Joe Hildebrand in Stellar Magazine: The man that clashed with George Pell
Cardinal George Pell was the darling of the Vatican while Father Bob Maguire languished on the streets. Then everything changed.
I seem to keep speaking to Father Bob Maguire in the shadow of Cardinal George Pell.
The last time I talked to him was on the day Pell was publicly exposed for child sex abuse.
Today it is the day Pell was sentenced to prison for it.
It’s a coincidence but of course there are no coincidences in the world of God. Besides, it feels like fate. No two men better embody the opposing poles of the global Catholic Church — one the high prince of Rome, the other the low priest of the street.
And indeed when they were both serving in Melbourne — Pell as Archbishop in St Patrick’s Cathedral and Father Bob as a minister to the street kids of St Kilda — it is fair to say the town wasn’t big enough for the two of them. They clashed on all levels: ideologically, spiritually and geographically.
Eventually Cardinal Pell went all the way to St Peter’s Basilica in Rome, where he became the Pope’s right-hand man. Father Bob stayed as priest at St Peter and Paul’s Catholic Church in South Melbourne.
Or at least he did until 2012, when Pell’s beloved Vatican bestowed upon him an involuntary retirement from his parish. Apparently Father Bob had committed the cardinal sin of selling church property to help the poor.
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Few would have thought then that it was Pell who would be brought undone while Father Bob would be vindicated, but true believers might not have been surprised. As a certain man predicted some 2000 years ago, the last shall be first and the first shall be last. And so it came to pass.
But even on the day of the great cardinal’s jailing, Father Bob doesn’t want to talk about “Mr Pell”. He’d rather talk about Emperor Constantine.
The thing is Father Bob believes that all the problems with the Catholic Church go back to this guy — which, given that this is the guy who was the first Roman emperor to profess Christianity, gives you an idea as to why Father Bob isn’t the darling of the church hierarchy.
It also explains why this sworn iconoclast is himself something of an icon, despite swearing — often literally — that it is a role he abhors.
He has just obligingly done a photo shoot for Stellar without precisely knowing what Stellar is. When I tell him it’s a glossy Sunday magazine with the highest circulation in the country, he immediately takes the Lord’s name in vain.
“Oh God, I can’t stand it!” he protests.
But Father Bob is no stranger to celebrity — he has had a whole film made about him entitled In Bob We Trust and an improbable hit radio show with Australia’s greatest enfant terrible John Safran. There is probably no religious figure better known in the country.
Even so, as he talks to me from his modest office at the Father Bob Maguire Foundation, he is worried about paying the rent. He is a man devoted less to spreadsheets than to spreading the word. And the word is basically “Shut up and help people!” Unless you’re Father Bob, in which case it is “Never shut up and help people!”
Having a conversation with Father Bob is like chasing a jackrabbit through a hedge maze. You constantly end up lost among myriad dead ends while he effortlessly scoots along the ground. Which brings us back to Constantine.
“That’s where it all started and went wrong,” he says. “He took the money and then we took the churches.”
In short, as soon as Christianity became about institutions instead of souls it immediately lost its own. Or as Father Bob puts it: “Chuck the bloody Vestal Virgins out and we’ll give you the basilica down the road and that began the great Roman Catholic real estate. Before that we were in the bloody catacombs and we were thrown to the gladiators.”
He says the last part almost wistfully, as though they were happier — or at least holier — times. I ask him if he really thinks so and he says, basically, yes.
“It’s only by hindsight. Because power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
And his source is a pretty primary one. Conventional Catholics call him the Lord, the Holy One, the Most High. Father Bob casually refers to him like a guy he used to work with.
“Well they were told not to do it,” he says, as though admonishing children who are 1700 years old.
“The founder of the firm said: ‘See those clergy over there with the big hats and the beards and all that?’ And they said: ‘Yes, master.’ And he said: ‘Well look, don’t do that.’”
This is what Father Bob had to tell himself to survive when church powers were painting him as a maverick or troublemaker — or when they took his parish from him in 2012. That he was the one who was sticking to Jesus’s original message and they were the ones who had strayed.
“No! I’m always orthodox! I’m more orthodox than the bloody archbishop!”
But being truly pure of heart means you have to practice what you preach. Can a priest truly forgive the most unforgivable sinners? Even a mass murderer?
A few years back Father Bob was quoted in a book about Melbourne’s gangland wars as saying the most important funeral he had presided over was that of criminal and suspected Walsh Street police killer Victor Peirce. It is a comment that would have ended the career of a lesser man but Father Bob says Peirce himself was a victim of the lack of community and moral structure that should have stopped him from committing such a heinous crime.
That’s all well and good, I think, but evil is surely harder to forgive when it’s you who is the victim, and so I ask him about his own childhood — specifically his father, who beat him both regularly and ruthlessly.
“I’ve got him over there in a picture. I can see him over there in my office with his little Gladstone bag and his suit and his old-fashioned, I don’t know what they wore in the ’40s — the hat,” he replies breezily.
I’m almost upset that he spends his working days staring at the face of the man who so brutalised him and I say so.
“Yeah, well he’s a child of the time,” says Father Bob, running off a family background that quickly unravels into tales of class war, world war and the ancient tribal rivalries between Ireland and Scotland.
On this Easter Sunday — the holiest day of the Christian calendar — and in a so-called “information age” which has instead seemed to turbocharge indulgence and ignorance, it is cathartic to speak to a man so constantly mindful of the world around him and his fleeting place in time.
Father Bob remembers his history well, and something tells me history will return the favour.
This article originally appeared in Stellar and is reproduced here with permission.
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