Catholic priest Father Bob Maguire, the patron of “the unloved and unlovely”, has died in Melbourne at the age of 88. There are many Australians who will feel his loss keenly as an individual and, profoundly, as the end to a generation of cultural Catholicism.
Those who mourn him can be grateful that he lived a longer life than most, and an extraordinary one – of community leadership, of unquestionable service and of honour. I am in floods of tears, not just because I grieve a man I knew and a character I admired. To me and others among Australia’s leftwing Catholics who – despite everything – still identify with the faith, his death perhaps also represents the final severance of our remaining community from public view.
