Fathers and Father’s Day

Our Editor wanted some emphasis in this edition to be on fathers. She asked me for my thoughts and I pointed her towards Pope John Paul’s writing on St Joseph, ‘Guardian of the Redeemer’. That said, September brings Father’s Day, and perhaps it is a good moment to remember the fathers who have shaped our lives, often without quite knowing the extent of their influence.

My father was an extremely shy man. He was also a journalist and an expert wordsmith. Both my parents knew and wrote shorthand. My mother would write the shopping list in shorthand. In migrant families, parents use their mother tongue when they want to discuss something without the children understanding. My parents had another method. They would write shorthand across the top of the newspaper, passing messages backwards and forwards like schoolchildren exchanging notes. We had absolutely no idea what they were saying/writing.

My father’s name was Beverley. Everyone in our little neighbourhood knew him as Bev.

He had never obtained a driver’s licence and, when I was seventeen, decided that he was certainly going to get one before his eldest child did. The paperwork and licence came back addressed to “Miss Beverley Ireland”. That was enough. He changed his name by deed poll to Bernard.

This created a slight difficulty at his funeral. Local parishioners asked whom I had been praying for. They had known Bev for years, but apparently Bernard was an unknown.

He should have changed his name to Bevan.

Dad began journalism on local newspapers in Richmond, Victoria, in the shadow of the MCG. Later, his working life included writing, virtually single-handedly, the newspaper of the Victorian Public Service Association. He also wrote speeches for significant public figures, whose Christmas cards would duly arrive at our home each year.

He was also very private and deeply Catholic.

Dad described himself as “a simple rosary bead Catholic”. I am not sure the description was entirely accurate. Fr Vin Creed once embarrassed me at a priests’ lunch by announcing in front of thirty of the clergy, “Your father was the most intelligent man I have ever met.” Fr Vin was in his eighties at the time and had met quite a few people.

The Catholicism of my childhood had a wonderful array of organisations. At St Aloysius, Caulfield, there seemed to be something for everyone. The women had their Sacred Heart Sodality Sunday. The men had Holy Name Sunday. My father and I, by virtue of our surname, found ourselves allocated to the pew beneath the St Patrick standard.

Faith was simply part of the fabric of our family life. Dad did not make a great performance of it. His faith was quieter than that. The Rosary mattered. The parish mattered. Being Catholic mattered.

I still remember the mighty serve he gave me because I had not chosen to become a Jesuit. Apparently becoming a diocesan priest was not quite ambitious enough.

There were also things about him I learned only later. He himself did not know that his father had served with distinction in both world wars, as well as in two other campaigns. Fathers carry histories within them that their children may only gradually discover.

As children, we often imagine our fathers simply as “Dad”. Only with the passing years do we begin to see the whole person: the hopes he carried, the disappointments he endured, the sacrifices we barely noticed, the faith that sustained him.

I was the last member of our family to see my father alive. I still remember the heartbreak of his death and the wrench of telephoning people to tell them that he had gone. Love sometimes reveals its depth most painfully in absence.

Father’s Day can therefore be joyful, but for many it also carries an ache. Some fathers are still sitting at the family table. Be sure to enjoy every moment! Some live now in memory. Some relationships with fathers have been difficult or wounded. Yet good fatherhood always points beyond itself. At its best, a father helps his children discover that they are loved, while preparing them to become the people God calls them to be.

My father was shy, intelligent, demanding, funny in ways he probably never intended, and deeply faithful.

He called himself a simple rosary bead Catholic.

Looking back, I think there are worse things a father could leave his son.