My Priestly Life – In Part:



My Priestly Life – In Part:

It all began, I suppose, by being born into and growing up in a faith-filled Catholic family in Pinnaroo in the tough times of the Great Depression, Drought, losing the farm, World War II and rationing.

This family faith was enhanced by being educated by the Sisters of St Joseph in a small convent school until Grade 7. Then three years at boarding at Sacred Heart College where the Marist Brothers actively fostered the idea of becoming a brother or a priest. So it was on my fifteenth birthday on the feast of the Sacred Heart while we were on retreat that I first broached the idea with the Passionist retreat director that I thought God was calling me to be a priest. My brother, Jim, was already studying at St Francis Xavier Seminary in Adelaide. He later completed his studies in Rome and was ordained there in 1954.

I had great admiration for our parish priest, Bill Bustelli, who was part of our family. Mum used to do his washing and he generally had tea with us each week when he picked up his washing. His parish covered a wide area of the Mallee with four or five Mass centres in the farming communities. To me, he was the complete person, a handyman, music lover, striding around his book-filled rooms listening to glorious classical music. Often I would accompany him as an altar server to the outstations – he was a great driver in his 1939 Dodge.

I left school at the end of Year 10, or Intermediate, because I hated boarding school. At age 16 I accepted the invitation to go and work at the Bank of Adelaide. I didn’t like that job either and resigned after four years going from junior to ledger keeper to acting teller – all at Pinnaroo. Many years later when in my first appointment, the parish priest, Monsignor Bill Russell, an Irishman, asked me to help him count the first collection, I boldly told him that I left the bank because I hated counting money. I think it gave him a bit of a shock.

Finishing up at the bank just before Christmas 1955 I had no idea of what I wanted to do in life. Along came two lads in a 1937 Ford coupe towing an old ply-wood caravan at the beginning of an adventure, working their way around Australia. They invited me to go with them. We were on the road for nearly seventeen months, fruit-picking, labouring and doing whatever came our way. I had my 21st birthday with just the two of them in Brisbane, Queensland in June 1956. The greyhound we had picked up in Victoria stayed with the caravan on the Gold Coast for the day.

So it was in Townsville in North Queensland while the other lads were out West working and I was in town looking after the outfit, when I went to a parish mission at the Cathedral. I spoke to the Redemptorist missioner about my idea of maybe having a vocation to the priesthood. He told me that the only way to find out if God wanted me to be a priest was to go to the seminary and try it out. I wrote to Jim and his reply was the same.

As we were thousands of miles and three States away from Adelaide without any money and not wanting to leave the others halfway through the journey, I decided that I would do something about it when we returned to South Australia. Of course, I never mentioned it to the other lads. Six months later we arrived home around Easter 1957. It was too late to apply to go to the seminary so I got a job in the Mercantile Marine Office at Port Adelaide. Jack Illa was my new boss. His parents were Spanish migrants and he had been a navigator in the RAF in England during the war. Jack taught me much over many long talks in those ten months of waiting.

At last, in February 1958, I arrived at the Seminary and joined a group of students who were 8 or 9 years younger than me. It was six years since I had left school in Year 10, so it took me two years to get my Matriculation, including Latin, before I could begin my study of Philosophy and Theology. It was a long nine years. I found seminary life difficult and claustrophobic. Looking back I am convinced that it was only God’s grace that kept me going.

Half-way through our final year, we were ordained in St Francis Xavier Cathedral by Archbishop Matthew Beovich. Then in early 1967, having completed our pastoral training we were appointed to our respective parishes as assistant priests. My first parish as assistant was at Woodville/Findon Parish in an industrial area with many new migrants from Eastern Europe in the Western suburbs. Monsignor Russell had had a stroke a few months before and had just returned from recuperation in Ireland. He died two years later while I was still in the parish. He was followed by Fr Bill Kelly, another Bill and another Irishman and a great bloke.

I was five years in a large city parish with a major hospital which I loved visiting, and several schools where we took Religious Education classes in each every week which I found quite difficult. Many young people were getting married which entailed weeks of marriage instruction and much paper work before we ever got to the church. There were many emergency calls during the night to the hospital a mile away. I used to try and drive there and back, having baptised a premature baby or anoint someone, without fully waking up. We used to take Holy Communion to the sick patients in hospital at 6.00am on our way to 7.00am Mass.

