Father Bob

by Sue Williams

  The afterglow of the blessing was soon clouded, in any case, by the curse of Father Vincent Kiss. The jailing of the priest for fraud had offered only temporary relief from both the scandal itself, and Derryn Hinch. While Kiss was in jail, a man came forward to accuse the priest of indecently assaulting him in 1965 when he was a thirteen-year-old boy and Kiss was thirty-four. He’d been a member of the Young Christian Students Association, during Kiss’s tenure as the Director of Youth for Wagga Wagga.

  More boys then came forward to press similar claims. Kiss had plied the boys with alcohol, they said, taken them off on holidays in fast cars, and had sexually abused them. He’d assaulted others, they alleged, during their training as altar boys and after athletics training in a steam room.

  In 1999, as Kiss was released from H M Ararat Prison, having served his seven-year sentence for fraud, he was immediately re-arrested and charged with child sex crimes. His name was also linked with an alleged network of paedophiles operating out of an area of the Philippines 90 kilometres south of the capital, Manila. Hinch, who’d been investigating Kiss on suspicion of such activity for years, was triumphant. Father Bob was appalled. This latest turn of events was deeply shocking to him, and he steeled himself for the maelstrom of criticism that was surely headed his way.

  Father Bob giving a talk to school children.

  The priest in a shirt gifted to him by students of a Gippsland Catholic college.

  PART 3

  THE TROUBLES

  16

  The Worst of Times

  If Father Bob Maguire could ever have imagined having an annus horribilis, the year 2002 was it.

  Most people’s difficulties in life generally come down to two things: money and sex. Father Bob’s troubles were similar, but with a priestly twist. The number-one issue was money – both that there was never enough of it, and Father Bob’s handling of what there was. The second involved accusations of sexual abuse levelled at fellow priests, and going right to the top.

  On the money front, things weren’t travelling well. The work of both Open Family Australia and the Emerald Hill Mission had expanded so widely and so quickly, it was perhaps inevitable there would be problems.

  In 2002 alone, for instance, Open Family’s outreach workers were to see 626 kids from the age of twelve to eighteen from around thirty different ethnic backgrounds in Melbourne, Canberra and now Sydney, too. The intervention work included helping the youngsters make contact with their families, providing family mediation and support, organising visits to GPs and community health workers, and giving them access to drug and alcohol programs. Of the kids being seen, follow-up contact found that the lives of 317 had since improved, while 147 experienced a stabilisation in their conditions. Around a quarter continued on a downward slope.

  Street kid Erica was perhaps typical of a number of the young people on Open Family’s books. She’d run away from home at eleven, after suffering years of sexual and emotional abuse. When a street outreach worker first encountered her, she was sixteen and a hopeless heroin addict, working as a prostitute to maintain both her habit and that of her boyfriend. ‘She was a tough little veteran of street life,’ said Open Family’s Carmel Barber. ‘We made life plans and appointments which Erica endorsed enthusiastically, but which she never attempted to carry out.’

  The young girl then disappeared until turning up two years later on the streets of Frankston. Carmel gave her a business card. Erica phoned her that night, saying she needed help. She was three months pregnant, her boyfriend was violent towards her and she was sleeping on the beach. Open Family swung into action, arranging for her to stay in a caravan park, giving her some emergency funds and then putting her on a methadone plan to get off heroin. She was later housed in a two-bedroom unit. ‘Erica now has a beautiful baby boy and is making a valiant effort to be a fantastic mum to her son,’ Carmel reported. ‘She is determined that he will have a better life than she had.’

  It was young people like Erica that kept Father Bob, by then sixty-seven, pressing so hard for his organisations to help more kids, and continue assistance to the adults many had become. ‘When a young person is finally ready to ask for help, we have to be there to give them that help,’ he says. ‘So many of them are trying to run on their own merits but just need a helping hand from someone at a critical time. If that’s not forthcoming, then they may be lost forever.’

