishing and maintaining St Peter's College.
  In January 1943 Liston wrote to his old classmate Br Michael James Benignus Hanrahan, the Provincial of the Christian Brothers when the college was established, on the occasion of the latter's Golden Jubilee, saying that the school had always been what Hanrahan or himself would wish it to be.
  When Liston died in 1976 the college formed a guard of honour for his funeral cortege from the Town Hall to Grafton Bridge. When the school adopted a new motto (it had been: "Facere et Docere" or "To Do and to Teach"), it adopted the English version of Liston's personal motto "Amare et Servire", "To Love and to Serve".
caption: Bro B E Ryan Building (1973)
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