by Sue Williams
Open Family management said the organisation had been hit hard by circumstances. ‘We’d had a number of quite extraordinary situations – the 2007/8 drought, the bushfires and the GFC – which all drained probably $600 000 from us in just one year,’ says Phil Ruthven. But others saw it differently. ‘After Bob left, morale went down,’ says former Open Family worker Richard Tregear. ‘He was the heart and soul of it in many ways but the new people were much more about economic rationalism.’
But Father Bob still had plenty of other causes to champion, and not only for the poor. He spoke up on behalf of Richard Pratt, the billionaire philanthropist who was facing criminal charges after admitting in a civil trial to being part of a price-fixing cartel. On his deathbed, the businessman, whose wife Jeanne had once been on the board of Open Family, had asked that charges be dropped so he could clear his name. Father Bob always believed in speaking up for those under attack by the rest of society, like Peter Hollingworth in the past, however unpopular the stand might make him. This time, he was happy to pay tribute to the ‘cardboard king’. ‘Mr Pratt warned us all that we should be businesslike, as well as bleeding hearts,’ he said.
Trying to take a leaf from his book, he was also always looking for new opportunities to raise money and engage with the community. Jumping on the bandwagon of popular farmers’ markets, he declared a new ‘father’s market’, a series of arts, crafts and clothes stalls in the grounds of the church on Sundays, with the stall rents going to both the church and his Foundation.
It was no surprise, then, that when the Archbishop visited the priest and told him he’d have to offer to retire on his seventy-fifth birthday, after thirty-six years spent working in the parish of South Melbourne, he was absolutely devastated. ‘By the time he’d gone, I felt more like ninety years of age,’ he said. ‘Not seventy-five – the age of statutory senility. They told me I should be out within a month of my birthday. It was, “Congratulations! You’re seventy-five! Now get out!” That’s not nice.
‘But my view is, if the parishioners still want me here as their spiritual representative, then that’s my contract. My role is to serve them; I can’t break that contract. The Lord says to look after your sheep. As well, I have commitments to my associates through the Foundation. No-one else is going to look after them. What are they meant to do? I have responsibilities … If there was nothing to do, then maybe I’d start believing that old people should retire. I wouldn’t be churlish about it. But with so much left to do, and having to make up for the sins of our fathers, I don’t want to be dishonourably discharged and be sent to a retirement village. That’s not what I signed up for. I’m a 1934 model. We don’t retire. We keep going until the wheels fall off.’
Over the previous year and a half, his good friend Frank O’Connor had talked with him about the need for succession planning, but they’d both considered it would be a comfortable distance into the future. ‘We’d had a few conversations around succession planning for Bob, before he got to seventy-five, and had started doing some work around documenting the parish, the way it worked, what its various ministries were and who did what, and so on,’ says Frank. ‘But there was no real urgency to it. It was just that the hierarchy had talked about parishes needing to be thinking about themselves and planning the succession of their parish priests, and so we did some work around that.’
But now it seemed that the end really was nigh, and it had come far sooner than expected. The Archbishop even issued his own statement, with an air of great finality. ‘Father Maguire has for many years provided exemplary service to the Archdiocese of Melbourne and in particular to the people of South Melbourne,’ it read. ‘I am deeply grateful to him for his exceptional pastoral work over many years.’
Father Bob was appalled and decided, with the writing so large on the wall, that he’d better break the news to his parishioners. That Sunday, at mass, he told his 200-strong congregation that he might be forced to retire, even though he dearly wanted to continue. Even he was taken aback by the avalanche of outrage that followed.
Fury at the decision to oust Father Bob exploded throughout Australia, in newspapers, on TV, radio and social media, and even in parliament. Nearly everyone demanded he be given the right to stay on.
Visitors came flooding to the presbytery to pledge their support for the priest, and voiced their determination to support him in ‘fighting the good fight’. As he went on his daily walk – he’d long since given away his bicycle – locals and outsiders alike rushed over to shake his hand and tell him to keep going. Others shouted from across the street, ‘Father Bob! We’re with you! Hang in there!’
