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.
Father Bob’s death provokes a sad question: what does it mean to still be Catholic when the kind of Catholic you want to be is gone?
You’d struggle to find a social justice advocate in this country who didn’t have an encounter with Bob’s unique practice of larrikin, radical faith.
My partner and I met Bob in separate capacities. I’d shared speaking lists with Bob at demos for economic justice and performed alongside him at union anti-poverty events. Ben had worked for a Uniting Church charity that shared Bob’s St Kilda turf, and they collaborated on service programs together.
Ben tells a great story of a Christmas lunch for the local homeless to which Bob turned up with four sacks of clothes and a mysterious car boot full of hams. Everyone who knew Bob knew him as a servant of a truly collectivist ethos. He was a stalwart of union events. He was no mere comrade, or champion of the movement’s values. Even before John Safran’s TV and radio shows turned the humble priest from an impoverished family into Australia’s most unlikely media star, Bob was a leftwing icon.
Father Bob spoke in a cadence somewhere between free jazz, beat poetry and your grandfather’s sly mocking of rap music. Whatever you sought from him when you arrived at the offices of his foundation in St Kilda, you also left with the story of a show.
Ben’s and my last visit to St Kilda was to book him as our marriage celebrant before the pandemic changed our plans. While there, we were licked by a large dog, fed cups of tea and watched him dispense clothes, food and cash to doorstep arrivals before he knighted us both with a plastic lightsaber and agreed to do the wedding.
Whatever theatrics he may have engaged to entertain his audience, Father Bob was a ruthlessly honest man. His criticism of Catholic church hierarchy, of church hypocrisy and of the infamous Archbishop George Pell cost him institutional support and eventually even his parish.
It’s in deference to the spirit of Father Bob’s honesty that I’ll admit here, I look at the dominant public character of modern Australian Catholicism that’s now without him and see no shred of the battler faith I was raised into. This remnant institutional Catholicism concerns itself with the defence of elite private schooling, advancing the practice of bigotry and prayer services for protectors of the abominable. No wonder Catholics like me are more likely to tie a solidarity ribbon to a fence of a church than go to Mass in one.
Compare this to Father Bob’s moral instruction that “the poor matter because not only are they the majority; they’re also the treasure trove of wisdom and resilience. The elites might have everything but they know nothing.” He represented the cultural Catholicism of the old neighbourhoods, sticking together, and sharing – always sharing – whatever little you have, with the moral certainty that acts of kindness and justice will ever bring you a richer reward on Earth than the pursuit of mere wealth can.
What’s left of my battered faith will repeat one final ritual, and in his honour. From now on, every time I need a miracle, I’ll pray for Father Bob Maguire’s intercession. This is not because the larrikin priest ever asked for saintly recognition, but for me to remember – in the hardest human moments – his example.
• Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist
