Bob Maguire – 50 years a Priest
Sat, 31 Jul 2010
by Frank O’Connor
parishioner and City of Port Phillip Mayor
It’s now my task to say a few words in acknowledgement of Bob’s Golden Jubilee.
But what to cover from 50 years of service by this orthodox but unconventional priest? We have been fortunate to have had him here in South Melbourne for 37 of those years, and for those who have joined us this morning from other places, I seek your forgiveness if I focus mainly on his South Melbourne era. I’m confident that his time in the parishes of Heidelberg, Ashburton, East Kew, Ivanhoe and Seymour would have produced equally important outcomes.
I first met Bob in the early 1960’s when he was Chaplin to the School Cadets at Christian Brothers College St Kilda. It’s a military flavour that covers quite a bit of Bob’s life and career – he himself was in the Cadets at CBC from 1948 to 1952 and then he subsequently had a significant career leading the Army’s Character Training Unit for young officers prior to his arrival here in South Melbourne. And for those of us familiar with him, we’ve heard his infamous ‘I’m the commander in chief’ jibe on many occasions.
But to commemorate his 50 years as a priest, it’s important to go back and look firstly at what influenced him as he was growing up. I’m not going to dwell on any of the issues of his family life and those tough days other than to note that the fiercely religious framework of his upbringing clearly pointed him in certain directions and his deprived family circumstances gave him a fierce desire to work for those less fortunate.
His school years and his years in the Seminary were during the 1940’s and 1950’s, a period when life was clear as crystal. The Catholic Church was dominant and authoritarian, Parishes had huge numbers of people and they were a strong focus for family and community life, and the Church hierarchy was very much in control.
As a Catholic schoolboy in those days there was always the expectation that somebody in the family would have a religious vocation. Bob actually shocked one of his mates at school during a careers session, when Bob ticked the box that indicated his interest in becoming a Christian Brother. His friend wanted to be a priest and as our good fortune would have it, Bob went down to Werribee with this friend to have a look around and the rest is history.
But as Bob finished his training for the priesthood, things were starting to change and there would be a far bigger influence in his life. This was the time of the Second Vatican Council, one of the most significant events in the modern history of the Catholic Church, with its transformations even now still reverberating throughout the Church. It pushed the Church into many new directions: ecumenism; changes in liturgy, with English replacing Latin in the Mass; a greater involvement of lay people in leading worship and in pastoral ministry; the creation of parish pastoral councils; a greater openness to the wider community, to issues of social justice, and to new thinking in many areas. Women became prominent in parish and diocesan leadership.
So Bob, as a newly minted Priest, embraced that Vatican 2 direction and to use a bit of Bobby_waffle as he calls it, it was all about flattening the model.
• Bob didn’t want Liturgy to be a spectator sport. He wanted it to be interactive and to be the people’s liturgy.
• He didn’t want the scriptures just to be read. He wanted them to be dissected, the meaning for today, here and now, understood and implemented, with people really living the gospel message.
• And he felt that the Vatican 2 message was that the Church couldn’t remain dominated from the top by the Pope and Bishops but that it belonged to the people, the parishioners, with the Parish Priest the conductor, not the one_man band.
All of these things have been part of his constant message to encourage us to take responsibility for our parish, and I’m sure he similarly encouraged his parishioners in his earlier postings, and how we need to live our lives in our local communities:
• Our liturgical celebrations are designed by and for local people
• Our celebrations, such as today’s, are generated by local people
• Our weekly newsletter, the Southerly Buster, was an initiative of local people 27 or 28 years ago
All of these things and so much more have happened over the years and continue to happen because Bob allows it and encourages it because he believes that the Vatican 2 message is the way to go. And he has shown time and time again that where people have an idea or the passion to do something he will support them to the hilt and give them the authority.
There’s a flipside to this though. His willingness to give others a go has over the years been matched by a very strong propensity to initiate his own ideas. Sometimes they were just throwaway lines but often they were issued as challenges to us parishioners to do something:
• There was the Half Way House in Cecil Street which was staffed by volunteer parishioners among others, set up because Bob believed there were young people at risk because of poor housing, accommodation and support options
• There was the Produce Store across from South Melbourne Market, renovated, set up and operated by parishioners because Bob wanted us to celebrate liturgy out in the community as well as meeting the coffee and cake needs of locals
• There was the roster of parishioners who provided a presence in the Presbytery into the evenings, answering the phone and door and giving out food and vouchers, and we stayed overnight because he said we should be able to provide 24x7 support to people who needed it.
Some of these then morphed into more substantial organisations in their own right. The Half Way House became the Open Family Foundation, the roster of people providing support from the Presbytery became Emerald Hill Mission, and when he felt that these organisations weren’t providing what he saw as the new, emerging needs, he formed the Fr Bob Maguire Foundation. These organisations and the things they have achieved and the services they continue to deliver are testament to a priest who not only understood the Vatican 2 message but who actually went out and did something about it. And he continues to innovate and push the boundaries and advocate for a better deal for those who would otherwise have nobody fighting for their cause.
On the other hand, today is not a day to focus for any length of time on some of Bob’s more outlandish initiatives. I’ve had the good fortune and the challenge of being involved with him since those early days of the Half Way House so I’ve seen some doozies over that time. But they all arose because of that fierce desire he has to ensure that the disadvantaged, the disenfranchised and those whom society would rather discard and forget, all have the opportunity to say, ‘Well at least somebody has been willing to try and help me’.
And in hindsight it may well have been some of those doozies, which brought him into conflict with the church hierarchy some years ago. That period was a black time for Bob when he felt that all of his efforts were being undermined by people who didn’t understand the urgent needs in the real world. And it coincided with a serious health issue, but he got through it all with help from people he trusted and with the support of the Parish. Parish activities continued during that time because that’s the way he taught us.
And then there were the unfortunate events of last year when again the Church hierarchy, perhaps unable to understand Bob’s passion for a Vatican 2 type of church, used the lame excuse of him turning 75 to force him to agree to call it quits. Even through those black times, the message was still consistent – flatten the model, parishioners had to take control so that our liturgy remained relevant to us and our community, and keep our focus on the needs of others.
Over the years of course there has been the very public Bob Maguire, maverick priest, original grumpy old man with an opinion on everything, often couched in humour to help get the message across, who is regularly and widely sought out by the media for comment. He’s been a media performer for more than 40 years from early days on 3AW and other stations through to more recent years when he has been a regular on TV and 3JJJ, with an uncanny ability to translate and transmit real gospel messages to the younger generations. Interestingly, in December 1959, about six months prior to Bob’s ordination, a priest who was a supporter and mentor of his wrote to him and among other good wishes prophetically said ‘…your talents will re_appear on TV some day’.
He has never been one to seek personal recognition for his work but it has been publicly acknowledged on a few occasions. In 1989 he was awarded a Member of the Order of Australia for his work with young people through the Open Family Foundation and then he was awarded the Centenary of Federation Medal for his service to this parish and the wider community. In 2005 he was awarded Local Hero status as part of the Australian of the Year Awards and he has been an official Australia Day Ambassador since then. And in 2008 he won Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year Award for the Southern Region of Australia for social and community enterprises. And he was awarded another medal just last Sunday for completing his 5K in the Run Melbourne event!
He has described his mission in life as helping people find God in themselves and in their families and in their local communities. One of his great concerns is that the dominance of clericalism in the Church will mean that the real message will be lost, i.e. (in this week’s Southerly Buster) that the founder of the firm, as Bob calls Jesus, preferred his followers to be ‘shepherd’ priests embedded with a flock, not ‘temple’ priests, isolated from the flock.
As a Parish we are proud of the fact that Bob has encouraged and cajoled us to be inclusive, often urging us to be the ‘Inclusive Brethren’. There are many people here today and hundreds of others over the years who have been recipients of his generosity of heart and spirit in his accepting them as themselves, no judgement, no labels, no categorising.
I’ve seen and heard some great examples of people attempting to describe Bob in a phrase. Someone said ‘Maguire is the real deal’ whilst another said ‘He is the full bottle’. And there is an elderly local woman, Irish immigrant and long_term resident of a local public housing estate but now living in the nursing home, who provided an insight. This is from someone who used to push her shopping trolley around this area and someone who might have been considered one of the lowest – she said ‘Bob is the same to rich or poor alike, he is a good man’. And perhaps I could be allowed to borrow an expression of the late Fr Ted Kennedy who was describing an indigenous elder, but if I may I think it’s perfect for Bob – ‘He has swallowed the gospel whole’.
So Bob we thank you and we congratulate you on 50 years as a priest and a prophet and may there be many more years of you having the appropriate platform to preach the Gospel message in your inimitable way, a way that has already made such a huge differences in so many lives, and may there be many more years of you demanding that society, whether Church or secular, put the required effort and resources into those who have less.
