by Sue Williams
At home in the presbytery office, there were other changes taking place. Following the death of Father Bob’s dog Rocky, he was offered a replacement, another standard poodle that had been ailing in a pound until rescued by an animal-lover who vowed to find him a new home. The first couple to take him called back two days later to say it was impossible; Franklin had proved an excellent escape artist and kept jumping over their fence. They brought him back and, desperate, the woman had phoned Father Bob. He hadn’t hesitated to take him in. Franklin turned out to love being around people, which was just as well with so many people constantly staying around the presbytery.
Sometimes, those guests still could be troublesome, particularly if they were high on drugs, or desperate for money for their next fix. One of the volunteers claims someone there once chased her with a machete. Another time the TV went missing – presumably stolen and sold for cash. Father Bob had a screen door installed in his office, so he could see who was calling before they rang the bell, and a security keypad was put in, so visitors couldn’t get access to the inner areas of the presbytery. The problem was, the priest could never remember the code number, and insisted on sticking a Post-it note on the keypad with the code number scrawled on it. ‘He had a great mind, always active, always coming up with grand schemes,’ says a parishioner. ‘But he was never so good on the details.’
The other major change was the rapid advance of technology. Father Bob had been writing an internet blog since mid-2005, often dictating it to someone who actually typed it in for him, and he loved it as a way of communicating what he had to say about the world. He also had his own website, podcasts, Facebook and Myspace pages, was constantly on email and his mobile phone, and loved Google and Wikipedia on the net. ‘It’s a miracle to have so much information and wisdom at your fingertips,’ he says. But now, at the start of 2007, he’d discovered something quite new: Second Life, the online virtual world, where users could customise an avatar, connect with others and socialise.
Father Bob said his main motivation for creating his odd-looking avatar Bob Aji – ‘We had no money in the bank, so couldn’t afford a better one,’ he explained – was to build a spirituality centre and see if the 3D world would function better than the real one. Avatars should be able to take a break from their hedonistic lifestyle, drop into a faith centre and decide, if they wanted to, he said, to become a Second Life monk. ‘And in our next life, hopefully we’ll all be digitally enhanced and look so much better!’
In other quiet moments, he still read voraciously, and wrote letters or emails to people around the world to talk about their missionary work, and to those in the Australian news whom he felt were having a particularly hard time. One day, for instance, he wrote to the footballer Ben Cousins who was struggling with drug-taking, and to the retired Anglican bishop and Governor-General Peter Hollingworth, who was at the time under fire for the inappropriate handling of sex abuse allegations. ‘He’s a very compassionate man,’ says Father Hal Ranger.
He also replied to the thirty or so letters he received every week. On any given day, there might be somebody writing to him to thank him for a past favour, to ask for a new one, to congratulate him for spreading the message about God, to give him news of a mutual friend, to say how much he’d helped them with a life dilemma or to complain about something he’d said. ‘You make me realise how good life is when I listen to you,’ said one Triple J listener. ‘You help me get through everything.’ From another: ‘I felt like I’d touched God in your presence last week.’ And from one atheist: ‘I’m not a believer but people like you make me realise I might well be missing out.’ There’d also be regular posts on news websites along similar lines: Father Bob for Archbishop, for Cardinal, and some even said for Pope. To any such suggestions made directly to him, Father Bob always politely demurred, pointing out he was merely a lowly parish priest who didn’t have to wrestle with any of the politics of the Church, unlike men like Cardinal Pell.
Plenty of others, of course, weren’t so glowing. ‘I was appalled at what you said this morning on TV,’ one viewer wrote to him. ‘You made a mockery of the life and death of Jesus and you’re likely to turn people away from the Church. Please do not cheapen Christ on TV.’ One man phoned him up after watching him on TV’s ‘A Current Affair’, where he’d appeared talking about British chef Gordon Ramsay’s constant swearing. ‘You’ve exceeded your use-by date,’ said the man. ‘Retire or go to Tasmania!’ Other people branded him a narcissist or an egotist for speaking up publicly so often, and appearing so frequently on TV, on radio and in newspapers, accusing him of ‘showing off’. But Father Bob weathered every storm. ‘I always replied that I was putting in,’ he says. ‘Catholicism is a broad Church and we should be able to talk about what’s troubling us, and discuss it freely. Church people should be actively engaged in building civil society, we should be putting ourselves out there, we should be getting the debate going at every opportunity.’
