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Like all Collingwood fans, Father Bob Maguire was not having a wonderful time last Saturday as the Magpies lost to Geelong in the AFL preliminary final. Shortly afterwards he received a phone call about a man whose evening was faring worse, and he left the presbytery for the all-too-familiar territory of the morgue. When he asked if he could enter and pray with the body, the South Melbourne parish priest was informed that at that moment the man’s organs were being harvested.
The 75-year-old chose to sit elsewhere. In the act of prayer, he found joy.
Father Bob Maguire at the Sunday service on September 13, 2009, as the priest’s future was uncertain.Credit: Luis Ascui
Carrying out God’s work has been Maguire’s motivation throughout life, and combined with what he sees as hereditary Scottish recalcitrance, this is what makes him determined to continue at St Peter and Paul’s parish in South Melbourne. Despite the half-joking declarations that he could be dead or slip into insanity at any minute, epitomising the eccentric old man he is seen as, and challenges to Catholic convention, the secret is that the beloved and bedevilled Father Bob is at heart a warm, caring Christian.
“You’re going to get me to admit I’m a Catholic,” he interrupts himself at one point, in typical cantankerous style.
After an hour of discussing everything from the Declaration of Independence and the search for the Promised Land, the parable of Lazarus, parallel universes, parasites and talk-back radio hosts, he decides that, “I’d like to come out as a Catholic. What’s it called, an outing?”
Maguire spends more time than he would like answering phone calls and emails in his large office, where his desk and a large table are covered in messy piles of paperwork including notes from lawyers and letters from police, the walls are adorned with awards and artwork, and a stick of incense burns on the mantle. The bookcase does contain large volumes about Jesus Christ, along with weighty novels and the 2001 edition of The Age Good Food Guide. A block-mounted poster of Maguire and John Safran used to promote their Sunday night radio program on Triple J stands on the floor near the entrance, with the slogan “Everyone offended equally”.
Black labradoodle Frank bounds around with a chew toy seeking attention, and is unflappably happy even after he gets growled at. The only times he howls are during the Edinburgh Tattoo, another time Maguire finds joy, and the playing of The Last Post on Anzac Day. “See how it touches the primitive?”
In the office, it is easy to forget Maguire is first and foremost a Catholic priest.
Father Bob, as he is most widely known, uses a blog, podcasts and most recently Twitter where his profile says he is a “cranky old man” to reach the virtual parishioners who he thinks outnumber those who attend mass. Maguire engages his audience through social media because “there seems to be a demand for it” and he is “a passionate salesperson for the ordinary Catholic”.
The sense is that what happens in the office, including our conversation and the documentary crew that attaches a microphone and quietly goes about filming him, is a necessary evil that allows him to do more important work. For the past 35 years, he has opened the parish doors between 7am and 7pm and held mass daily, as much as possible, has been active in community work through Open Family which he co-founded in 1978, presided over the Bob Maguire Foundation, established the Emerald Hill Mission and Beyond Care.
He says he is not only orthodox but also orthopraxis. “I believe the right stuff, I also believe in doing the right stuff”, he translates striving to live what he believes and teaches. His last day off lasted 45 minutes and the fact he has not had a holiday in 35 years is his own fault.
“I thought the idea was to be the salt of the earth, that’s why I like to stay in the parish. If I was younger, and had some dedicated helpers, we could leave the place open 24 hours, seven days.”
Maguire’s inspiration comes from Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, who started the Catholic Worker movement and the Emmaus houses of hospitality. He sees his parish ideally as a similar place where people are treated hospitably and respectfully, and the community is active and interdependent. He drives the Hope Mobile around St Kilda’s streets, handing out food and friendship. He raises money for poor, hungry and homeless. Rather than setting himself as the example for all to follow, he believes all 250 Catholic parishes around Melbourne should be tailored to their communities’ needs.
Maguire has copped criticism for giving money to drug users, but exclaims that “they’re all drug users”. That is at the root of many of the problems he deals with, and he sees a clash of cultures between those struggling in St Kilda and the world of the Church hierarchy a short tram ride away in the central business district.
Worried that South Melbourne will be turned into a franchise governed by head office rather than responding to the community’s needs, Maguire is refusing to tender his resignation, having turned 75 on September 14. The Catholic Church requires priests to offer their resignations at this age something Maguire objected to. (The latest news is that a compromise deal was struck yesterday that will allow Maguire to remain parish priest, with control of the finances handed over to the diocese.)
During the two-week stand-off he has taken heart from rebellious saints, particularly John Vianney, the patron saint of parish priests, and the fact Mary McKillop was excommunicated by the leadership of her day. Also encouraging has been contact from a recalcitrant cousin of Maguire’s in Scotland who was “exiled” to Bangladesh, where he fell in love with the poor, and has been a nuisance to the Scottish hierarchy more than 30 years after they first tried to banish him from the priesthood.
