Father Bob

by Sue Williams

  The letter was to prove a ticking timebomb for Father Bob. The Archbishop saw it as symptomatic of a growing dissatisfaction within the parish with their priest, and wanted to act on it.

  Others within the parish, however, were appalled by the letter, and angry they hadn’t been consulted before it had been sent in the name of the parish council. A number of them wrote letters of protest, including Frank O’Connor, a member of the parish at that stage for twenty-three years. He also wrote to Brian, calling his original letter ‘most astonishing’. He mounted a vigorous defence of Father Bob, saying the priest had already given a number of undertakings about Costas, arguing that his ministry to the parish was consistent with his belief in the need to move from the clerical model of the Church to one based on individual and community responsibilities, and describing the priest’s approach to finance as ‘less than traditional’. He finished by writing that Brian should either resume his role of developing and supporting the parish in accordance with Father Bob’s philosophy, or, ‘If alternatively you don’t believe that Fr Bob’s view of Christ’s message is correct then I am at a loss to understand how you can continue in your role as Parish Councillor of this Parish.’

  They were strong words but, a decade on, and now a former local councillor and four-time mayor of Port Phillip and South Melbourne, Frank doesn’t resile from them. Growing up in a hardworking Irish Catholic family in St Kilda, he built a successful career in IT and married and had two children, then he and his wife Ann volunteered to run a family group home for wards of the state, so he knew firsthand the kind of kids Father Bob had made it his mission to help. In 1980, after moving to Albert Park, he started attending St Peter and Paul’s and became a huge admirer of the priest’s Vatican II philosophy and an enthusiastic member of ‘the people’s liturgy’. He could see how people might be concerned by Father Bob’s attitude to financial matters, but he didn’t agree with them.

  ‘Bob’s always insisted that if you’ve got the money, it ought to be given to those who need it,’ Frank says. ‘If there was any money around, it went to what he saw as worthy causes and that’s what was getting him into strife. He often sees money as the only lever he has to make change in the world. I disagree with him on this. I think he’s got the capacity to change the world through what he says, and the inspiration he gives people by interpreting Christian gospel messages into modern-day living. But he likes to use money to solve the world’s ills. He could always dispense money very quickly, but it’s a philosophical thing. If you’ve got money, you’ve just got to hand it over because it’s probably more meaningful and more relevant to the person at that particular time than it might be tomorrow or next week.’

  Similarly, his CEO at Open Family at the time, Nathan Stirling, says to suggest that Father Bob can’t manage finances is quite wrong. ‘For anyone to portray him as a financial imbecile is the absolute inverse of what he’s like,’ he says. ‘The impression that he’s financially incompetent is ridiculous, and the trouble is then that mud sticks. But while I was never privy to the parish finances, he’s quite competent. He simply chooses to spend money rather than save it.’

  His old offsider Damian Coleridge agrees. It was simply an old-fashioned view of the Church and its responsibilities to those unable to help themselves, he believes. ‘There’s no point in being the richest person in the graveyard; it’s about being creative with money,’ he says. ‘Bob is old-fashioned. You won’t see his type again. He has a great belief in having personal responsibility for dispensing funds, and a real kind of love for the poor. It’s generosity, giving done from the heart. Part of me actually rather likes that attitude. You don’t have to go through these bloody mountains of paperwork to do it. But the times aren’t propitious for that anymore.

  ‘Yet I’ve seen that in other figures too. The old Archbishop Mannix used to walk through Collingwood on his way to the cathedral, dispensing coins as he went.’

  At base, the clashes between Father Bob and his financial managers seemed to be a fundamental conflict of philosophies about the proper way for funds to be managed and spent. The priest had become well known for giving money to people who asked him for help, twenty dollars here, twenty-five there, and usually considerably more to Costas, but he was still rarely seen as a soft touch.