In the rest of his spare time, he was still devoted to Collingwood, often attending matches with his mate from the Painters and Dockers who’d made the allegations against George Pell. He rarely missed a home game and had become a well-known champion of the club. Its president, Eddie McGuire, was, in turn, an equally enthusiastic supporter of the priest. The pair had first met in the 1970s when Father Bob was taking services as a chaplain at his old school, the Christian Brothers’ College. He made a huge impression on the then 12-year-old Eddie. ‘Bob was a large breath of fresh air coming through CBC, with style and verve and a message that was always welcoming,’ he says. ‘He was the first priest ever to come in, hold a mass and finish it twenty minutes before the scheduled finish at lunchtime and say, “There’s nothing worse than being in church when you could be out playing football.” He made an impression on everyone! The boys all thought he was a legend.’
Father Bob was also invited to take on a role as an ambassador with the NRL’s Melbourne Storm. The crises in the performances of each club, he reckoned, often balanced each other out, or at least took his mind off some of the most crushing losses.
Father Bob proudly displaying his allegiance to Collingwood Football Club.
The priest still liked nothing better than a good stunt to shock people out of what he saw as their lethargy about the poor and defenceless. A new ad highlighting the need for funds for his Father Bob Maguire Foundation this time had stickers of a knife, fork and napkin on the top of a rubbish bin to represent a dinner plate, to bring home the plight of those forced to scavenge for scraps to survive. ‘For the homeless, every day is a struggle’, read the message, created free of charge by ad agency Clemenger for Father Bob’s foundation.
And when Australian workplace agreements were finally declared to be dead, the long-time committed union man even held a funeral for them, with the ashes held in an urn, at St Peter and Paul’s for Channel 31’s ‘The Union Show’. ‘May the burial of these AWAs remind us that death comes to us all – political and human – and it is the natural passage for all life,’ Father Bob solemnly declared. ‘May these AWAs sleep on and not reappear in an eternal slumber in your Godly care.’ Then he scattered the ashes under the rose bush in the church garden.
But beneath the flamboyance of such attention-grabbing acts, there was always a serious message. He felt strongly about the rights of the disadvantaged, and was outspoken in their defence. When, for instance, the government moved to trial schemes cutting welfare payments for families whose kids didn’t attend school, he spoke out forcefully against the experiment. It would merely force needy families to rely on charity, he predicted. ‘We are going to create a social problem to solve another social problem and at the expense of those who are least able to articulate their predicament.’
As if to prove his argument, six weeks later he announced that he had to suspend his work on the streets because his charity couldn’t cope with the rise in the number of people asking for help since the start of the global financial crisis. When he’d expla
in he didn’t have the money to give, some of those people were getting menacing and threatening, he revealed. ‘These people are desperate, poor and frustrated. Some have been marginalised for forty years.’ He couldn’t resist a jibe at the Church hierarchy, either. ‘I’m living in a double-storey house on almost an acre and it’s obviously worth millions. So when I say I don’t have the resources to help, people don’t believe me.’
But Father Bob’s resourcefulness was still greatly admired by many and at the end of 2008, he was named as one of the top ten Victorian heroes of the year by the News Ltd newspapers. ‘Father Bob inspires us because he is not afraid to speak out for the poor and disadvantaged,’ said the commendation. ‘After a lifetime of working with the poor and speaking out on social injustice, Father Bob is one of Australia’s genuine heroes.’
It was a lovely sentiment, but still Father Bob couldn’t help an uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach. The next year, he’d turn seventy-five, the age at which priests were usually expected to offer their resignation to the Archbishop. Personally, he couldn’t imagine anything worse than retirement. He still had so much he wanted to do, and so little time. He hoped the Archdiocese had forgotten his birthday.
