Father Bob

by Sue Williams

  Yet he was still just as active back home, at his beloved St Peter and Paul’s. Early in the year, he announced the start of the transformation of the old Galilee school into the community hub, South Melbourne Commons, and had a barbecue at the site, with a working bee to start on the demolition and renovation of parts of the building. At the same time, his Foundation was fully functioning, looking after both kids and his long-time older ‘associates’, some of whom were doing well, and some of whom weren’t. One day, on his way from the presbytery to the church to open the doors as usual at 7 a.m., he was horrified to see one of his long-time charges, Steven Cooper, a 48-year-old father of three, hanging from a rope tied to a tree in the front garden. He raced over, but the man was already dead. ‘He called me and asked me to come down quickly,’ says helper Henri Ser. ‘He was very upset.’

  There was certainly always a dark side to his work. One time, he was asked to conduct the funeral ceremony for Katie Peirce, the 24-year-old daughter of underworld figure Victor Peirce, whom he’d buried eight years before. The young woman’s mother Wendy Peirce had been in jail when her daughter died of a suspected drug overdose and blamed both the police and her mother-in-law Kath Petingill for her death, claiming she’d died after someone had injected her with a ‘hot shot’ of heroin. There was even drama at the service when the two mourners with Katie’s eulogy arrived late, and then Wendy confronted Katie’s half-brother Chris and demanded he leave. Father Bob intervened and successfully calmed everything down ‘for the sake of Katie’s child’, he said calmly. He even made everyone smile when, in a reference to the Formula One Grand Prix that had just taken place in Melbourne, he said, ‘Just like the Grand Prix, Katie’s run her last lap.’ There was a sharp intake of breath, then laughter. ‘That went down quite well,’ says Henri Ser. ‘He tries to make people happy, even at their darkest hour.’

  At the risk of being dubbed ‘The Gangland Priest’, Father Bob also offered to bless the clubhouse of the outlaw motorcycle gang the Comancheros – a group that would come back into his life two years later with disastrous consequences. ‘I’m a blesser,’ he explained. ‘I blessed the casino and got into trouble for that, but I still like to bless things.’

  He had another controversial meeting, brokered by his childhood friend Brian Harman, with former leading gangland figure Mick Gatto, who was bringing over US comedian Jerry Lewis for a $1000-a-ticket black-tie show to raise money for muscular dystrophy and now also the Father Bob Maguire Foundation. That show ended up netting the Foundation $80 000, and another the following year brought in $40 000. Mick Gatto attended school at St Peter and Paul’s as a kid, so the place had always meant a lot to him. ‘And I think Father Bob is a terrific human being,’ Mick says. ‘All he wants to do is help street kids and the homeless, and is out there beating the drum for them and doing the right thing. He’s a little bit unorthodox in the ways he does it, but he can’t do enough for people. I couldn’t speak more highly of the man.’

  To add to funds, Father Bob completed a 5 kilometre walk for the Run Melbourne event, giving up biscuits, increasing the number of visits to parishioners in hospital and walking around Albert Park Lake as part of his training regime. ‘One time, I walked in the dark and nearly fell into the bloody lake, silly old bugger!’ he said. He also had red Viva La Bob! T-shirts made and said anyone from his ‘Bob-terage’ who donated more than fifty dollars to his Foundation would receive one free.

  One of the priest’s greatest gifts was being able to express his faith in catchy secular terms and he showed that again and again. Talking about the haves and the have-nots, and the need for a little redistribution of wealth, he explained the problem as, ‘Australian society has a case of “affluenza”. The problem is not poverty but affluence. Most people have far too much; much more than they need. The other dangerous virus is “instant gratification syndrome” ’. On Easter, he said people shouldn’t get bogged down by the idea of Christ’s crucifixion. ‘That grim side of Easter is a lot to inflict on secular society, and people like giving chocolate eggs, which is still a symbol of renewal, so isn’t that the best way the message can be expressed?’ And when a church group performed a gruesome mock crucifixion in the street, sparking a storm of controversy, he tried to settle things down, saying they might have been better staging their stunt in their church. ‘You don’t have to use street theatre to get your message across,’ he said. ‘You can do good things, like caring for people who are socially marginalised. That’s crucifixion, too.’

