Father Bob

by Sue Williams

  Everyone around the priest was stunned by the news of Costas’s death. ‘It was a huge shock,’ says Father Bob’s former secretary, Judy. ‘In the end, I think he just wore himself out. He was so skinny. But his death affected Bob greatly. Costas was like his son. He’d looked after him nearly all his life. Bob was the only person in Costas’s life, really, he was the only one he’d talk to.’

  When others found out about Costas, the presbytery received dozens of phone calls from locals offering their sympathy, and around forty emails. Everyone had a little story to tell about him, an unexpected kindness or thoughtful moment. Many told Father Bob that he’d known him so many years, it must be like losing a son. ‘But I’m a priest,’ he replied. ‘What do I know about having sons? I’m a priest, I’m socially handicapped, I’m psycho-socially challenged, I don’t know the right way to feel.’

  Instead, he threw himself into a frenzy of activity. He had a card made with Costas’s face on it, and a photo of his dog Rosie, as well as his outstretched hand holding a multicoloured butterfly he’d once found, his signature and a saying Costas had loved: ‘Not for you to ask the reason but to find a reason big enough.’

  Lynn-Maree says the priest then raced around giving everyone a card. ‘It was like he was on speed!’ she says. ‘He raced from place to place and spoke to everyone Costas had ever accosted. We found it really hard to keep up. He had tears in his eyes the whole time. I think emotions make him uncomfortable, so he covers it up with activity.’

  Father Bob was adamant that Costas have a proper funeral and so he was farewelled at St Peter and Paul’s in a service with an Aboriginal smoking ceremony organised by Henri Ser, at which everyone held red and white balloons. Later, there was a remembrance service in the parish garden after the 10 a.m. Sunday mass, with a kaleidoscope of butterflies released into the air.

  Father Bob wrote his obituary, remembering him as ‘Respected member of Sts. Peter and Paul’s Parish and founding member of the Father Bob Maguire Foundation’.

  The memorial card Father Bob gave out at the funeral of Costas.

  There was a maelstrom of plans and projects on the go, but no-one was quite sure what the future would bring for Father Bob. He continued his work at a frenzied pace, as if he was trying to solve all the problems of the parish in what limited time he had left.

  He kept a close eye on the building of the new community housing block by the church, which had, as he’d forecast, put the parish accounts in the black for about $1.6 million, and he auctioned a giant Lego mural of Flinders Street Station to raise money for his Foundation. He appeared as a guest panellist on a new gay radio show in Werribee, he was on the Nova 100 Christmas show with Dave Hughes and Kate Langbroek, and he put out calls for a warehouse from which to continue his charity work after his time as parish priest expired. At the same time, he sat for a portrait by stencil and aerosol paint artist Luke Cornish for the 2012 Archibald Prize, which became the first piece of stencil art ever to make it into the finals. The process was even documented in a short film entitled Me We – after boxer Mohammed Ali’s poem, the shortest ever written, proclaiming the power of one – for the Tropfest short film festival.

  There were also a few surprise visitors to St Peter and Paul’s: a crowd of young people from the protest group Occupy Melbourne. They’d been occupying the City Square from the middle of October 2011, as part of the worldwide Occupy movement protesting social injustice, poverty, corruption in the financial sector and corporate greed. The group had been continually moved on by the City of Melbourne and Victoria Police, and had set up camp in a number of other sites as well as the city centre. This offshoot group had been staying in Flagstaff Gardens but had been threatened at knifepoint by a passer-by and, fearing for their safety, visited Father Bob on the day before Christmas Eve to ask if they could set up twenty tents in the grounds of his church instead. ‘I felt sorry for them, and said they were welcome to stay as individuals rather than as a political group,’ he says. ‘They were all thoughtful twenty-somethings, very nice people wanting to make a genuine protest and I said they could use the kitchen in the presbytery and the power. After all, it was Christmas!

  ‘It was a nice experience coming at such a difficult time for me. It was like the arrival of twenty or thirty angels coming to reassure me. I could never have designed it.’