When I was appointed parish priest of Bordertown Parish, Bill Kelly said ‘Kevin, you won’t encounter any thing harder than you have had while you have been here.’ The parish covered a vast area in the South-East of the State on the Victorian Border, 185 miles from Adelaide. There were five Mass centres, Bordertown, Keith, Tintinara, Coonalpyn and Wolseley, all on the main Highway between Adelaide and Melbourne. So there was a lot of driving on a dangerous busy narrow road with plenty of interstate transports on the road.

I felt very much at home in this rural parish, ninety miles due south from our home town of Pinnaroo. Bordertown parish was mainly a grazing and farming area. It was much better country than the Mallee where we grew up. It was called ‘Tatiara’, ‘The Good Country’. Again there were the religion classes each week in the State schools up and down the highway. However the country kids were much more receptive than those in the city. Still I was glad when the Government stopped them in later years. As there was no Catholic school in the parish we conducted a holiday school in September run by the St Joseph Sisters. Children came from all over the parish and were prepared for the sacraments of Reconciliation and First Communion and sometimes Confirmation. These were celebrated at Bordertown and Keith churches on the Sunday following the School before the Sisters returned to the city to begin another term. I handed over the presbytery to the Sisters for the two weeks while I stayed with one of the parishioners.

Visiting parishioners on their farms and in their homes was something I appreciated very much. They truly were the salt of the earth. When Saturday evening Mass came in I would drive 70 or 85 miles once a fortnight for evening Mass at either Tintinara or Coonalpyn and then sleep overnight in a little room off the sacristy in the Keith church. After a shower I would celebrate 8.30am Mass at Keith and then drive 25 miles to Bordertown for 10.30am Mass. It was much better than waiting around at Keith after morning Masses before driving to the out stations for Sunday evening Mass and driving 70 miles home after a big day just when the big semi-trailers reached our area. However, I was sad to leave there after six happy years, having driven 180,000 miles in that time.

Fortunately, the pain of leaving was lessened by my new appointment to another rural parish much closer to the city in 1978. The Barossa Valley/Freeling parish is about 50 miles from Adelaide. The Barossa is a premium wine growing region with three main towns, Nuriootpa, Tanunda and Angaston. Our Lady of the Valley Church and the presbytery are in Nuriootpa, with St Benedict’s at Freeling. So I went from five Mass centres to two, much less driving. My brother, Jim, had been parish priest there seven years before I was appointed. I told the parishioners that we were quite different characters, only the name was the same – O’Loughlin.

The Barossa is a region full of history of early settlement in the nineteenth century. The English settled South Australia in 1836 and soon moved North into the hinterland. George Fife Angas encouraged Pastor Kavel and his Lutheran flock who had arrived in London, to migrate to the new colony of South Australia. They were refugees from Germany where the Emperor was trying to reform the Lutheran Church. Angas settled them in the Barossa where they began planting grapevines. The whole area is still predominately Lutheran. When I was there the Barossa was 50% Lutheran and 3% Catholic with 16 active Lutheran pastors and one Catholic priest.

Not only did I follow Jim to the Barossa but, to confuse things even more, I followed him on the Australian Lutheran/ Roman Catholic Dialogue which met in Adelaide four or five times a year. I was to serve on the Dialogue for 25 years even though I was not a theologian like Jim. Again I loved being a country parish priest and stayed there nine years. Because it was within striking distance of the city I found myself on various committees including being regional representative on the Priest’s Senate, as I had been in the South East region.

After twenty years of fairly constant ministry I felt the need for a break and applied for leave to go on a sabbatical and then hopefully to return to hospital ministry full time. This had been my first love. The first part of my request was granted and I spent five months in the Philippines and in Italy with the Focolare Movement, a community of love, based on the early Christian community as portrayed in the Acts of the Apostles. It had been founded by Chiara Lubich, whom I met in Loppiano in Italy. I found living in community with other priests and seminarians from around the world an enriching but a testing experience.

However, before I left to go overseas, I was disappointed when the Archbishop asked me to remain in parish ministry. The disappointment was tempered by being sent to Victor Harbor/ Goolwa parish which is a beautiful holiday destination on the coast, fifty miles South of Adelaide. Victor had the unfair tag of ‘God’s waiting room’ because it was a popular place for retirees.

So in August 1987 I was the new parish priest having to get to know a new lot of people in two main centres, and also to oversee the building of a new church in Goolwa. The opening of the tenders took place three weeks after my arrival. Goolwa, like Victor Harbor, was growing rapidly. After the experience of building a church, I vowed never to be involved in any building projects in the future. This vow was broken for me in my next parish. One the tasks I found most difficult in parish ministry was attending parish meetings, and here it was no different.

