By Barb Kelly
If you are Catholic, you will know this song, and chances are you can sing it loudly, moving the notes up and down in a rollicking, rolling way.
Faith of our fathers, living stillIn spite of dungeon, fire and sword,O how our hearts beat high with joyWhene’er we hear that glorious word!”
It’s a war cry, an anthem. It is the song we sang at the end of Missions — a special week of devotion led by Redemptorist Fathers. It is a proud song, and one young Catholics would sing at drinking parties away from home.
I am sitting in the church of my childhood, in our pew on the right, five seats from the front.
I can hear that big booming voice of the Redemptorist, and I can just see through the shoulders, the words of the hymn all lopsided up on the wall. Margie is thumping the organ with her little body, her curly hair just out of rollers.
But really, all is silent today and the church at Tempy that my family helped build and support is empty, and dirty.
The crucifix hangs above the altar all dusty, and forlorn. The church building is free now to anyone who wants to pay for the transportation. The steel girders, wooden floor and exterior tin are ready to be dismantled.
I sit with my memories
My husband has his tape measure gliding back and forwards, as he adds things up in his head. While he measures, I sit with my memories.
The church was decommissioned many years ago, and now lies alone in a deserted town. There is still a school with 23 students and two staff down the road, and a few houses. But the shop and post office are long gone.
“The state of it,” I can hear my aunties say of the church they once attended every fortnight for 8am Mass. “Will you look at this?!”
When I was young there was a cleaning routine every Friday before Mass. My Mum and my aunties, Anne and Margaret, were always on the roster together.
Anne and Margaret were slim, fit sisters who could clean like machines. And they could talk — constantly.
The process had a pattern and a sequence. The last job was doing the vestments, and my Mum was always the one. A special role.
Anne and Margaret were converts and in a strange sort of hierarchy, Mum was on the top of the Catholic women’s pile because she was born a Catholic. Even better, she had been to a Catholic school.
While my husband continues with his tape measure, I head to the sacristy — the vestments place. On the way, I almost stop to genuflect: old habits die hard.
The sacristy is a mess. The floor is covered in feathers and grass from sparrows’ nests, and the mice have made their homes in the drawers. Mum would have been heartbroken. In her day, this room was fresh and clean and the wooden furniture all smelt of Marveer.
In this room Mum would teach me the vestments protocol. The transition from the alb to the chasuble all laid out perfectly. “Just in case,” she would say.
“Just in case of what?” I asked.
“In case I die or get sick.”
I’m not sure if it was her Catholic faith, or just a morbid attitude, but my mum would often tell me about being ready to die; how you could make a quick confession without a priest before you died and still get to heaven.
The alternative was to languish in purgatory, a sort of halfway house on the way — but from where someone else could still save you, with their acts of penance.
Praying the rosary, giving up lollies in Lent and putting up with the dentist drill all went towards getting souls out of purgatory. I was keen on the penance early on but lost interest as time went by.
If there was Irish royalty in Australia then it was us my uncle Thaddeus Moore was killed at the Eureka Stockade.
I walked back through the church along the soft green carpet just like on my confirmation night, when a procession of little girls followed the visiting Bishop out into a starry, frosty night.
The Holy Spirit was riveting through me at the time.
Of the seven gifts you receive on confirmation — wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety and fear of the Lord — wisdom was the best. Perfect scores in spelling tests and rocketing through the maths sums neatly ruled on the blackboard. Triumphant.
Being Catholic felt so wonderful to me as a child. And being an Irish Catholic — even better.
Dad had nine brothers and two sisters, and five of the families lived near us and went to Church. The pews were always full of my cousins and neighbours, and we were all pretty much descended from the Irish diaspora after the famine.
Growing up I really thought if there was Irish royalty in Australia, then it was us. Dad told me stories about his Mum, and surviving the famine, how much they hated the English who he said let them starve.
He told me about Mum’s great uncle Teddy, who bravely stood up before a sea of redcoats and bled out from a bullet to the thigh during the Eureka Stockade in December 1954.
Patrick, his brother and my great-grandad, took his dead brother home to his family in Geelong to be secretly buried. It wasn’t safe in Ballarat to be Irish, and a rebel.
Patsy later selected land, worked hard to survive growing wheat, and supplying milk to the neighbours with his cows at Massey, near Birchip.
There were endless stories of the Irish working together to select land, to fight against the big landowners — eviction still a bitter memory for them all.
Stories of the way they found one another in the new land playing their fiddles and speaking Irish when they could, suffering the droughts and the rabbit plagues, building churches and becoming Australian.
A lineage blighting
I had such a proud lineage, and I have recently spent hours tracking, and tracing my family from County Clare. They would be proud, my ancestors of our family and their education and their values.
But not of their church.
I would hate those old people to know about the seemingly constant investigations, and inquiries about the clergy; the way we are tainted, and blackened by cruel and selfish men.
He moved about from parish to parish and was finally convicted — three years’ under house arrest — and has since died.
I often wonder if Bishop John O’Collins, who looked out over our church that winter confirmation night, was receiving letters and disclosures about the sins of his priests as he watched those mothers praying — the same ones who would later bury their broken sons.
Betrayal that destroyed a community
My Dad spoke to me about the betrayal when he was much older: “They just used us up, those bastards.”
Monsignor John Day — a notorious paedophile in our regional city of Mildura — was about to have his crimes made public in the Truth newspaper in January 1972 when my father was called up to a meeting and asked to pay some money to stop the presses and pull the story.
Day was protected for years by powerful people in the church and the police. He was never convicted.
Dad’s eyes were moist.
What happened in churches like mine was treachery of the most devious and cruel kind: taking away the innocence of children, then covering it up, denying it happened.
All that time my father spent on tractors to make money to build a church, and my mother spent cleaning the dust, making sandwiches for the priests and getting the vestments ready. It is a betrayal that can never be forgotten, and never forgiven.
It left a community disintegrating just like this empty church building.
To be an Irish Catholic is no longer a rich and honourable thing. I no longer have a heart that beats with joy. The faith in those fathers has gone.