  He knew that from the thirty-one young people he’d already lost among the street kids and neighbourhood youngsters he’d been trying to help from the beginning. Many had killed themselves out of desperation; others had been killed by their pushers, drugs, alcohol, gang members or enemies; one died in jail; another in a fight. In 2001, he decided to honour their memory and, on the back of a memorial to local babies who’d died that had previously been established in the church garden by parishioners, he had a slab of granite placed, with the first names and first letter of the surname of each of the dead inscribed into it. ‘Forgive us our sins. We have already forgiven you yours,’ he had written. ‘We died on your watch during the 70s, 80s, and 90s urban drug wars. We were only 20-somethings. Lest We Forget.’

  ‘Anzac Day commemorates those who died in the war but this goes further,’ says Father Bob. ‘Here we’re talking about the destruction of major parts of a whole new young generation. Here, they can rest peacefully at last. They may have sinned, but they’re still worthy of remembrance. And I put they’d forgiven us our sin – of neglecting them, of not caring enough about them.’ Having the memorial constructed and placed in the garden immediately made him feel better. These young people, whose lives had been so tragically cut short, would at least live on in people’s memories, and he decided that a memorial service be held every year in their honour, on the day he arrived in the parish on 14 September, the same day as his own birthday.

  For the work of Open Family, numerous fundraising events were being held and planned for the future, everything from a rugby league lunch with H G Nelson and Tony Squires to a sponsored film night, from a corporate race day to a comedy night out. Father Bob spent a lot of his time racing around the country talking up donations, as well as working hard within the parish and the neighbouring areas, and coping with Costas’s frequent outbursts. He kept up a manic workaholic pace and in 2002, it all came back to bite him.

  He was rushing off to conduct a wedding, when he felt his heart racing at what he describes as 320 kilometres an hour. He tried to ignore it at first, but when it seemed to be getting even faster, he rang a priest friend to see if he could cover the wedding and drove himself to the local clinic. The doctor there sent him straight to hospital. After a number of tests, he was diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, an irregular heartbeat, and prescribed medication to keep it in check. ‘I thought I was dying!’ he says. ‘But now I know it’s the lowest form of heart conditions …’

  He made an effort from that point on to eat more healthily, try to cut down on the amount of junk food he loved to eat and to drop his occasional whisky and Cuban cigar habit. ‘I don’t drink,’ he told those offering. ‘I’m on the pill, the girth control pill.’ But it did nothing to slow him down and he continued on exactly the same mad round of appointments, meetings, seminars, conferences, charity functions, motivational and inspirational talks, and services at the church. One day at the pulpit, he embarked on a new grumpy old man routine. ‘We’re expected to do everything, be everything to everyone,’ he told the congregation. ‘We’re sent here, we’re sent there … but you never hear anything about priest abuse!’ There was a gasp of horror from some, laughter from others.

  Yet the tightness of finances was no laughing matter at all. Father Bob had been propping up the work of both Open Family and the Emerald Hill Mission, at times, with parish money, and then the parish in turn with his charity funds. He felt there was a mutual agreement among all three for giving and taking as the fortunes of each ebbed and flowed, and his bookkeeper kept a careful tally of what went where. While many onlookers didn
’t mind that, feeling all the work was being done in the name of St Peter and Paul’s anyway, others felt they should remain entirely separate entities, each strictly quarantined from each other, and feared the records were now becoming intricately intertwined.

  By 2002, tensions had built up in both Open Family and the parish about money. A number of prominent business­people from the world of finance were now sitting on the board of Open Family, and they were used to running companies along strict profit and loss lines, with every dollar spent carefully receipted and accounted for. It was quite at odds with Father Bob’s modus operandi.