  He could sometimes be heard chiding those asking for a handout, or telling someone to ‘Get out of here!’ One man once asked him for money, saying he was in need of fourteen dollars. Father Bob gave him a twenty-dollar note. The man insisted on carefully counting six one-dollar coins back into the priest’s hand.

  ‘And even if I am sometimes a soft touch, that’s what the gospel is all about: If you give your cloak and they want your trousers, well, give them too,’ he defends himself. ‘And occasionally it might pay off. The people I’ve helped are often highly talented people whose lives have been wrecked by their childhoods or by drugs. Traumatic early-childhood experiences, like being abused, or being a state ward or having drug-or alcohol-addicted parents, can mess up your wiring to the point where you can’t even aspire to do good things. But we should try to create equal opportunities for everybody. These people can still think, they still feel, they can still hurt …’

  But the Archbishop, after trying to negotiate with Father Bob and having his approaches rebuffed, instead issued an ultimatum to his priest: either exclude Costas from the presbytery, stop spending money on him and allow the finance committee to supervise the accounts, or resign as parish priest. Father Bob tried to argue his corner, but Denis Hart, quietly, firmly and politely, held his position. Everyone knew that the Archbishop had the power to remove him from the parish, and doubtless some would have liked him to exercise that power, but in the end, Father Bob was the one to back down.

  He sent out a note to real estate agents looking for alternative accommodation for Costas, and wrote back to his Archbishop to say all matters had now been attended to. Hurt, annoyed and affronted in almost equal measure, he desperately hoped that would be the end of the matter and he’d be left alone to conduct business pretty much as normal.

  If Father Bob thought that times were bad, they were soon to become much worse.

  In August 2002, the disgraced Father Vincent Kiss pleaded guilty in a Sydney courtroom to thirteen child sex offences. ‘In my view, the offences are so serious that a custodial sentence is inevitable,’ said Judge Penny Hock of the acts that had taken place between 1966 and 1973 in Albury, Yass and Sydney. The next month, he was sentenced to ten and a half years in jail.

  There were then a series of revelations that suggested the charges were probably just the tip of the iceberg, and Kiss was a serial pederast who’d been abusing a huge number of boys, both in Australia and in the Philippines, for many years. A priest at his old seminary in the New South Wales Blue Mountains said a student had come to him one evening to disclose that Kiss had been taking him on trips into Sydney and to the Gold Coast as a young teenager, taking him to motels, abusing him, and then hearing his confession afterwards. The priest said, in retrospect, he should have gone straight to the police but back then, feeling bound by the confidentiality of the student’s admission, and a sense of loyalty to the Church, he kept the terrible secret, all the while fearing what Kiss’s ‘missionary’ activities might have entailed.

  To Father Bob, this was all shocking news. If he’d ever suspected Kiss of abusing children, he would never have let him anywhere near his church. He was relieved, however, that Kiss had never been associated with Open Family or any of his work with children. But, predictably, Derryn Hinch went back on to the attack, linking Father Bob again with Kiss, and this time also adding the parish rows about money to the mix.

  ‘He’s never been good with money,’ says Derryn. ‘And he didn’t care how he got it or spent it, even if that meant money laundering for a child molester. He made a pact with the devil. He said he needed the money for his children, but what about those poor children in the Philippines who’d been at the mercy of this
man?’

  Once again, Father Bob protested that he, along with the rest of Melbourne, had no idea what Kiss had been up to, and that he was only one of a long line of prominent and highly respected figures who’d been taken in by the debonair priest.

  He feared the publicity might end up having repercussions on his organisations but it seems he was hurt personally by the attacks much more than his public persona or any of his work were. He continued to be as popular as he’d ever been.

  But that wasn’t always a good thing, he was soon to discover. The publicity over the Kiss sexual abuse and allegations on the highly rating TV show ‘60 Minutes’ that the Church had tried to cover up another instance of priest paedophilia had driven one of his parishioners to approach him with a horrendous accusation. As a twelve-year-old altar boy he’d been sexually molested, he said, at a holiday camp run by Catholic seminarians forty-one years before. And his assailant, he claimed, was a trainee priest known to the boys as ‘Big George’, a man he alleged was no less than the Archbishop of Sydney, George Pell.