  One of the members of this group, nineteen-year-old apprentice cook Michael Carlyon, was making some coffee in the kitchen at 3 a.m. on Christmas Eve when Father Bob came down to get some food out of the fridge. ‘We started talking and he told me about his history,’ says Michael. ‘We exchanged stories, and our friendship grew from there.’

  Michael had been born in Ireland but had come to Australia as a young child with his family. He’d had some issues at home, and later spent three to four years on the streets, until he was attacked there, a knife puncturing a lung, and at sixteen went back to stay with his mother. ‘I’d seen the dark side of life in Australia,’ he says, ‘and I felt that shouldn’t be happening. We have such a rich country, and yet we have so many people really struggling, so that’s why I joined Occupy Melbourne.’

  Father Bob was enormously impressed with the young man, and offered him a job with his Foundation, to restart the kind of work that Open Family had previously been doing with kids on the streets. ‘Michael was like a soldier from God,’ he says. ‘It was an epiphany, a bright spot in the gloom. He seemed to have a vocation of his own to work with homeless teenagers, whereas our work had gradually become partly palliative, critical care and burying the dead. So it was a revival.’

  Gradually, the priest was trying to work out a future path, in case he didn’t receive that final reprieve from the Archbishop. With his old Open Family organisation just having announced a merger with youth organisation Whitelion, he felt there was now a fresh need for more work to be done among homeless young people. One worker still at Open Family, from just after Brother Alex left, says that it had shrunk a lot since Father Bob was at the helm. ‘He was such a great figurehead and was so motivating and attractive to people, and under him Open Family was constantly growing,’ he says. ‘But now it’s totally different. It’s much more conservative and more corpor­ate. At its height, we had thirty to forty outreach workers in Melbourne. Now there’s just a dozen or so. It’s very sad.’

  But as Father Bob prepared for his last Christmas mass, he still hadn’t given up hope that he might be able to stay on and continue his youth work as the parish priest. After all, the Australian ambassador to the Holy See Tim Fischer had reported that he’d been flooded with emails in Rome asking for Father Bob to be allowed to keep on. ‘Who knows what Santa might bring me?’ the priest told reporters. ‘Maybe there’ll be a letter from the Pope saying I can stay …’

  He’d always seen the Church as his metaphorical mother and father, and after most of his lifetime spent with them, he was finding the break very hard. Andrew de Groot of Ghost Pictures says, despite his bravado, it was heartbreaking to see his pain close-up. ‘He was angry but he also had that imprint of children whose parents divorce and then abandon them. The Church had taken him in as a fourteen year old and he’d given his whole life to the priesthood, but now it was booting him out. He thought it was a home, but it had turned out to be just a business. And he was never prepared to have the carpet pulled out from beneath him. He had no Plan B.’

  That Christmas Eve mass, and the Christmas Day mass following, the church was packed both times with wellwishers, as Father Bob delivered a message about ‘saving each other’ rather than waiting for God to do it for them. ‘We are all in this together,’ the priest told the congregation. ‘The mystery of Christmas is that humanity is the safest place for God to be.’ As he left the altar, a number of his parishioners broke down in tears.

  ‘It’s not right,’ one woman sobbed. ‘He married me and he baptised all my kids. The Church is crazy to kick him out. He’s a wonderful man, a saint.’

  Father Bob walked out of t
he doors, and didn’t look back.

  On Sunday, 29 January 2012, Father Bob said his last mass at St Peter and Paul’s as parish priest of South Melbourne. Over 1000 people crammed into the pews, including faithful parishioners, celebrities, Comanchero bikies, fellow priests, celebrities, even the separated conjoined twins Trishna and Krishna.

  There were standing ovations for the priest who had just entered his thirty-ninth year of serving the neighbourhood, and floods of tears amid the accolades, the prayers, the songs and the pipers playing. Lynn-Maree, like the rest of the congregation, was overcome with the emotion of the occasion. ‘There was a moment you could see, from the set of his jaw and his lips, that he was saying, “This is it!”’ she says. ‘And I couldn’t help a quiet sob and then feeling the tears streaming down my face. There was such sadness. It was the same when he was up in his room, packing up ready to leave, and he was trying to make sense of it all. It’s like when you’re on the phone and someone hangs up on you and there’s no recourse; it’s a very different energy to just having a row. There’s such disappointment and sadness that he can’t do everything he wants to do.’

