Anniversary Mass for Fr Michael Tate
14th Sunday in Ordinary Time 2026
St Francis Xavier Church, South Hobart
Today marks the month’s mind of the death of Fr Michael Tate. In our Catholic tradition, we pause one month on to commend someone we love to the mercy of God and to give thanks for the gift they have been to us.
Also, tomorrow would have been Michael’s eighty-first birthday.
Ordinarily, birthdays are occasions for gathering around a table, sharing stories, recalling old adventures, and celebrating a life. This year we gather around another table—the altar of the Lord. We come not with presents but with prayer. We thank God for a remarkable priest whose intellect enriched the Church, whose imagination inspired this parish, and whose friendship touched people far beyond these walls.
Many of you still feel his absence. Grief does not keep a timetable because love never keeps one. There are moments when you still expect to hear Michael’s familiar voice, or one of those observations that would challenge accepted wisdom and leave you thinking long after Mass had ended.
Into that mixture of gratitude and sadness, today’s Gospel seems almost providential.
Jesus says:
“Come to me, all you who labour and are overburdened, and I will give you rest. Shoulder my yoke and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart.”
There are seasons of life when those words sound beautiful. There are other seasons when they become indispensable. I suspect St Francis Xavier’s parish hears them differently today than it did a month ago.
One of the lovely characteristics of the Gospels is that Jesus never forces himself upon anyone. He just invites.
He invites fishermen to leave their nets.
He invites Zacchaeus down from his tree.
He invites the first disciples to “Come and see.”
After the Resurrection, when weary disciples had struggled through a long night without success, he simply called from the shore, “Come and have breakfast.”
Isn’t that a lovely image?
Breakfast is not a formal banquet. It is where friendships deepen. It is where people tell stories, share burdens, laugh together and simply enjoy each other’s company.
That is what prayer really is.
Prayer is accepting Christ’s invitation to spend time with him. It is bringing him our grief without having to pretend to be strong. It is telling him what is really in our hearts. It is allowing ourselves to discover that the One who carried the Cross is able to help us carry our own.
Today’s second reading is also so full of hope.
St Paul reminds us that “the Spirit of God has made his home in you.”
What an extraordinary sentence.
God has not chosen merely to visit us from time to time. He has made his home within us.
Then Paul continues:
“He who raised Jesus from the dead will give life to your own mortal bodies through his Spirit living in you.”
Everything we believe about eternal life rests upon that promise.
The Spirit who raised Jesus from the tomb is alive within his Church today. It is that same Spirit which now continues Christ’s work in this parish.
Today is also Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Sunday.
Here in Tasmania, we cannot celebrate this day without remembering our own history. The story of the Palawa people includes extraordinary resilience and enduring culture, but it also includes dispossession, violence and attempts to erase a people whose ancestors had cared for this island for thousands of years. The wounds of that history have not completely healed. As Christians, we cannot ignore that reality because reconciliation begins with truth.
This year also marks forty years since Pope St John Paul II addressed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples at Alice Springs saying:
“For thousands of years this culture of yours was free to grow without interference by people from other places. You lived your lives in spiritual closeness to the land, with its animals, birds, fishes, waterholes, rivers, hills, and mountains. You did not spoil the land, use it up, exhaust it, and then walk away from it. You realised that your land was related to the source of life.”
The oldest living culture on earth has gifts to offer the Church—an attentiveness to creation as God’s gift, a profound sense of belonging to place, the wisdom of elders, and an understanding that community is built through relationships rather than possessions. These are gifts we need.
Michael would have appreciated that challenge. He never feared difficult conversations. He believed that faith grows stronger when it listens carefully, thinks deeply, and remains open to the movement of the Holy Spirit.
For us, the journey continues.
The invitation of Christ remains unchanged.
Bring to Jesus your grief, your gratitude, your questions, and your hopes.
The Spirit of God has made his home in you. The Lord who calls you is gentle and humble of heart. If we continue to walk with him, the day will come when the invitation we have heard throughout our lives will become eternal: “Come, you whom my Father has blessed, take for your heritage the kingdom prepared for you since the foundation of the world” (Matthew 25:34).
Most Rev. Anthony J. Ireland
Archbishop of Hobart
5 July 2026