“I don’t understand the Catholics, on the one hand they’re saying let’s all be like Mary McKillop and John Vianney and on the other hand as soon as you do it, you’re under arrest. They want to have their cake and eat it, all the saints were rebels,” Maguire says.
“[The retirement policy] doesn’t make sense to me, only because I don’t have much sense. I’ve flown by the seat of my pants since the womb, intending to stay in the air until we run out of petrol. But that’s a silly thing because most people like to plan. Do they? I don’t know.”
That stream-of-consciousness answer was about the closest Maguire came to thoughtful reflection during our hour together, as he clearly prefers keeping busy and being in the moment. He dismisses his past as “boring” and while making detailed plans may not be to his taste since in the past they have gone awry, he discusses his ideals and hopes with unforced enthusiasm.
The crankiness winds up, however, with the realisation that he is discussing the importance of community work above church buildings on a coming episode of Compass on ABC1, fears that he and the recently crucified Safran talked about sex for the new series Race Relations, all at the time he is negotiating with the Church. He feels some will see it as an egomaniacal campaign rather than coincidence.
On another flank, 3AW drive host Derryn Hinch has renewed a 20-year campaign against him, claiming Maguire had been involved in money laundering for paedophile priest Vincent Kiss. A letter from police dated in the 1990s shows past claims to be false, and Kiss was the one convicted of fraud and later jailed internationally for sex offences.
Maguire’s concern is not so much at the substance of the attack – at one point he comically reads out the carefully worded and dull legal advice that said there was never a case to answer – as the timing. The attack comes as he is trying to give his congregation the chance to choose its destiny, either to remain with the unconventional though orthodox “Father Bob” or acquiescing to the global rules. Noting that 150 years have passed since Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published, Maguire demonstrates his rebellious streak in being willing to discuss explanations for existence other than God. He is even apparently curious about parallel universe theories, though does end up dismissing it gruffly as speaking in tongues.
“The orthodox members of all faiths will want you to stick to one commonly acceptable terms of reference. Do you believe in heaven? Do you believe in the communion? I’ll say yes. I’ll say yes to anything, sign anything. But, there will be other explanations for the meaning of those foundational statements.
“I don’t mind you saying the creed, but I want to live the creed, and I want other people to live the creed. Especially the group I preside over as their priest. I want us to live the creed, as a parish should be.”
South Melbourne, the city’s first suburban parish, began when the Catholics were living in a ghetto in 1854, the year of the Eureka Stockade. The Eureka flag flies alongside the Irish and Aboriginal flags on the presbytery to reflect this. Since forming, the parish’s heart has moved from Emerald Hill to the acre on Montague Street, with bluestone buildings for congregations of 2000, and accumulated school, orphanage and mission buildings.
By the time Maguire arrived “the gloss had been knocked off the place” and the congregations are now down to 200. Only a handful of people attend the weekday masses. But he wants the parish to determine its own future, and has left his retirement in their hands.
“That’s why with this kerfuffle, I’m trying to make it ours, not mine. Who are you, South Melbourne? You better start making your mind up because the next episode in your life may well be that you become a franchise of central headquarters.
“If you’re dinkum Aussies, of course you might say, ‘I don’t give a rats what I am, I’ll just go with the flow’. If that’s the case, so be it, but this is your last chance for the foreseeable future to be a local church with a style of your choosing and as a result of your evolution.
“It doesn’t suit the bosses. They say ‘no, no, no, no, no, it’s got nothing to do with them.’ I’m saying that to me it does have something to do with them, even according to the spirit of canon law if not the ethos of Catholicism. But the administrative preference these days may well say not.”
Maguire’s local focus, an insistence that there is a particular brand of South Melbourne Catholicism, refusal to simply do the hierarchy’s bidding and general demeanour grate on those who are more resistant to change. Constantly referring to the Catholic Church as the enemy may not help relations either.
“Some boy wrote to me on the thing,” he waves at the computer, “he says, ‘no, no, there’s no such thing as the Australian Catholic Church, it’s got to be the Roman Catholic Church in Australia.’ See? He gets frightened at this idea there’s an Australian anything. How can that be so? Why couldn’t the Aussies be something unique? We haven’t had it before, but that’s what evolution’s all about.”
Again Darwin returns to the conversation, mentioned almost as many times as God. What Maguire takes from Darwin naturally fits perfectly with his hopes for the parish, a community that grows stronger to overcome challenges and disadvantages.
“We’re all in this together, whether you are a parasite in somebody’s gut or whether you are the bloody Dalai Lama.”
This article was first published in The Canberra Times on September 25, 2009.
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