  After the service was finished, he was presented with boxing gloves, inscribed with the words: ‘Father Bob, God’s Own’ on the left, and ‘Father Bob, Keep Punch’n’ on the right. As he draped them over his shoulders, he suddenly looked as if all the fight had drained right out of him. As he bustled away, everyone looked after him, wondering how he was going to fare.

  One of his most loyal parishioners, Mavis Keighery, felt as though life would never be the same without him. ‘He said he was heartbroken,’ she says. ‘I don’t think he’ll ever recover from this. I don’t know if he’ll be able to keep going.’

  Father Bob after his last mass.

  24

  Leave ’Em Smiling

  The phone rings in the office of a former real estate agent’s shop on a busy street in Albert Park, and Father Bob Maguire snatches it up. He listens intently for a minute, then rises to his feet. ‘I’m coming, Mother!’ he barks, slams the receiver down and races out the door.

  A minute later, he’s behind the wheel of the large motorhome a corporate admirer has lent him for six months, steering it cautiously towards a low bridge, then changing his mind about whether it’ll get through and doubling back on himself to take an alternative route instead. ‘That was the devil’s work,’ he’s mumbling to himself. ‘That could have taken our bloody top off!’

  Ten minutes on, in between answering his phone and reading texts at traffic lights – ‘The things we do for Jesus!’ he exclaims – he’s manoeuvring the large vehicle gingerly along the railings outside a hospital where one of his parishioners lies dying inside, waiting for him to perform the last rites. As he shunts back and forth to move out of the way of oncoming traffic, he bashes into the rails, halts, then bashes into them again. A woman standing at the entrance to the hospital dabbing her eyes with a tissue looks on horrified.

  ‘That’s her daughter,’ declares Father Bob, grabbing his bag and leaping out of the motorhome with an agility that gives lie to his seventy-eight years. ‘Here comes the ready response unit! All for one and one for all!’ He then scurries off towards her, along the way throwing a quick look back to assess any damage to the back of the vehicle. As he reaches her, he asks urgently, ‘Is she still with us?’ The daughter nods, and races back into the hospital, the priest in hot pursuit. The pair then run down a corridor, up two flights of stairs and down another corridor until the woman stops finally at the entrance of a room. ‘There she is,’ she says finally, indicating a comatose figure on a bed, wired to various monitors, with three nurses standing in the corner.

  Father Bob opens his bag and whips out his long green and white stole, the symbol of ordination for priests, and throws it on, while rummaging for his battered old Bible and his pot of oil. Then he approaches the bed and stands by the woman, gently touching her hand. He reads softly from the Bible, recites a prayer, then solemnly anoints the woman’s forehead, drawing the sign of the cross in holy oil, while saying her sins have now been forgiven.

  After the last Amen, he turns to the room: the nurses looking solemnly on, and the daughter softly sobbing. The air of tension and misery is palpable. ‘Right!’ says Father Bob, decisively. ‘She’s now cleared for take-off!’

  There’s a sharp intake of breath from everyone in the room, and a silence that feels like it will never end. Then the grieving daughter, through her tears, starts laughing, and the nurses, relieved, all join in.

  ‘Father,’ says the woman. ‘I want you to do her funeral. I don’t want anyone else. Will you do it?’ Father Bob smiles. ‘Yes, of course,’ he says. She hugs him warmly.

  As he troops back out to the motorhome, he grins. ‘It’s good to make people laugh, even at the worst times of their lives,’ he says. ‘Do you say something mealy-mouthed, or do you use secular humour to cheer people up? I try not to add to the horrors of death. I try to highlight the bright side and people seem to appreciate it. They like a clown; they like to have permission to laugh. I always prefer to leave ’em smiling.’

  It’s been seven months since Father Bob packed up and left St Peter and Paul’s on 1 February 2012 and, despite the grief of losing his home, the anger, a fair deal of bitterness, and the confusion over what his next steps should be, he now seems almost as busy as ever he was.