Thanks and congratulations.
parishioner and City of Port Phillip Mayor
It’s now my task to say a few words in acknowledgement of Bob’s Golden Jubilee.
But what to cover from 50 years of service by this orthodox but unconventional priest? We have been fortunate to have had him here in South Melbourne for 37 of those years, and for those who have joined us this morning from other places, I seek your forgiveness if I focus mainly on his South Melbourne era. I’m confident that his time in the parishes of Heidelberg, Ashburton, East Kew, Ivanhoe and Seymour would have produced equally important outcomes.
I first met Bob in the early 1960’s when he was Chaplin to the School Cadets at Christian Brothers College St Kilda. It’s a military flavour that covers quite a bit of Bob’s life and career – he himself was in the Cadets at CBC from 1948 to 1952 and then he subsequently had a significant career leading the Army’s Character Training Unit for young officers prior to his arrival here in South Melbourne. And for those of us familiar with him, we’ve heard his infamous ‘I’m the commander in chief’ jibe on many occasions.
But to commemorate his 50 years as a priest, it’s important to go back and look firstly at what influenced him as he was growing up. I’m not going to dwell on any of the issues of his family life and those tough days other than to note that the fiercely religious framework of his upbringing clearly pointed him in certain directions and his deprived family circumstances gave him a fierce desire to work for those less fortunate.
His school years and his years in the Seminary were during the 1940’s and 1950’s, a period when life was clear as crystal. The Catholic Church was dominant and authoritarian, Parishes had huge numbers of people and they were a strong focus for family and community life, and the Church hierarchy was very much in control.
As a Catholic schoolboy in those days there was always the expectation that somebody in the family would have a religious vocation. Bob actually shocked one of his mates at school during a careers session, when Bob ticked the box that indicated his interest in becoming a Christian Brother. His friend wanted to be a priest and as our good fortune would have it, Bob went down to Werribee with this friend to have a look around and the rest is history.
But as Bob finished his training for the priesthood, things were starting to change and there would be a far bigger influence in his life. This was the time of the Second Vatican Council, one of the most significant events in the modern history of the Catholic Church, with its transformations even now still reverberating throughout the Church. It pushed the Church into many new directions: ecumenism; changes in liturgy, with English replacing Latin in the Mass; a greater involvement of lay people in leading worship and in pastoral ministry; the creation of parish pastoral councils; a greater openness to the wider community, to issues of social justice, and to new thinking in many areas. Women became prominent in parish and diocesan leadership.
So Bob, as a newly minted Priest, embraced that Vatican 2 direction and to use a bit of Bobby_waffle as he calls it, it was all about flattening the model.
• Bob didn’t want Liturgy to be a spectator sport. He wanted it to be interactive and to be the people’s liturgy.
• He didn’t want the scriptures just to be read. He wanted them to be dissected, the meaning for today, here and now, understood and implemented, with people really living the gospel message.
• And he felt that the Vatican 2 message was that the Church couldn’t remain dominated from the top by the Pope and Bishops but that it belonged to the people, the parishioners, with the Parish Priest the conductor, not the one_man band.
All of these things have been part of his constant message to encourage us to take responsibility for our parish, and I’m sure he similarly encouraged his parishioners in his earlier postings, and how we need to live our lives in our local communities:
• Our liturgical celebrations are designed by and for local people
• Our celebrations, such as today’s, are generated by local people
• Our weekly newsletter, the Southerly Buster, was an initiative of local people 27 or 28 years ago
All of these things and so much more have happened over the years and continue to happen because Bob allows it and encourages it because he believes that the Vatican 2 message is the way to go. And he has shown time and time again that where people have an idea or the passion to do something he will support them to the hilt and give them the authority.
There’s a flipside to this though. His willingness to give others a go has over the years been matched by a very strong propensity to initiate his own ideas. Sometimes they were just throwaway lines but often they were issued as challenges to us parishioners to do something:
• There was the Half Way House in Cecil Street which was staffed by volunteer parishioners among others, set up because Bob believed there were young people at risk because of poor housing, accommodation and support options
• There was the Produce Store across from South Melbourne Market, renovated, set up and operated by parishioners because Bob wanted us to celebrate liturgy out in the community as well as meeting the coffee and cake needs of locals
• There was the roster of parishioners who provided a presence in the Presbytery into the evenings, answering the phone and door and giving out food and vouchers, and we stayed overnight because he said we should be able to provide 24x7 support to people who needed it.