  17

  Another New Project

  The allegation that George Pell, the Archbishop of Sydney and arguably the most powerful person in the Catholic Church in Australia, had sexually abused one of his parishioners many years before presented Father Bob Maguire with a terrible dilemma.

  On the one hand, he found this accusation very hard to believe. On the other, he’d worked with abused kids long enough to know that those in authority often didn’t take their claims seriously and, in cases where they were telling the truth, scepticism and a refusal to investigate could cause them sometimes even more damage.

  In addition, he wanted his beloved Church to be free of the taint of ever trying to cover up any kind of allegations involving the evil of child abuse. The Father Vincent Kiss case had been a sickening jolt for him, and he was determined that the Church always be prepared to be accountable for any past and present sins, however unlikely.

  ‘What was I to do?’ says Father Bob. ‘I couldn’t turn my back on the bloke who came to me. I was in a position of trust, and he’d come to me for help. I couldn’t tell him to go away and just shut up about it. But I knew that if I supported him, I could be making a powerful enemy too. That could be the end of me, and my work.’

  The man, a former member of the Federated Ship Painters and Dockers Union, told Father Bob he’d been driven in 1961 by members of the seminary at Werribee – the same seminary the priest had left the year before – to a holiday camp on Phillip Island, where one trainee priest known by the nickname ‘Big George’ had sexually assaulted him on several occasions. He’d recently been watching TV and had seen George Pell. He immediately recognised him, he claimed, as his assailant from all those years ago.

  Father Bob listened in silence to the man. He’d known him for a number of years and admired him for having risen above a past riven by alcoholism and crime. These days the fifty-three year old was a respected figure whom he bumped into regularly at Collingwood football games and seemed genuine in his belief about what had happened. He said he wasn’t after publicity or money – he’d been tortured by the memory of what he recalled having happened and wanted the Church quietly to acknowledge that, and perhaps have a private meeting with George Pell, to lay his demons to rest.

  After the man had left, Father Bob made a phone call to the National Committee for Professional Standards (NCPS), the body set up by the Australian Catholic Bishops’ Conference to receive complaints of sexual abuse by Catholic priests. He told them what had happened, and arranged an appointment for the man who, for legal reasons, can’t be identified. That took place in June 2002.

  Two months on, however, events took a dramatic turn when details of his allegations were posted on a Sydney website, as well as the claim that the NCPS had decided it couldn’t investigate because the case involved the Archbishop. The report further claimed that the complainant, frustrated by this lack of action, had decided to go to a journalist instead. At this, the NCPS agreed to hold a Church investigation. Then, in another shocking twist, aspects of the man’s past criminal convictions were leaked to the media, as well as details of his alcoholism.

  Two weeks later, George Pell held a press conference denying the claims, and saying the alleged events never happened but that he would cooperate fully with the investigation. He then took indefinite leave as the Archbishop of Sydney until the completion of the inquiry. That evening, Prime Minister John Howard defended him, declaring, ‘I believe completely George Pell’s denial.’

  The inquiry took place during September and October of 2002, presided over by retired Victorian Supreme Court judge Alec Southwell, QC.

  In his final ruling, Judge Southwell said the complainant’s credibility had been subjected to a forceful attack but that it appeared the man had not had any problem with alcohol since 1979, and while he’d previously had thirty-nine convictions from about twenty court appearances, most of which involved drink-driving or assaults, the last one had been more than twenty years before; none had involved dishonesty.

  In the end, with a marked lack of corroborative evidence, the case seemed to come down to the word of one man against another. The judge accepted ‘that the complainant, when giving evidence of molesting, gave the impression that he was speaking honestly from an actual recollection’. But he said the Archbishop ‘also gave me the impression he was speaking the truth’. As a result, he said he couldn’t be ‘satisfied that the complaint has been established’.