State Opposition leader Ted Baillieu, later to become the Victorian premier, was also onside. ‘Bob Maguire is highly regarded as an icon and I’m sure he will attract a lot of support from his own community,’ he said.
Others were even more forceful. ‘I think Father Bob Maguire should become Archbishop of Melbourne,’ one reader of The Age declared on the letters page. ‘He is, after all, eight years younger than Pope Benedict and he does listen to people and his agenda is clear.’ ‘Father Bob is everything religion should be,’ wrote another. ‘If there were more Father Bobs in the world, it would be a far better place. Fancy even contemplating retiring such a vital man.’ And the Faithworks blog’s verdict: ‘This is the kind of priest the Catholic Church ought to celebrate, not sack.’
People were quick to point out how many competent people over the age of seventy-five were still active in Catholic religious life. Apart from Father Heriot, there was Father Paul Ryan in North Balwyn, who retired at the age of ninety-three, while the former Pope Benedict XVI had been seventy-eight when he’d been elected Pope four years before. Media commentators were also called in to give their verdict: people like social researcher Hugh Mackay, who said forced retirement was ‘a joke’. Then there were the lists of other various ‘aged’ experts in their various fields, like eighty-year-old horse trainer Bart Cummings, parliamentarian Billy Hughes, who only left the House at his death at ninety, the 79-year-old chair of the Victorian Bushfire Appeal Fund John Landy, the 78-year-old football coach Tom Hafey …
‘The irony is that Bob’s probably even sharper today than he was in the old days,’ says one of his workers, Henri Ser. ‘It’s a travesty of justice saying he’d have to leave at seventy-five. I always remember him saying he wanted to live and work in South Melbourne till he died there.’ His former Open Family CEO Nathan Stirling also contends that the age issue was a furphy. ‘That’s obviously spurious,’ he says. ‘It’s just that he won’t play the game they want him to.’
Hundreds of bloggers vented their anger on sites around Australia, and the invitations to talk on radio and on TV poured in. To everyone, Father Bob’s message was always the same. He hadn’t yet finished what he’d started; he wasn’t ready to give up just yet. ‘It’s like if you’re in a hospital and the head surgeon is performing delicate heart surgery and then the clock ticks past a certain hour and the administrator demands he leave,’ he says. ‘Wouldn’t the patient say, “Hang on a minute! I don’t want a new guy who’s never done this before! I want the bloke who’s experienced, who’s been doing this for years, who started the operation”? You can’t just leave in the bloody middle!’
In Father Bob’s mind, this enforced retirement was quite clearly politically motivated. When someone on Channel 9 asked him what he thought about Pope Benedict’s ability to do his job at such an advanced age, he responded darkly, ‘It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.’
And it was at that point that things started to turn ugly.
21
Give Priests a Chance
Melbourne Archbishop Denis Hart launched his first counteroffensive against the Save Father Bob Campaign on 8 September 2009, signalling that the battle really was on.
He wrote an editorial in the Melbourne Herald Sun newspaper defending his stance, saying the Church law on offering to retire at seventy-five applied to everyone equally.
He would offer to retire at seventy-five, and even Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who later became Pope Benedict XVI, had submitted his resignation on his seventy-fifth birthday as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, although Pope John Paul II had asked him to continue in his role.
‘Notwithstanding the good that Father Bob has done, he knows the rules of the Church, and is conscious of the vow of obedience he took when he was ordained,’ Hart wrote. ‘ … Priests, particularly parish priests, are generally available 24 hours a day, often seven days a week. It can be demanding enough for a 45-year-old priest, let alone a 75-year-old priest. The Church believes it has a great responsibility to its priests throughout their lives. The later years bring a heightened concern for their health and well-being. The Church chooses to err on the side of properly caring for its older priests …’
His words did nothing to convince Father Bob’s supporters that he truly had the priest’s interests at heart. With no indication from the Archbishop that he had any other intention than forcing him to retire, more and more people came out to express their solidarity with the campaign, joining the self-proclaimed ‘Bob Squad’.
