Father Bob

by Sue Williams

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  PART 1:  A HARD ROAD

  1The Day is Over

  2A Mongrel Drunk and a Bully

  3BYO and DIY

  4Behind the Eight Ball

  5The Cavalry Arrives

  6A Forward Scout

  7Talking Underwater for Vietnam

  PART 2:  A HOME OF MY OWN

  8A Home at Last

  9Greater Fools Than Me

  10Talking the Talk and Walking the Walk

  11Nothing to Live for

  12A Day in Court

  13Making a Powerful Enemy

  14The Murky Stuff of Human Lives

  15Keeping Hope Alive

  PART 3: THE TROUBLES

  16The Worst of Times

  17Another New Project

  18Battle of the Gonzos

  19Hatches, Matches and Dispatches

  20(Un)Happy Birthday to You

  21Give Priests a Chance

  22The Dismissal

  23Let’s Hear It for the Bogans

  24Leave ’Em Smiling

  Acknowledgements

  And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.

  ‘Dover Beach’ by Matthew Arnold, 1851

  All that is required for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing.

  Edmund Burke

  Father Bob stands next to a portrait by Peter Ferrier, which was entered into the 2012 Archibald Prize.

  Foreword

  Father Bob Maguire AM, RFD

  There’s been a lot said, and written, about me over the years.

  Some people have said I’m a saint; to others, I’m more the devil incarnate.

  I’ve been called the ‘sad’ priest because so much of my work has been with the poorest, most marginalised, most desperate people in Australia today. To some I’m a ‘bad’ priest, because many of my ways of doing things are quite unconventional, although my interpretation of the gospels has always been absolutely orthodox.

  And to many I might seem, at times, quite mad. They’re the ones who only see me on TV, hear me on radio or read about me in newspapers, sounding off about the sorry state of my beloved Catholic Church around the world today, calling for those of us in religious life to be much more inclusive, and pontificating on the kinds of subjects priests don’t usually dare to go near: sex ’n’ drugs ’n’ rock ’n’ roll, abuse by clergy, contraception, gay marriage, crime, forgotten Australians and the dangers of hidebound clericalism.

  Since I was ordained as a priest in 1960, I’ve seen many changes in both society and religious life. Vatican II has come and almost gone, and the Catholic Church has become mired in controversy over the abuse of youngsters in its care and its treatment of both offenders and their victims. For that, I apologise wholeheartedly, with every strand of my being. Nothing will ever wipe out the pain of those who suffered, or excuse their sickening betrayal by the Church, although I hope the Royal Commission can go even a little way to helping those victims.

  At the same time, society has doubtless become more secular, more stressed and a great deal less forgiving of those who fall between the cracks.

  My time as a priest, up until I was forced out of my church in South Melbourne after thirty-eight years working there, was all about creating a caring, sharing church, working in partnership with the neighbourhood and community to design a new model of collaboration and support. It was about a church working for the people, and by the people.

  As a result, everything achieved during those years was never done by me alone, but was a real and meaningful expression of teamwork. That includes the pioneering work with street kids through Open Family, the formation of the Emerald Hill Mission to help older people who were struggling, the galvanisation of the parish to feed, clothe and assist the poor and, finally, the Father Bob Maguire Foundation to help those at both ends of the spectrum: granting scholarships to disadvantaged kids, helping with a refuge in Nepal for child victims of the global sex trade, and looking after those older Australians who otherwise might have given up all hope.

  Of course, I’ve made mistakes along the way, but we’ve also enjoyed great successes.

  Finally, as I still strive to continue my work, now without my parish but instead as part of a church without borders, harnessing technology to build a whole new pop-up congregation online through Church.tv, Twitter and my blogs, using traditional media to send my message and travelling around Melbourne to say mass and hold baptisms, weddings and funerals, I felt it was at last the right time to tell our story.

  That’s the good and bad, and warts ’n’ all – both, as you may say, the saintly and the devilish.

  And for the love of Jesus, now here it is.