  Melbourne lawyer Tony Joyce, who often acted pro bono for Father Bob, saw the verdict as a win for neither side. ‘It was effectively a nil-all decision,’ he says. ‘Bob had supported the underdog, which is what he always does. It’s one of his many good traits.’

  The inquiry’s conclusion was certainly less than the complete exoneration Archbishop Pell had no doubt been hoping for and Father Bob, reading the report of the inquiry on the Church website, felt nervous. His parishioner, he knew, would be devastated by the verdict but he also suspected George Pell might not be too pleased, either. ‘I think this could be the end of Father Bob!’ he told supporters. One of them nodded sagely. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I don’t know if Pell has it in him to forgive or forget.’

  According to his biographer, Tess Livingstone, he certainly has, and she reports that after ‘a little interval of time’ George Pell prayed for his accuser. It is not known whether Father Bob was accorded the same blessing.

  Father Bob had plenty of time over the next eight months to ponder that. Early in 2003, the sixty-eight year old was diagnosed with prostate cancer. It was his second bout of ill health in two years, and it took him completely by surprise. He was always so focused on others’ needs, it felt almost an indulgence to be concentrating so much on himself and he felt very uncomfortable to be put in such an unfamiliar situation.

  Happily, the cancer wasn’t too far gone and he had daily radiotherapy treatments for a total of nine weeks over July and August for ‘my prostitute problem’, as he became fond of calling it. But he grumbled every time he had to go into hospital to receive the dose. It wasn’t that he was particularly afraid of death; he felt he just didn’t have the time to waste warding it off when there was so much still he wanted to achieve.

  ‘As well, he told me he was having to walk around in one of those gowns that fasten at the back,’ says John Cindric, who Father Bob helped, along with Costas, Brian Rudd, Chris Apostolidis and Mem River, and is today a good friend. ‘He’d say he was being forced to walk around with his bum hanging out. He didn’t think that’s the way you should behave as a priest.’

  But the treatment did give him plenty of time to sit and think, and it was then that he decided to start another charity project. He was still having rows with the Open Family board over how they were running the organisation and tensions remained within the parish and at the Emerald Hill Mission over the finances, so it seemed now was the time to strike out afresh. In addition, he’d been buoyed earlier in t
he year when he’d been awarded the Centenary Medal – an honour given to Australians who’ve contributed to the success of the nation’s future in some way – in recognition of his long service to the congregation of St Peter and Paul’s and the local community. A few months on, in a scenario he thought was ironic considering the criticism over his financial dealings, he was given the coveted Ernst & Young title of Social Entrepreneur of the Year for the Southern Region of Australia for a social, community or not-for-profit organisation. So as a result, the priest launched the Father Bob Maguire Foundation, a body set up to provide funding for about a dozen former clients of Open Family who were by then too old to qualify for its help.

  ‘These were the survivors from the drug wars who no-one else wanted to help,’ says Father Bob. ‘They were former wards of the state who’d made it this far, but it was still very hard for them to keep going without any personal, family and community support. The prospects for this group of people, on the whole, weren’t so good. Many had been terribly damaged by alcohol, drugs or their lifestyles. They were beyond care – beyond the kind of care other charities could give them. So I called the type of aid “futile care”. It wasn’t about giving them training or helping them learn new skills. It was about, simply, keeping them alive.’

  Costas was to be one of the clients of the new Foundation. His position hadn’t improved. He was losing weight, and exhibiting more signs of psychiatric problems. Father Bob, wondering at one point whether he’d also been abused at perhaps one of the state institutions he’d been in – Costas would never talk about any of them – persuaded him to make a submission to the Senate inquiry Report on Forgotten Australians, about children placed in institutions or out of home care. In desperation, he even sent him over to Cyprus to his family there to see if that would help. Costas returned a little quieter for a while, but still seemed deeply disturbed. The major problem was that the Archbishop had insisted Costas no longer be allowed to stay at the presbytery, or anywhere near it.