Some of these then morphed into more substantial organisations in their own right. The Half Way House became the Open Family Foundation, the roster of people providing support from the Presbytery became Emerald Hill Mission, and when he felt that these organisations weren’t providing what he saw as the new, emerging needs, he formed the Fr Bob Maguire Foundation. These organisations and the things they have achieved and the services they continue to deliver are testament to a priest who not only understood the Vatican 2 message but who actually went out and did something about it. And he continues to innovate and push the boundaries and advocate for a better deal for those who would otherwise have nobody fighting for their cause.
On the other hand, today is not a day to focus for any length of time on some of Bob’s more outlandish initiatives. I’ve had the good fortune and the challenge of being involved with him since those early days of the Half Way House so I’ve seen some doozies over that time. But they all arose because of that fierce desire he has to ensure that the disadvantaged, the disenfranchised and those whom society would rather discard and forget, all have the opportunity to say, ‘Well at least somebody has been willing to try and help me’.
And in hindsight it may well have been some of those doozies, which brought him into conflict with the church hierarchy some years ago. That period was a black time for Bob when he felt that all of his efforts were being undermined by people who didn’t understand the urgent needs in the real world. And it coincided with a serious health issue, but he got through it all with help from people he trusted and with the support of the Parish. Parish activities continued during that time because that’s the way he taught us.
And then there were the unfortunate events of last year when again the Church hierarchy, perhaps unable to understand Bob’s passion for a Vatican 2 type of church, used the lame excuse of him turning 75 to force him to agree to call it quits. Even through those black times, the message was still consistent – flatten the model, parishioners had to take control so that our liturgy remained relevant to us and our community, and keep our focus on the needs of others.
Over the years of course there has been the very public Bob Maguire, maverick priest, original grumpy old man with an opinion on everything, often couched in humour to help get the message across, who is regularly and widely sought out by the media for comment. He’s been a media performer for more than 40 years from early days on 3AW and other stations through to more recent years when he has been a regular on TV and 3JJJ, with an uncanny ability to translate and transmit real gospel messages to the younger generations. Interestingly, in December 1959, about six months prior to Bob’s ordination, a priest who was a supporter and mentor of his wrote to him and among other good wishes prophetically said ‘…your talents will re_appear on TV some day’.
He has never been one to seek personal recognition for his work but it has been publicly acknowledged on a few occasions. In 1989 he was awarded a Member of the Order of Australia for his work with young people through the Open Family Foundation and then he was awarded the Centenary of Federation Medal for his service to this parish and the wider community. In 2005 he was awarded Local Hero status as part of the Australian of the Year Awards and he has been an official Australia Day Ambassador since then. And in 2008 he won Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year Award for the Southern Region of Australia for social and community enterprises. And he was awarded another medal just last Sunday for completing his 5K in the Run Melbourne event!
He has described his mission in life as helping people find God in themselves and in their families and in their local communities. One of his great concerns is that the dominance of clericalism in the Church will mean that the real message will be lost, i.e. (in this week’s Southerly Buster) that the founder of the firm, as Bob calls Jesus, preferred his followers to be ‘shepherd’ priests embedded with a flock, not ‘temple’ priests, isolated from the flock.
As a Parish we are proud of the fact that Bob has encouraged and cajoled us to be inclusive, often urging us to be the ‘Inclusive Brethren’. There are many people here today and hundreds of others over the years who have been recipients of his generosity of heart and spirit in his accepting them as themselves, no judgement, no labels, no categorising.
I’ve seen and heard some great examples of people attempting to describe Bob in a phrase. Someone said ‘Maguire is the real deal’ whilst another said ‘He is the full bottle’. And there is an elderly local woman, Irish immigrant and long_term resident of a local public housing estate but now living in the nursing home, who provided an insight. This is from someone who used to push her shopping trolley around this area and someone who might have been considered one of the lowest – she said ‘Bob is the same to rich or poor alike, he is a good man’. And perhaps I could be allowed to borrow an expression of the late Fr Ted Kennedy who was describing an indigenous elder, but if I may I think it’s perfect for Bob – ‘He has swallowed the gospel whole’.
So Bob we thank you and we congratulate you on 50 years as a priest and a prophet and may there be many more years of you having the appropriate platform to preach the Gospel message in your inimitable way, a way that has already made such a huge differences in so many lives, and may there be many more years of you demanding that society, whether Church or secular, put the required effort and resources into those who have less.
Thanks and congratulations.