They hadn’t.
20
(Un)Happy Birthday to You
On 2 September 2009, the phone rang in the St Peter and St Paul’s presbytery office. Father Bob Maguire picked up the receiver. There was a brisk, businesslike voice at the other end. ‘Hello,’ it said. ‘Denis Hart here. Are you in? I’ll be over in twenty minutes.’
Father Bob felt his heart sink; the Archbishop of Melbourne just didn’t make casual calls. He felt a dark sense of foreboding. He called his secretary Judy Sampson into the office. ‘The Archbishop is on his way,’ he told her. ‘Will you sit in and take notes of our meeting?’
When Denis Hart arrived, Judy showed him in and took her seat, as the two men sat stiffly on either side of the desk. She then bent over her pad and took notes, not daring to look up. ‘The Archbishop said Father Bob would be seventy-five in twelve days and the time for his retirement had come,’ says Judy. ‘They bantered to and fro, each watching their words very carefully as they both knew I was sitting writing everything down.’
Finally, Denis took an envelope out of his pocket and put it on the desk, saying it was Father Bob’s invitation to retire. The priest looked at it and shook his head. ‘No,’ he said carefully. ‘I’m not going to sign that.’ After a few more words, the two men formally nodded and Denis stood up and walked out the door.
Judy stared after him, then glanced back at Father Bob. He was still sitting unmoving at his desk, his body hunched, a shell-shocked look on his face. ‘It was like a bad dream, really,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t believe what had happened and, I think, neither could he.’ But then the priest lifted his eyes to the heavens, and she could see his lips set in a defiant line. ‘And then,’ adds Judy, ‘all hell broke loose.’
The Catholic Church’s Code of Canon Law dictates that, on reaching their seventy-fifth birthday, parish priests are required to offer their resignation to the Archbishop – although he doesn’t necessarily have to accept. Usually, if he considers priests to be doing satisfactory jobs in their parishes, and if they are still in good health, then he allows them to stay much later, at least until eighty. It’s a recognition that many just aren’t ready to retire at that point and, with a critical shortage of new recruits to the priesthood, the Church is often more than happy to extend their tenure.
With so many priests being allowed to stay well beyond their seventy-fifth birthday, including Father Bob’s predecessor at St Peter and Paul’s, Father Lou Heriot, who had just that year been ordered to retire from his parish in Brighton East – at the age of eighty-two – Father Bob had considered himself pretty safe. He was far too busy to even contemplate retiring, with so much work still to be done. His Father Bob Maguire Foundation was by now supporting no fewer than twelve kids with scholarships, as well as several dozen older battlers, and he was feeding hundreds more each week out the back of the church. He was also one of the most popular, if not the most popular, priest in Melbourne to conduct baptisms, weddings and funerals, with people travelling from all over Victoria to attend his masses, and his profile was growing exponentially through the media. ‘But when I’d first been invited to South Melbourne, it was for life,’ he says. ‘I thought I’d be safe from being made to retire so early. I thought the rules that were prevailing at the time I was appointed would apply, rather than those of a new regime, and I’d be exempt. I’d keep going indefinitely, until I was incompetent or incontinent, or both, and live out my years working for the parish, in the only home I’d ever known.’
So when the priest had received a letter from Archbishop Hart in January that year – ironically enough for him declared by Pope Benedict the Year of the Priesthood – saying he was due to turn seventy-five and that the Church would be expecting his resignation offer, Father Bob didn’t take it seriously. He’d put it to one side, planning to reply to it later. But then he hadn’t given it a second thought.
