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.