This paper will consider the religious aspects of the life of Ned Kelly, in dialogue with Russel Wards Australian Legend, in order to explore the relatively unexamined religious dimensions of the Australian national myth. Religious leaders could be surprisingly sympathetic toward Kelly, with the Anglican Archbishop of Melbourne, James Moorhouse, urging congregants to pray for the outlaws as they cowered in the bush on the run from the law. Kelly was an Irish Catholic, of course, but there are also interesting Methodist connections. His widowed mother Ellen married the Californian miner George King in a Primitive Methodist chapel, a perhaps surprising thing for an Irish Catholic to do in a sectarian age that frowned on such ‘mixed marriages’. The Wesleyan Methodist preacher John Cowley Coles visited Kelly in the Melbourne Gaol in September and October 1880 while Kelly awaited execution. Kelly the penitent Catholic Christian knelt beside Coles the forthright Wesleyan preacher, together calling upon God to grant mercy to a fallen sinner. An examination of the response of religious leaders to the Kelly Outbreak as well as Kelly’s own religious sentiments can inform and enlarge our understanding of one of Australia’s most enduring cultural icons.