The parish council chairman of the time was Tony Long, an assistant commissioner in the Australian Taxation Office who’d become involved with the church after reading a eulogy there at the funeral of an aunt in 2005. He’d been impressed by Father Bob’s approach when the priest had first arrived in the parish, and by his charity work since then. Tony saw him as specialising in all the hard cases, like drug addicts and substance abusers, ‘the troubled and the troublesome’. Tony was also a great supporter of the more recent projects, such as the plan for the commons building next door to the church to become a community hub, and now the next phase of the plans for the parish precinct: the use of largely vacant land at the back, with the help of partners and government funding, to be developed for social housing. ‘This represented a model which the Archdiocese itself hoped to roll out to other parishes,’ he says.
But most of all, he’d come to really appreciate the kind of church that had been put in place in South Melbourne. ‘With the help and kindness that Father Bob offers, many people have, for the first time, been exposed to active humanity and Catholicism,’ Tony says. ‘This has been the core of our parish ethos and is a template for all communities. He operates without borders. He wants the outside world brought in and the outsiders brought in as well. He wants “inclusive brethren”. Services have always benefitted from an injection of his famous humour and his sense of mischief, always with the purpose of making a point. He has never seen value in allowing the gospel message to remain shrouded in the obscure and the metaphorical. Of course we want Father Bob to be allowed to stay on! He has the total support of the congregation.’
Father Bob had the support of many other admirers too. Les Twentyman, for instance, said he was horrified that the Church would be trying to pension off one of its most valuable assets. ‘Bob’s so alive and sharp, how can he be retired off?’ he asked. ‘I’m staggered by their decision. We need Bob!’
But the Church wasn’t willing to concede any ground. Instead, on the evening of Saturday 12 September, a date that became known as ‘The Night of the Long Knives’, Archbishop Denis Hart re-entered the fray from a quite unexpected direction. In a highly unusual move, completely without precedent, he issued a damning statement about Father Bob direct to the press. The first the priest knew of it was when he started receiving calls from journalists to gauge his reaction.
The statement claimed that Father Bob had ‘financially mismanaged’ the parish, overspending on his pastoral work with his various charities. He’d only managed to keep everything going, said the Archbishop, by selling off church assets worth millions. Between 1998 and 2008, the parish had incurred deficits for eight of the eleven years, of a total of $1.191 million, but sold church property worth $1.5 million. These ‘real facts’ were being revealed to counter the ‘extensive negative media coverage of this issue’.
The press release made headlines around the country, and Father Bob was quick to respond. ‘I was amazed he came up with those claims at that point,’ he says. ‘It was very naughty of him; he must have been desperate. He knew full well we had a parish plan to liquefy some of those idle property assets that were empty and slowly crumbling and we didn’t have any use for, and his office had signed off on our plans to raise much-needed cash instead. We can’t actually sell off anything without HQ agreeing to it, and they get 15 per cent of any sale. They knew exactly where the money was going, too. We couldn’t do anything without them knowing. What we’ve done, we’ve done with the supreme commander’s signature, so if I’m guilty, he’s guilty.’
His response was backed up by Catholic commentator and Church historian Dr Paul Collins, who confirmed that any sale of property would require the signature of the Archbishop. ‘My personal feeling is that this isn’t the way to conduct affairs within the Christian community, or for an archbishop to treat a priest, especially one who’s done such sterling service as Father Maguire.’ The business manager of another large Catholic parish in Melbourne, Mark Bennett, also chimed into the row, saying any sale of property had to comply with a rigorous process of control administered by the Archdiocese. That involved ‘obtaining current market valuations, the consent of the responsible regional bishop, detailed application to the Archdiocese property services office, consideration by the appropriate Archdiocese committee for such matters and, finally, the authorising consenting signature of the Archbishop to conduct the sale …’
Father Bob’s niece Peta Knights was privy to the parish’s finances, having done the accounts for her uncle for years, and she insists it’s terrible to say he’s bad with money. ‘There was never any financial mismanagement,’ she says. ‘He simply felt the parish should be helping the poor. He did sell properties and used the money in different ways. It seems to me, he did brilliantly.’
