VOCATIONS: ‘I just felt the call and never looked back’
By Catherine Sheehan
As Fr Brian Nichols prepares to return to Tasmania after serving as Vice Rector and Formator at the seminary in Melbourne for the past six years, he reflected on his 46 years of priesthood, recalling that once he felt the call as a young man, he “never looked back”.
Fr Brian said the “privileged aspect” of being a priest was “being intimately linked to the lives of people” through all stages of life, including baptisms, weddings, sickness and funerals.
“I mean, that’s where the great privilege lies, and to bring Christ sacramentally into the lives of people, and to celebrate their sacramental life with them,” he said.
After years away from his home state, Fr Brian said he is looking forward to returning and re-engaging with parish life.
“I really want to come back to Tasmania,” he said.
“I used to think about my parish on Sundays, because I didn’t have a regular place to go on a Sunday, and I’d sit and pine for my parish,” he added, referring to his last parish appointment—Sandy Bay—before his move to Melbourne in 2021.
He will be returning to very familiar ground, as last month Archbishop Tony appointed him Parish Priest of both Sandy Bay and South Hobart, stating that, “The parishes are united in the person of the Parish Priest.”
Fr Brian will take up his new role on 25 November.
“I am very pleased to return to Sandy Bay as Parish Priest and to re-connect with many people I know as well as coming to know new parishioners,” Fr Brian said.
“I also look forward to my ministry among the people of South Hobart parish, many of whom I know.”
According to Fr Brian, the seed of his vocation was planted during his childhood and youth, when he was inspired by priests he encountered.
Born in Queenstown, on Tasmania’s West coast, Fr Brian recalls being impressed by local priest, Fr Edmund Roche.
“One of the priests who had a big influence on me as a child, I didn’t realise until later, was Father Edmund Roche, an Irish priest, [who] was a priest in Queenstown for about 40 years.
“A beautiful man, and everyone loved him.”
The Nichols family eventually moved to the Hobart suburb of New Town, where Fr Brian was an altar server at Sacred Heart Church in New Town.
In his final years of secondary school at Dominic College (then Savio College), he thought seriously about the priesthood.
“To explain a vocation is not always easy. There are so many influences, but I would say that the parish of New Town and my early years as a young boy in Queenstown probably certainly had its influence.”
“There were a lot of wonderful priests in the Archdiocese of Hobart who were good men. I just felt the call… And I’ve never looked back.”
He entered the seminary in 1974 at the age of 20 and was ordained a priest on 27 August 1980 by Archbishop Guilford Young at St Mary’s Cathedral in Hobart.
Fr Brian served as Assistant Priest at Glenorchy and Bellerive, Parish Priest at Bridgewater, Administrator of St Mary’s Cathedral, and as Parish Priest at Sanday Bay.
He studied Liturgy at the Pontifical Institute in Rome and taught at the seminary in Brisbane. For many years he taught Liturgy and Sacramental Theology at the Catholic Theological College in East Melbourne and in 2021 he took the role of Vice Rector and Formator at Corpus Christi College in Melbourne.
Fr Brian said he would advise any man considering a vocation to the priesthood to be prepared for “a life of total service”.
“We have to be seen as a Church that is reaching out to the margins and really trying to preach the Gospel as Jesus did,” he said.
“In that deepest sense of calling people to conversion, change of heart, and making Jesus Christ the centre of our lives, that’s what we really need to do.