The South Coast, as it is called, is a beautiful part of our State, so I enjoyed bush walking with views of the Southern Ocean and sighting whales migrating past in the winter months. The whales come up from Antarctica to warmer waters to give birth to their calves and to mate. Victor Harbor had a bloody beginning, being a whaling station in the nineteenth century where whales were slaughtered – now they were coming back after so many years.

After six and a half years of parish ministry there, I still yearned for hospital ministry. So when the chaplain at the Women’s and Children’s Hospital, who had been there twenty-eight years, died, I immediately lobbied the Archbishop for the position. He agreed. I was appointed parish priest to a small inner city parish, Lower North Adelaide, and as chaplain to three major hospitals; the Women’s and Children’s, The Memorial Hospital and The Adelaide Clinic, a psychiatric hospital. I was overjoyed.

I had begun my life at the ‘Children’s’ with twelve years of treatment, having been born with club feet. Now I was back where Fr Tom O’Rourke (another Irishman) used to visit me when I was an inpatient in the hospital.

Three of us, Denis Edwards, Michael Trainor and I moved into the presbytery in Lower North Adelaide to form a community. They both taught at the Adelaide College of Divinity, part of Flinders University. Denis taught Sacred Theology and Michael, Sacred Scripture, and both celebrated Mass in parishes at weekends. It has been said that friends ought not to live together, but we are all still friends. Denis and I had been ordained together.

(The now) Saint Mary MacKillop opened a little school in Stanley Street, Lower North Adelaide, which was then called ‘Irishtown’ (at the bottom of the hill) in 1870. Eight years later, a bluestone church was built on the site which was used as a classroom during the week and for Masses on the Sundays. Larger classrooms were built next door in 1961 and then closed in 1973 due to a change in demographics and city colleges admitting primary school children. It was leased to the Diocese until the parish sold the property and restored and refurbished the little church. At the same time we restored the original name of ‘St Mary’s Church’ Sometime in the past it had been renamed ‘Our Lady, Help of Christians’. Our project artist compared the renaming to Australia becoming a republic and changing the flag at the same time. Neither of those things has happened yet, but I would like to see it happen before I die.

The stress of the rebuilding project over two years together with nearly forty years of parish ministry began to take its toll. My heart went into atrial fibrillation mode and had to be normalised by electro-cardioversion, or as one of the volunteers at the hospital called it; ‘jump-started’. I had the heart jump-started three times but eventually after it had been out of rhythm for over a year I had an eight hour procedure called an ablation in August 2006. I was encouraged to retire and did so in July 2007, having ministered to the people of Lower North Adelaide for fourteen and a half years.

In retirement I gave up being chaplain to two of the hospitals but continued at the Women’s and Children’s where I visit the sick and injured children and young people and their parents two days a week and take my turn having the pager after hours. I live only fifteen minutes from the hospital in a lovely house built behind another house. I also celebrate a ‘Peace Mass’ at St Ann’s Church at Elizabeth north of the city and support the people on a newly-formed Justice and Peace group in the parish. However even with all that activity I still find retirement a most freeing life.

In 2008 I made two visits to Israel/Palestine, the first in January on a three-week Bible Lands Study Tour and then returning in December to live in Jerusalem for four and a half weeks in the Muslim Quarter in the Old City, staying at the ‘Ecce Homo’ pilgrim centre on the Via Dolorosa. We celebrated Christmas Eve Mass with the Sisters of Sion and others at Shepherds Fields near Bethlehem, having to negotiate the check points in ‘The Wall’, or Separation Fence, as the Israelis call it. Three days after Christmas the Israeli Air Force began bombing Gaza which went on for three weeks including a tank-led invasion in the final week. Over 1300 Palestinians, mostly civilians and children and thirteen Israeli soldiers were killed.

I have read and continue to read many books on that sad part of the world and try not to give up hope for peace there. Sometimes I am invited to give a talk on my experiences there, which I enjoy doing. I am in the process of becoming a ‘prophet for peace’. At the same time I am trying to write my life story. I have only reached 1956 when I turned twenty-one and began to think seriously about becoming a priest. Now fifty-four years later, about to celebrate my 75th birthday, I still have a long way to travel. As the poet, Robert Frost penned:

“The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep

And miles to go before I sleep”.

(Footnote: Edward OLoghlin is responsible for me writing this screed.)

Fr Kevin O’Loughlin

Adelaide, Australia.

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