He’d always been careful, in any case, to not intentionally upset the Church. He made it a habit to be clear in the paperwork that any weddings conducted for divorcees were civil ceremonies, he often sent tapes of his shows with John Safran to the diocesan office before they aired and he was intent on trying to keep Costas in the background, after the Church hierarchy had told him to stop supporting the homeless former heroin addict. Now forty-eight, Costas was occasionally visiting the back room of the presbytery and filling it with the ‘treasures’ he’d collected as he roamed the streets with his dog Rosie, but for the most part was being billeted elsewhere. But the priest soon forgot the letter as the year quickly developed into another hectic round of commitments, with a huge diary of appointments, the growth of his Foundation, the food van – christened the Hopemobile – driving around the streets serving meals to the homeless, and the constant search for funds to keep everything going. After a while, he didn’t even mind the fact that the Catholic diocesan newspaper Kairos had finally cut his column after years of publication, although he would later give that a more sinister motive as the first shot in the campaign to silence him. Yet at the time, he barely even had the space to think about it, he was kept so busy with work and his new mastery of tweeting with a Twitter feed, as well as the usual round of controversies.
This year, it was Easter that proved a flashpoint. It started out with the Victorian TAB announcing that, for the first time ever, outlets would be open on Good Friday for the placing of bets on races in Singapore and South Africa and on two NRL games. The move sparked immediate outrage, with anti-gambling advocate the Reverend Tim Costello, who’d criticised Father Bob for blessing the Crown casino, slamming it as being motivated by little more than corporate greed, and the Melbourne Catholic Bishop Christopher Prowse saying Good Friday was the day that should be reserved for remembering the death of Christ. Father Bob, on the other hand, said he had no objection to people gambling that day – as long as they went to church first. His comments did nothing to endear him to his more pious detractors.
Shortly afterwards, trouble flared again when his old TV partner and Triple J radio co-host John Safran was reported as having had himself nailed to a cross in a Good Friday ceremony in the Philippines, half-naked and wearing a crown of thorns. Safran endured a huge amount of criticism from those accusing him of trying to mock Christ’s death until Father Bob stepped into the fray to defend him. ‘He would not have done it contemptuously,’ the priest said. ‘ … it would have been for a forensic investigation of religious practices.’
The TV star has never forgotten Father Bob coming to his aid. ‘He really stood up for me in the press and calmed things down a bit,’ says Safran, who hung on the cross for five minutes before being taken away for medical treatment, as a segment on a new ABC TV show ‘John Safran’s Race Relations’, to screen later in the year. ‘He’ll always stand up for you
. He’s very, very loyal.’
Father Bob’s former Open Family worker Les Twentyman also discovered how deep Father Bob’s loyalty ran. He’d gone into hospital for day lap band surgery but there were complications, and a serious infection threatened all his vital organs. The band eventually had to be removed and he was placed in a coma. Over the following weeks, he nearly died several times as fluid developed on his lungs, he needed a ventilator to breathe and his condition deteriorated.
‘I was in a coma for over a month and in intensive care for two months, but Bob visited me every day and on two occasions gave me the last rites,’ says Les, who finally rallied and recovered. ‘It was quite funny to wake up and see Bob at the end of the bed. To have him there, as well as one of the sponsors for my charity, the 20th Man Fund, being Le Pine Funerals … you think if you’re going to die, at least two of the boxes are ticked!
‘He is super loyal. He knew I like Pepsi Max, and he’d bring it in for me. I’d look forward to that. He really polarises the Catholic Church, and annoys the rabid dogs of the right, but he’s a great man. We’ve talked about merging our two charities to beef up our efforts for the poor and excluded.’
Both men were feeling similarly hurt by the changes to Open Family, the organisation they’d respectively founded and worked for, and watched keenly as controversy developed over how it was faring under its new managers. A report out in August said it had lost almost $1 million in the previous four years, axed one of its regions, had cut wages by 10 per cent and was demanding money from the Canberra operation to be allowed to continue working under its banner.
Chief Justice Terry Higgins of the Supreme Court of the ACT who was then the Chairman of Open Family Canberra, and had been involved with the organisation since 1988, says HQ decided his branch would only be able to operate as Open Family on a payment of $40,000. He refused and renamed it Youth Care Canberra instead, an organisation still running today. ‘I think Bob is amazing,’ he says. ‘His mass at St Peter and Paul’s used to be the best entertainment in town. He was always a very generous man, perhaps overly generous at times, but he had some spectacular success stories among others that weren’t. He ran very effective programs. His knowledge of street kids and his understanding of them is phenomenal. He’s an inspiration.’