  A highlight of 2010 came when a special Sunday-morning mass was held at St Peter and Paul’s to celebrate the golden jubilee of his ordination. The church was packed with wellwishers, keen to honour his past and hear his plans for the future: to set up a new inter-faith centre servicing Southbank and the Docklands.

  Meanwhile, he was still just as visible on stage and screen. He was a special guest of comedian Josh Thomas in his series of live stage shows on different topics. One performance misfired spectacularly, though, when Father Bob was put on with a cross-dresser to discuss gay marriage. ‘The idea was that Bob was the conservative priest and he was set up to look uptight,’ says John Safran. ‘But that went down like a lead balloon. Firstly, he’s not uptight, and secondly, people feel very warmly towards him and are very respectful to him, so making fun at his expense just doesn’t work!’

  More successful was his appearance on ABC TV’s ‘Talking Heads’ with Peter Thompson, where he came up with a new word that described his own particular institutional orthodox but unconventional approach. ‘I’m unconvenstitutional,’ he proudly declared. It was on that show that he also first brought up the notion that he may have been bullied into signing up for retirement at the start of 2012. It signalled the beginning of the next phase of his campaign, to stay on well beyond the deadline he’d agreed.

  Feeling he was on a kind of good behaviour bond with the Church in the interim, Father Bob was careful never to overstep the mark, even when he didn’t agree with what the Church might be doing. He felt strongly the Melbourne diocesan authorities were wrong when they went even further than George Pell’s new rules on family members making inappropriate remarks at funerals, this time banning footy anthems, romantic ballads and other popular songs from funerals. They also said celebrants ‘should moderate any tendency to turn the funeral into a secular celebration of the life of the deceased’. But when asked for his opinion, Father Bob chose his words cautiously.

  ‘My job is to salute and say, “Thank you for that, sir!” and then try to find a way of keeping everybody happy,’ he said. ‘If people want to sing “Good Old Collingwood Forever”, then maybe I can suggest they get outside first and sing it out the front …’ But in truth, he privately felt this was one more example of the clerics being hopelessly out of touch with what people wanted from their Church.

  The recognitions for his achievements kept coming and, secretly, he was thrilled with each new award; perhaps these would make the Church rethink its position. At the end of 2010, he won the Council of the Ageing Award for helping the underprivileged and homeless, and was crowned Old Bastard of the Year by the International Society of Old Bastards. Then, at the start of 2011, he was honoured with a golden jubilee dinner at Crown casino, hosted by Australian TV presenter and Collingwood president Eddie McGuire with Les Twentyman, Denise Drysdale and John Blackman giving him a roast, with all proceeds going to his Foundation.

  Yet he always seemed to be in the news for other reasons too, both good and bad. On the actual day of his roast, he hit the headlines for saying he’d conduct a gay ceremony held outside a church building, although not a gay wedding as that would be against Church and state laws. ‘I can’t break those laws, but if the law changed, I would be the first to perform such a ceremony,’ he said. ‘As Christians, we should be caring for outsiders.’ He also organised a publicity-grabbing fundraiser for victims of Queensland’s devastating floods, with a circus show including performers even more colourful than he: a man who’
d lie on a bed of nails with up to 100 kilograms of concrete on his chest being hit by a sledgehammer, and another taking a nine-inch nail from a train sleeper with his teeth.