The priest’s supporters rallied behind him even more strongly. Tony Long slammed the statement as ‘an outrageous misdescription’. He said it was astonishing that the Archbishop ‘doesn’t believe spending money on the poor and homeless is a reasonable use of the Church’s capacities. The statement had been on the Church’s site and then it was taken down. It took us two more years to get a copy of it. Everyone was absolutely offended at the lack of fairness; that tripled my blood pressure in about two minutes. They must have known they’d get a fight from the bloke, he wasn’t going to lie down and take it, but it really changed the whole flavour of the debate.’
The public at large also renewed their backing. ‘He is a man of the people, everybody loves him, and he should be here regardless of what the hierarchy thinks,’ declared one parishioner. Another wrote in to a newspaper: ‘Archbishop Denis Hart’s criteria for judging Father Bob Maguire are money and property – two reasons for religious wars. Mine are compassion, good deeds, selflessness and op shop clothing. Bob scores gold on all.’ Even professionals beyond the Church and parish were agog. From the marketing faculty of Deakin University, lecturer Dr Paul Harrison said Father Bob was a more valuable agent of the Church than a million-dollar ad campaign. ‘What he is doing is living the essence and values of the brand, and people can see that,’ he said.
Father Bob wasn’t totally without critics at this time, however. One woman wrote in saying the priest’s ‘lack of loyalty to his calling, his church and his archbishop should be a matter for his conscience’. Another old mate from his National Council of Priests’ days in the 1970s, Monsignor Frank Marriott, Vicar General and Moderator of the Curia of the Diocese of Sandhurst, and the administrator of Bendigo’s Sacred Heart Cathedral, always admired his energy and work, and felt he’d been ‘something of a prophetic figure in those days, very heroic’, but now felt he was behaving badly.
‘It was being handled badly both by him and others digging in to help him stay on,’ he says. ‘He should have said, “Yes, I’ll happily resign but then maybe I could stay on for
one month or two or three.” There are good retirement schemes for priests who have done a lot of service and we were all a bit offended when he talked about being chucked out onto the street. That was a bit disappointing, and hurtful to the clergy. Vatican II gave us the right to retire and there comes a time when we all have to ride off into the sunset and do something different, me included. None of us have the right to keep a job forever. But I think over the last couple of years he’s made a few indifferent calls. He lost the plot a bit.’
But Father Bob was unapologetic. He felt the Church was simply, at that stage, looking for an excuse, any excuse, to get rid of him, and he was determined not to go. ‘If an Armaguard van drove up and delivered a million dollars, it wouldn’t have mattered,’ he says. ‘Thirty pieces of silver never saved Jesus.’ Rather, he believed, it was all down to a fundamental clash of cultures between himself as a devout Vatican II priest, and the Australian Catholic hierarchy, who were on the side of a much more conservative orthodoxy. George Pell had been chosen by Pope John Paul II, after all, to be Archbishop of Melbourne, then Sydney, after being critical of the ‘laxness’ of Australian Catholicism and in favour of a return to traditional teachings.
‘I’m the meat in that sandwich,’ Father Bob says. ‘They were targeting the model of Catholicism I’d installed in the parish, with the blessing of parishioners. It was about all of us becoming involved in day-to-day Catholicism and being out there, working for the poor and disadvantaged, about putting everything into practice. The model and the experiment were in good favour for thirty-odd years, they said we were doing marvellous work, then suddenly it falls out of favour to the extent that they invade the laboratory, steal the experiment and sack the chief scientist. They couldn’t understand what was happening: My God! These people are getting enjoyment from Catholicism and they’re not totally and permanently dependent on us! They didn’t like that, so they turned dog. And I made them uncomfortable, so better to get rid of me.