  ‘If someone came to him in great need, then he’d give them money if that was what they needed because we were all about helping the poor, the marginalised, the dispossessed,’ says Richard Tregear, an experienced outreach worker who’d joined Open Family from Mission Victoria because he believed so passionately in Father Bob’s vision. ‘We were all about giving service 24/7 on the community’s terms, not ours. It was radical social work, outreach work and service delivery. But the Open Family board was becoming more and more and more conservative all the time, and the rebellious essence, the creativity that was there when Bob started was steadily diminishing. The people who came in and joined the board didn’t understand community service, they didn’t understand youth work, and they didn’t understand what we were trying to do. Outreach was the flagship of our work, and we were answerable to the local community, and then Bob, and finally the board. But the board wanted to come first all the time.’

  That board certainly tended to see things differently. Phil Ruthven, the founder and chairman of IBISWorld, an international corporation providing online business information, forecasting and strategic services, was a veteran member of the board, and was later to serve as Open Family chairman for two years. He was a long-time admirer of Father Bob and his work. ‘No-one would deny he has one of the smartest minds, or highest IQs, almost in Australia,’ he says. ‘He’s a remarkably unique man, with a warmth that’s very disarming.’ But he also felt there needed to be changes in the nature of the organisation as a way of modernising it, where strict processes and protocols had to be put in place to satisfy increasingly stringent accountability requirements. He saw Father Bob, on the other hand, as suffering a bout of what he suggests was ‘founder’s syndrome’, where the founder wants to continue to operate his way, and the way he always has, and retain most of the power and control.

  ‘In some ways, you need a fairly big ego to be able to start an organisation like this and keep it going in the face of some pretty extraordinary difficulties, financial, with the authorities and with the type of work you’re doing,’ says Phil. ‘You have to be stubborn and have an ego, and he’s someone who likes a measure of adulation to feed the ego. But that can be both the strength and a weakness of an organisation as you move forward. Bob felt as if he owned Open Family in a sense. That’s where founder’s syndrome came in. I remember saying to Bob one time that it isn’t something you own. He said, “But you own IBISWorld!” I said, “That’s true but that’s a private company and it’s taken a lot of money to do that.”

  ‘The board had issues with Bob but he’s not someone you could ever bring yourself to dislike. There were problems with administration and the proper accounting of funds but there was certainly never any defalcation. He may have been great at handing over money, but he never used it for himself. When you weigh up what Bob’s achieved, it’s a hell of a lot but when you go into the second or third generation of something, it can be difficult, the same as with any other company that’s been founded by someone. But nobody could take away from Bob what he’s achieved. He’d been recognised by the United Nations as having the world’s best practice in looking after street kids. The world’s best practice! He’s a remarkable human being, he’s a very popular figure and has become in a sense a beacon for good things, like Ben Chifley’s “The light on the hill”. But all the saints in the Catholic Church are flawed in some way, including Mother Teresa in India, because they’re all human beings.’

  But tensions continued to grow, arguments started and tempers flared. When finances grew tighter, the board started talking about cuts to services; Father Bob talked about putting more effort into fundraising. It was a complete difference of opinion and cracks began to appear in the organisation. Father Bob, as the founder and chairman, and CEO Nathan Stirling were on the one side, and the rest of his board were ranged on the other. It felt clear to Father Bob that the board was trying to sideline him, and he dug in his heels.

  His long-time ally Frank O’Connor watched on. ‘Phil seemed to express the board’s view that Bob was past it,’ he says. ‘So clearly the rot had started to set in from their perspective. Bob, of course, always felt they’d lost direction and the organisation was moving away from its core of being very focused on the extremely marginalised and disadvantaged, and was instead becoming just another service to provide things to slightly disadvantaged young people. And I think Bob had that fundamental disagreement with them that they’d lost their way.’

  But back in the parish, the situation was becoming even more fraught. By 2002, Father Bob had run up an overdraft of $300 000, and that had been brought to the attention of the new Archbishop of Melbourne.