  But he unintentionally managed to fall foul of the Church authorities once again when his plans for the South Melbourne Commons, a partnership between Friends of the Earth Australia, the Father Bob Maguire Foundation and the Parish of St Peter and Paul’s, were eventually submitted to council and it turned out the Archdiocese hadn’t been informed. As a result, it lodged an objection with the council, to try to block the scheme. Father Bob was both frustrated and outraged that everything was dragging on slowly when it was so patently such a good idea. He couldn’t disguise his impatience. ‘The problem is, I’ve got a limited life here, according to HQ, so I need to put this all in place before they have their wicked, wilful and wanton way and kick me out.’

  The parish council stepped in to try to mediate and discovered that all the arrangements to lease and retrofit the building along strictly sustainable lines had been made on an ad hoc handshake agreement. They then went in to negotiate with the Melbourne Diocese’s Roman Catholic Trust Corp to sort out some of the necessary paperwork. ‘It worked out all right in the end, except we couldn’t convince the Trust Corp to give them a long-term lease,’ says Frank O’Connor. ‘So they had to stay on a short-term lease, and just hope for the best …’

  Yet the resulting South Melbourne Commons finally developed into a huge community, and commercial, success. It became a meeting place for locals, with a children’s space featuring playgroups, a gardening club, parties and after-school activities, an organic fruit, vegetable and groceries store, a cafe, a community garden, a hall that could be hired for functions and events, affordable office and meeting spaces for community groups and a playground. The whole enterprise was intended to become a model to motivate residents, community groups and facility managers to perform sustainable retrofits on their own homes and buildings, and was ultimately lauded by the Catholic Church at HQ as a wonderful example of an environmentally responsible project that could be a model for other parishes.

  With Father Bob now such a media personality, nothing he did or said went without note. He’d attended a protest about the treatment of asylum-seekers at a detention centre but, when tensions increased and a man in a wheelchair was capsicum-sprayed by police, the fact that he’d been in attendance was reported in all the newspapers. Becoming the patron of InterAction, a multi-faith youth network, he called for a broader type of religious instruction to be taught in schools to encompass the ethos of all religions and for a system of community, rather than denomination-specific, schools; both ideas sparked instant controversy. He was a judge on the new ABC TV talent show ‘Strictly Speaking’, to find Australia’s best public speaker, and pulling off his clerical collar on an episode of Adam Hill’s chat program on the same channel ‘In Gordon Street Tonight’ also attracted a lot of attention. But setting up a drive-through confessional by the church on April Fool’s Day drew the biggest newspaper headlines. ‘All the media went for it, and had pictures of him standing outside the food bus with the sign for the drive-in,’ laughs Henri Ser. ‘I thought it was really clever. He was bringing the Church to the people, which is what he does best, but it caused a bit of a stink. There’s not much of a sense of humour in Vatican City. Obviously the powers that be didn’t like him being so out there, and being outspoken, but what he said and did was never anti-Christ or anti-Church. He was just a lot more open-minded than the people up above, and should be admired for making religion enjoyable.’

  Father Bob at the drive-through confessional.

  But everything came to a sudden halt in June 2011 when Father Bob attended one of his Foundation scholarship students’ prize-giving. He was walking up the steps at the front of the school, when he felt a searing back pain and realised he was struggling to make it to the top. Fearing it might be his heart playing up again, he went to see his cardiologist. His supporters hoped for the best, but feared the worst. ‘I dropped him off at the hospital that day, and I wasn’t sure if he was going to come out again,’ says parish council chairman Tony Long. ‘But then when I went back in, there he was sitting up, chatting to all the nurses and having a ball.’

  After a number of tests, he was diagnosed with an abdominal aortic aneurysm, where the large blood vessel that runs to the abdomen had ballooned, and he was rushed into surgery. There, he was given two stents and a clamp to fix the problem. Afterwards, he was taken to a respite home for priests for eight weeks to recuperate. ‘I languished out there,’ he says. ‘But what to do, for God’s sake? I didn’t need intensive care, but I needed some TLC to get me back to an AAA rating, that was all.’

