It all began in 1850, when Bishop Pompaillier moved the headquarters of the diocese from Russell to Auckland. He looked about for a place where he could set up the kind of headquarters he had dreamed of, with a church, schools, a seminary and a convent.

In 1854 he bought a 40-acre farm in what was then called Dedwood, sitting high on the hill above Freeman's Bay. He called it Mount St Mary, and the inlet below, and indeed the street that bordered the property, took their name from this. To the Sisters of Mercy he gave half the farm, for them to build a convent, a boarding school, a chapel and eventually an orphanage. On the land he kept there was a wooden house, which became the home of the Bishops of Auckland until the present Bishop's House was built in 1894. On the same ground he built a church, Ponsonby's first church, named the Immaculate Conception.  He also built there a convent for French and Maori nuns, and a boarding school for Maori girls.

By the middle 1860s Mount St Mary's had become a sort of Catholic colony, with a church, a chapel, two convents and three schools, as well as the first New Zealand seminary on the point of Freeman's Bay.

  Bishop Pompaillier resigned in 1869 and returned to France.  The church and seminary vanished, as did the school and convent for Maori girls, but the Sisters of Mercy and Bishop's House stayed on. They even had added to them the splendid Star of the Sea Orphanage that took over the site of the old seminary.

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