  Bob Maguire

  PART 1

  A HARD ROAD

  1

  The Day is Over

  A lone bagpiper steps into an old church in an inner-city suburb of Melbourne, to the soaring refrain of ‘Amazing Grace’.

  As he makes his way up the aisle, the 1000-strong packed congregation rise, as one, to their feet. They turn and look behind the piper to see a short, bespectacled, snowy-haired man in flowing white and green vestments hurrying to the front of the church.

  Immediately, the applause starts, and doesn’t stop until he takes his place behind the pulpit and adjusts the microphone. Already, there’s barely a dry eye in the house.

  For this is Father Bob Maguire – battler, army veteran and for the last thirty-eight years the priest of this proud parish.

  During that time, he’s been the founder of both national and local charities to help the poor, a champion of efforts to democratise Catholicism in Australia, an outspoken campaigner for the rights of perhaps the most downtrodden of all in society, a one-man comedy turn and, along the way, a much-admired TV and radio personality.

  He’s received nationwide recognition for his work, too. As well as being the 2012 Victorian of the Year, he’s also a Member of the Order of Australia, a Local Hero as part of the Australian of the Year awards and a long-time Australia Day Ambassador, in addition to winning an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award for social and community enterprises.

  On the flipside, he’s a man who also manages to outrage people. Some of the more traditional members of the Church have been appalled by his approach from time to time; he’s been criticised by people as diverse as the Archbishop of Melbourne and one of the city’s most influential shock jocks, and he once scandalised one of his old schoolteachers with his utterances from the pulpit. ‘I’m embarrassed by him now!’ says the elderly Christian Brother, shaking his head.

  To others, however, he’s seen as a 21st-century saviour of the Church, a man as saintly as he is entertaining, sitting on the limit of 5000 Facebook friends, with an astonishing 86 000-plus followers for his Twitter feed, regular radio and TV appearances, and his own Sunday night radio show on Triple J with media personality John Safran. ‘He always puts others first,’ says a long-time friend and follower from his parish of South Melbourne. ‘Despite the fact that he gets to meet and greet and be a confidant of leading business, political, sporting and community people, his preference is to be mixing with the outsiders, the lost sheep. Because, as he tells us, that’s where we’ll find God.’

  One of those lost sheep, a former drug-addicted street kid now living at a run-down boarding house, brightens visibly when she hears his name as she queues on a cold July night at one of the food vans he started. ‘If it wasn’t for Father Bob, I wouldn’t be alive today,’ she says. ‘If Catholic priests were allowed to marry, I’d ask him tomorrow …’

  But today, a bright Sunday morning in January 2012, is his bittersweet swansong. Aged seventy-seven, he
’s finally leaving the church he loves after being invited to retire by the Melbourne Catholic hierarchy, declining but then losing the fight to be allowed to stay on until he was ready to quit.

  After a lifetime of service, he now has no idea where he’ll go, what he’ll do next, how he’ll manage.

  Yet as his last official mass begins with standing room only, he just can’t help poking fun at himself, and at Church officialdom. He makes a reference to his co-celebrant also being moved on before he was perhaps ready. But he stops himself. ‘Don’t go there! Don’t go there!’ he warns, to uproarious laughter from the congregation, most of whom have been campaigning hard as The Bob Squad for their hero to remain. Then he cracks another joke about an Aboriginal smoking ceremony also having been planned, but not taking place. ‘I was going to say, we ran out of puff,’ he smiles.

  And when he’s forced to shuffle through his papers to find the page he wants, he sighs. ‘That’s why I’ve been moved on, you see,’ he says. His voice rises an octave: ‘I’ve lost me wits!’

  He also mentions the Father Bob Maguire bobble-head figurine still for sale to fund his continuing charity ventures. He recounts a conversation he had the other day when someone asked him, ‘Don’t you realise you’re making a fool of yourself?’ Father Bob laughs. ‘I say, What’s new? Now we’ll do it for money, as Jesus said to his disciples.’ He stops and chuckles. ‘Don’t look for the [Bible] passage,’ he adds, playing with his audience. ‘I don’t think there is one!’