  Father Bob wasn’t unduly worried about the state of the parish’s financial affairs. He’d consulted a financial adviser and the pair had toured the parish, looking at the buildings the Catholic Church owned there. ‘He looked around and said, “You’re not broke! Look at all these empty buildings!”’ reports Father Bob. ‘His advice was to liquefy some of these idle assets.’ As a result, he’d sketched out a long-term plan to sell some of the buildings belonging to the Church, to lease out some and to develop others with a series of different partners. That would net him around $1.5 million, he estimated, which would help pay for some much-needed repairs to other buildings, renovate others, and keep all his projects, as well as the parish, going.

  The financial adviser approved the schemes, saying the development plans would bring healthy cash flow into the future. It all seemed perfectly straightforward to Father Bob. After all, he wasn’t in the business of building wealth for its own sake. ‘There is a clause in Canon Law which says that the parish priest must use parish goods for the poor and needy,’ he says. ‘That’s the Church’s true work.’ The Catholic hierarchy, however, had other ideas.

  He received a letter from the Archdiocesan business manager saying there was a level of concern about the overdraft, and a need for some more independent financial advice. Father Bob’s spending needed to be a great deal more accountable and, at the same time, much more modest. Some within the parish welcomed the intervention. Gerry Vaughan, the treasurer of Emerald Hill Mission, says an incorporated body ‘has to be run correctly, which is where I had a few problems …’ The priest, however, didn’t take kindly to the edict from above. He instead had some stamps made with gospel and Vatican II references on them – including ‘I was hungry and you fed me’ and ‘I was in prison and you visited me’ – and then provided a set of accounts with such stamps next to each entry, and cheque butts with them on too.

  The newly appointed Archbishop of Melbourne, Denis Hart, replacing his old seminary classmate George Pell, who’d become Archbishop of Sydney, was unimpressed. He had meetings with Father Bob about the finances.

  His old friend Father Ernie Smith feared the worst. ‘He’s a complex sort of a person, and he can be his own worst enemy the way he goes about things,’ he says. ‘He doesn’t like to be accountable to the organisation.’

  Finally, Archibshop Hart, frustrated that they didn’t seem to be getting anywhere, closed the bank account the priest had been using, and opened another that required a second signature to access any funds.

  For Father Bob, that was a massive blow. From being a parish priest with a number of independent welfare organisations, being able to operate pretty much as he pleased, his activ­ities were now being serious curtailed, a
nd he was subject to a degree of control he’d never before known. ‘That was completely unjust and unjustifiable,’ says Father Bob. ‘The small bunch of administrators who knew the whole story knew that. I’d arrived in South Melbourne when it was a bombsite and I’d worked for so many years to get it up to the stage where it was perfectly able to look after itself. Next on the plan was the sale of Emerald Hall, which was of no use to anyone, as it was heritage-listed and couldn’t be used for residential and would have cost the Church more to repair than it could possibly afford. The tenant, Chris Apostolidis, was doing a great job of renovating it himself, and wanted to buy it for his Dance World, but then HQ said “No”. So when it came to the next stage of feeding the poor and looking after people who had nothing, HQ started saying Maguire’s attitude to both wasn’t acceptable. They were saying crime, crime, crime.’

  Yet his situation was about to become a whole lot worse. The South Melbourne parish chairman of the time, Brian Rochford, the operations manager of gas company Envestra, also wrote to the Archbishop, complaining about Father Bob. His letter ranged over a series of issues, including the level of general spending, the sale of church property, funds from the parish being spent outside the parish, personal growth programs that were developed by parishioners only and the priest’s lack of socialising over a cup of tea after the Sunday mass. He also claimed Father Bob would routinely give money to ‘a small, haphazardly selected group of people’, and singled out particularly the amounts of money that were going to Costas and the young man’s behaviour, which, the letter went on to say, was having an impact on the health and safety obligations of the parish.

  ‘I don’t have a lot of time for Father Bob but I don’t want to press it,’ says Brian today. ‘My concerns were mostly about the money and where it went. But one thing I’ll tell you about Bob, he never spent any money on Bob. But he spent a lot on other people, particularly with handouts to Costas.’