  John Safran visited him, brought him a laptop and set up Twitter for him so he could keep tweeting. Tony also called by. ‘He did find it hard as he was the liveliest bloke there,’ he says. ‘But he was exposed for the first time to what it was like to live a life for your own benefit entirely. He got up, he ate, he thought only things that were relevant to him, he didn’t have anyone’s needs to service other than his own. It was completely novel to him and I think it caused him a little bit of anguish because it was foreign, and also because in a way it was sort of enjoyable. I think he was umming and ahhing, should he come back to the parish, or should he have a bolt hole, a place that was just for him and not the presbytery with Costas and people always rushing around. But in the end, he came back, and just carried on where he left off.’

  Father Bob couldn’t resist a joke at his own expense, either. ‘Hello children, it’s your beloved pastor speaking to you from the other side,’ he tweeted. ‘i.e. Balwyn.’

  In July 2011, Father Bob received what he imagined would be a massive boost to his campaign to have his stay of execution in the Archdiocese extended: he was named Victorian of the Year. In his statement accepting the award, he said it belonged to his parishioners, supporters and ‘associates’ of his Foundation. ‘It was wonderful to be recognised like that, but only in so far as it gave the kind of work we all needed to be doing a higher profile,’ he said. ‘And, of course, unfortunately for my bosses, it will make me more determined to pursue the idea that we are all in this together, that the Messiah won’t be coming to save us, we need to save ourselves first, with a DIY, BYO form of religion.’

  It buoyed his spirits enormously, feeling that the title would make it much more difficult to move him on from his parish. He renewed his claim that he was ‘pressured’ into signing the deal to quit and said he needed to stay. ‘Why break up a relationship when everyone seems to agree it’s a bloody good thing?’ he asked. In addition, work had finally begun on the next stage of his plans to develop the parish precinct, his community housing project of forty units being built on land close to his church, and he wanted to see that through. He knew that would net the parish enough money to keep it on its feet forever. Early signs from HQ even looked promising too. Archbishop Hart praised the priest’s community work, saying he ‘thoroughly deserved’ the award, while callers to talkback radio, contributors to social media and newspaper letter-writers were stirred to start pressing again for Father Bob to be allowed to stay on.

  The priest got together with his two closest advisers, Frank O’Connor and Tony Long, and they all had meetings with the Diocese, hoping to win them over. At the same time, they decided to start succession planning in earnest. While now hopeful of winning Father Bob an extra few years in office, they felt they should still start looking for someone suitable to eventually take over, with Father Bob perhaps staying on as an adviser, living in the little flat in the top corner of the presbytery.

  Father Bob made a call to a priest he’d known who’d been working in Papua New Guinea, and someone else said they’d heard a monk from the Franciscan Capuchin order, the same group that had produced the first priest in South Melbourne in 1854, was interested in the parish. The trio agreed to ask the Capuchins in, to see whether their approach would be at all sympathetic with Fa
ther Bob’s vision. ‘They’d been working in Leichhardt in Sydney, so they came down and we started talking to them,’ says Frank.

  ‘And then, just twenty minutes in, with everything going well, Bob left the room. At that point, they casually mentioned that they’d already signed a ten-year contract with the Archdiocese to take over from 1 February 2012. We were just stunned.’ Frank looked at Tony and Tony stared at him. ‘Our jaws just hit the floor,’ says Tony. ‘And then Bob walked into the room, and we broke the news to him. He’s usually good at disguising his reactions to things, but this time he didn’t make any attempt at all.’

  23

  Let’s Hear It for the Bogans

  Father Bob Maguire was absolutely devastated to hear that arrangements had already been made to take over his parish. Suddenly, it felt as though the last chink of light in his dream to stay on in South Melbourne had snapped shut and the future now stretched ahead of him, empty and directionless. Even though he still should have been celebrating being acclaimed as the 2011 Victorian of the Year, it all abruptly felt worthless, and hopeless.