  There are tributes from parishioners and friends, and another haunting rendition of ‘Amazing Grace’, this time from a member of the congregation who’d once been a contestant on ‘The X Factor’.

  Then another joke, which this time brings the house down. He’d been clearing out the presbytery ready for his move, he says, when he came across his birth certificate. ‘I almost had a stroke,’ he reports. ‘I thought it said 1937, which meant I was only seventy-three … What do I do? Do I ring him [the Archbishop of Melbourne] up?’ There’s a gale of laughter, then cheering and clapping at the thought of a late reprise.

  As the unconventional mass weaves its way to its conclusion, Father Bob is presented with a portable mass kit, so he can say mass wherever he is, some funds and a plaque for the wall of the church, inscribed with a tribute to him and one of his favourite sayings, ‘No more us and them, just we’.

  Father Bob’s plaque at St Peter and Paul’s.

  Finally, there’s a standing ovation as everyone sings ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’: ‘Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! His truth is marching on.’ Father Bob stands to attention, like the old soldier he has always been, then straightens his white gown, the alb, and the green chasuble worn over it, and takes a deep breath.

  There’s a rousing chorus of Hip! Hip! Hooray! and then, in another nod to Father Bob’s heritage as the son of Scottish migrants, a Scottish pipe band steps out, playing the march ‘The Black Bear’, a tune traditionally played on a regiment’s return to barracks, signalling the day is over.

  As they lead the way for Father Bob Maguire out of his church and into a new life, not for the first time he wonders to himself how the hell he ended up in this position, and what on earth his future will hold.

  2

  A Mongrel Drunk and a Bully

  The most chilling sound of young Bobby Maguire’s childhood was his father’s heavy footfall on the front doorstep, followed by the scratch of a fumbled key in the lock as he stumbled home from yet another drunken evening at the pub.

  The family would hold their breath in fear, waiting to see just who would walk in. Sometimes it would be his dad in a genial mood, animated with ale and conversation, telling jokes, singing songs, reciting passages from Shakespeare and recounting funny anecdotes from his years spent at sea. More often, it would be a dark, smouldering stranger who didn’t want to know his kids and could, with his temper on a hair-trigger, explode into violence at any moment.

  It was their mum who was his usual target and she regularly endured savage beatings. The four children would cower in terror as their father lashed out in an alcoholic rage, frequently leaving his wife cut, bloodied and bruised. Even today, three-quarters of a century later, Bobby’s older brother Jim can still picture the handprints of blood left smeared on the walls as she struggled to get away from him and out of the sight of the children.

  At other times, their eldest sibling, Eileen, found herself on the wrong side of his fists, but Bobby, the baby of the family, has few memories of any of that. ‘I think I probably just blocked it out,’ he says now. ‘But I do remember the only time my father communicated with me. He’d been away and when he came home, he beat me with his belt. He was always a bad drunk and that’s the only time I can ever remember him taking any notice of me.’

  Yet Jim, eight years older, recalls those times as if they happened yesterday. ‘He would think nothing of giving our mother a backhander,’ he says. ‘Mum would be holding her hands to her face and to her nose, and she’d be all bloody. He was a total drunkard, a mongrel drunk and a bully. And he’d wake up the next morning and reckon everything was tra-la-la, as if nothing had ever happened.’

  Their mother tried to hide her injuries as best she could, although doubtless the neighbours knew exactly what was going on. But this was Australia in the late 1930s, and they all had enough problems of their own to worry about. In the small working-class suburb of Thornbury, 7 kilometres north-east of Melbourne’s CBD, most people were having to battle to get by. The memory of World War I, in which 16 000 of their fellow Victorians were killed, cast a dark shadow over the city, while the Great Depression that followed at the end of the ’20s had sent demand for wool and wheat exports plummeting, and plunged the country into yet another crisis. Melbourne was hit the hardest and, at one point, unemployment touched 30 per cent.

