The meddling priest and the Redfern prophet

In 1975, I turned 21 and headed down from Queensland to join the Jesuit novitiate in Sydney. Most nights a fellow novice used offer a prayer for Ted Kennedy. I could not work out why we needed to pray constantly for a US senator, no matter what his Irish Catholic pedigree. I then learnt that there were two Ted Kennedys.

As a second year novice I was sent to Redfern. Ted enjoyed forming Jesuit novices. I was appointed Mum Shirl's driver. I learnt a lot. Then I was asked to drive Len Watson down to Canberra where we watched the passage of the Northern Territory Land Rights Act through the Senate.

In those months, I learnt that there were many Ted Kennedys. He was an enigma — exhibiting sophistication and simplicity, subtle discernment and black and white judgment, a romantic vision and that resignation born of hard, bitter experience, soft love and brittle anger.

Ted was a man of the Word that he proclaimed Sunday after Sunday at the old wooden lectern in St Vincent's Church Redfern, and a priest of the Sacrament, blessing and breaking the bread for all comers at the Tom Bass altar which he brought with him from Neutral Bay.

Ted was like the Old Testament prophet Amos confronting Amaziah. He was like one of the 12 in the gospels taking nothing for the journey as they stepped out proclaiming repentance and casting out demons.

Like Amos, Ted did not plan to become a prophet at Redfern. But he found no need to shake the dust from his feet once he arrived there. He proclaimed and lived the radical edge, or was it the radical core, of the gospel — making it more ordinary, more demanded and more expected of each of us.

He spent a lot of his time and nervous energy engaging with a string of Amaziahs from 'Head Office'. He often heard religious authorities telling him not to prophesy at Bethel, the king's sanctuary, the temple of the kingdom. He just kept prophesying about the swarms of locusts, the devouring fires and the plumb line which would lay waste the hypocritical, institutional aspects of Church and nation.

His family background and his early parish experience were no preparation for the ministry he exercised around the streets of Redfern. Like Amos, he said, 'I was neither a prophet nor a prophet's son, but I was a shepherd, and I also took care of sycamore trees. But the Lord took me from tending the flock and said to me, "Go, prophesy to my people Israel".'

I wonder what he would have made of last week's exchange of literary gifts between the Pope and our Prime Minister. Benedict gave Kevin Rudd a copy of his new encyclical Caritas in Veritate. Ted would have heartily endorsed Ratzinger's observations that 'the exclusion of religion from the public square — and, at the other extreme, religious fundamentalism — hinders an encounter between persons and their collaboration for the progress of humanity', and that 'human rights risk being ignored either because they are robbed of their transcendent foundation or because personal freedom is not acknowledged'.

For his part Kevin Rudd gave the Pope a copy of the National Apology that stated the threefold 'sorry' for the suffering, hurt and degradation inflicted 'on a proud people and a proud culture', and requested that the apology 'be received in the spirit in which it is offered as part of the healing of the nation'.

All of this would have been music to Ted's ears. He was always wanting those in positions of power and authority to make these acknowledgements. But I can't help thinking that his delight would have been tempered by dissatisfaction. Those who knew him would know where his niggling would come from and how he would express it. Though he wanted and expected much from authority, he was ultimately mistrustful of it.

He knew that in the end, no matter how much was said or promised by those in authority, there was a need for commitment on the ground. There was dirty work to be done and suffering to be embraced. Even when he waxed lyrical about Paul Keating's 1992 Redfern Park speech, he preferred to focus on the weeping responses of Aboriginal people he knew rather than on the grandeur of the prime ministerial rhetoric.

Ted proclaimed a message of repentance to our whole nation, seeking to cast out the demons deep in the soul of the country — those historic abuses of our Aboriginal brothers and sisters that are still being played out, as attested in the recent inquest into the death of Mr Ward in Kalgoorlie.

Launching Ed Campion's new book Ted Kennedy, Priest of Redfern last week, Sydney lawyer Danny Gilbert said, 'Ted felt that the church had over the centuries soft-pedalled on the gospels. Christ's words had been reduced to something that was comfortably domesticated. But to Ted's way of thinking the gospels were radical, raw and uncompromising. Ted blamed Rome and the church hierarchy for this dumbing down.'

The lesson of Ted Kennedy's Redfern is that the poor belong at the altar and there is no place for dumbing down at the lectern.

The full text of Frank Brennan's homily at the mass preceding the launch of Edmund Campion's Ted Kennedy, Priest of Redfern, is available at here.

Source: www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=15163