  After a few weeks in a hotel, he and his dog Franklin set up home in the tiny back room of an office whose rent has been paid for the next three years by the Victorian Electrical Trades Union. ‘He’s always been there for us over the years, and after he was kicked out of his church we thought it was very important to keep him going,’ says union boss Dean Mighell. ‘We love his sense of social justice and how he uses his celebrity gloss to help the downtrodden and working people, and to promote good causes.’

  The room’s only just big enough to hold a single bed, a rug for Franklin, a few shelves of books, a TV and an easy chair, with a back door leading out to the yard where the motorhome parks, but it’s enough. In there he wakes up every morning at about 6.30 a.m., reads his Bible and all the newspapers, watches the news on TV, raids the fridge in the tiny nook just beyond for his breakfast and finally emerges to walk down the corridor, lined with three small offices and a wider open area that serves as a conference space, to the main room near the front of the building, where he sets up behind a huge desk to work for the day.

  It’s now from this desk, with a framed signed Collingwood jersey behind him, that he sees a steady stream of people coming in to talk over their problems, to pay their respects, to make bookings for him to talk to various groups, to plan finances or to work out a way forward. The phone rings constantly, picked up either by a secretary or volunteer helper out front, or by Father Bob himself. The callers range from those keen to book masses, weddings, baptisms, funerals or last rites, to those asking him to visit schools, speak to organisations, participate in interviews for newspapers or magazines, or appear online, on radio, or on TV.

  ‘We love having him on, not only for his razor-sharp wit, but for his warmth, his kindness and his integrity,’ says ‘The Project’ co-host Carrie Bickmore. ‘He’s one of the most genuine souls I know. He shows us that religion needs to move and adapt with the times, and that it’s our humanity, and our relationships with other people, that we should hold most dear.’

  Ben Fordham on Radio 2GB says he’s keener than ever to have the priest on regularly now he’s lost his church. ‘I want to make sure he has a congregation every week on radio to share his wisdom instead,’ he says. ‘That the Church sacked him is sad, but the tragedy is that they’re the losers. He’s such a forward thinker. We don’t have enough rough diamonds out there, and we can’t let him slip through our fingers. Our listeners just love him.’

  As for Father Bob, the banner over the front of the office says what he dearly hopes the next phase of his life might lead to: The Father Bob Maguire Foundation: The Next Generatio
n. ‘Yes, it does sound a bit Star Trekky, but I’m now looking to the younger ones to continue the work,’ he says. ‘They’re the ones with the energy, the optimism, the foresight and the wisdom to keep going what we’ve started. The future is theirs. Beam me up, Scotty!’

  The priest, however, in all his alternate joviality, cantankerousness, gruffness and compassion, is still always at the centre of everything. Two of the kids he first started out helping, Mem River and Chris Apostolidis, are now giving him a hand with the Foundation, while others drop in to help as and when needed. ‘He helped us when we were young, now it’s our turn to help him,’ says Slav Civcic, who got to know the priest as a kid after his father died and who now, together with his wife Trish Apiti and son Evan, also turns up regularly to give him a hand. ‘He’s a very good man, and it’s a real privilege to be able to give back to him, even in a very small way.’

  His new recruit Michael Carlyon is spearheading a return to youth outreach work helping kids who don’t so much sleep on the streets anymore, but squat in derelict factories and warehouses around town, while old mate Henri Ser looks after the food van, Henry Nissen keeps in touch with senior clients, and support comes from his inner circle of past parish chairmen and councillors Frank O’Connor and Tony Long, together with a variety of parishioners all now eager to give back after a lifetime of being cared for.

  While there’s an air of frenzied chaos – ‘That’s creative chaos,’ protests Father Bob – still everything, somehow, seems to get done. ‘Maybe people on the margins would find it too confronting if something were too organised,’ suggests Father Joe Giacobbe of the Doxa Youth Foundation. ‘Bob goes about things in a different way, but he makes things happen, he’s effective. A lot of organisations come and go, and he’s been doing it for fifty years now.’