  The Maguires weren’t, by any means, the only family struggling for survival, but they had significantly more to cope with than most. James Maguire’s drinking loomed large. It had cost him his home once, back in Scotland, when his parents, frustrated and embarrassed by his escalating alcoholism, encouraged him to migrate to Australia where they hoped he’d be able to put his past behind him, and make a fresh start in a new land. Instead, his drinking was wreaking a terrible toll not only on him and his prospects, but now also on the life of the woman he’d married in Australia and, in turn, on their four children.

  And their youngest, Bobby Maguire, took it harder than most. He developed into a quiet boy, introverted, fearful and gradually finding it harder and harder to find a reason to get up in the morning.

  The Maguires – originally the McGuires – had first settled in Scotland back in the 1850s, when Bobby’s great-grandfather, another James, had left his home in Ireland during the hard years of the potato famine, along with thousands of his starving countrymen. From the town of Bray, 20 kilometres south of Dublin, he’d caught the boat to Liverpool. A blacksmith by trade and experienced in working with iron, he found a job helping to build the railway at the start of its great expansion throughout Britain. He travelled north with the line to Glasgow, eventually settling with his Isle of Man–born wife Helenor in the suburb of Springburn in the city’s north-east, a place known through its manufacture of steam railway engines as ‘the workshop of the world’. It was an area perfectly suited to new migrants, and was very mixed, with middle-class houses and villas jostling for space next to sandstone tenements for the working classes. And while there were indeed jobs for the skilled, the strong and those with backgrounds favoured by employers, there was crushing poverty for others. The suburb was also home to Scotland’s largest poorhouse, where paupers who couldn’t support themselves were sent to break rocks and bundle firewood.

  Irish Catholics made up a large number of those penniless families. Many had come to Scotland with nothing but the clothes they stood in, and the largely Presbyterian Scots frequently resented their arrival. Irish Catholics
were considered by many to be a threat to Scottish nationality, and were routinely accused of drunkenness, crime and irresponsibility with money. Sectarian tensions flared even more sharply after the Irish Catholic uprising of 1916, the formation of the Sinn Fein and the Irish independence movement, and Catholics on the mainland were regularly discriminated against in jobs and housing, by both the Scots and the English.

  It was against this background that James and Helenor’s first-born son, again James, and his wife Ellen – Bob’s grandparents – changed the spelling of the family name from McGuire to Maguire in a bid to camouflage its Irish origins. ‘She thought they wouldn’t do themselves any good being identified as Irish Micks [Catholics],’ says Bob. ‘So she wanted to do something to give her family an edge. It worked, too. From their start as an iron turner and a bonnet-maker, they went into business as newsagents and tobacconists and they did all right. They became socially upwardly mobile.’ They ended up with two shops in Springburn and, from humble beginnings, became comparatively well-to-do, even buying their own home, something that was most unusual for an era in Scotland in which most, bar the land-owning rich, merely rented.

  The couple had eleven children, of whom four died in infancy and a fifth at the age of nine from rheumatic fever. Most of the rest thrived. One son went on to become a lawyer, a daughter to own a wholesale warehouse with her husband, another daughter to marry a teacher who became a school headmaster, and another to marry a law clerk who also became a lawyer. The only one of their children who didn’t do well was the one fast becoming the black sheep of the family: the eldest surviving son James, Bobby’s dad.

  With every passing year, the contrast between James and his siblings became more stark. For instance, James’s younger brother, another Bob, was the one who went on to become a lawyer, a soldier, and a prominent member of the Catholic Young Men’s Society. ‘He was very successful,’ says his son Des today, who himself ended up a Catholic priest, setting up the social services for the diocese of Glasgow. ‘My father Bob had a highly developed conscience. But James, well, all the rest of the family saw him as the black sheep. It was a shame. He went to work at sea, and a seaman who drinks can easily go the wrong way.’