Fr Kevin scores half century for Dominicans
Local
After celebrating his golden jubilee earlier this year with his North Adelaide/Prospect parish and in country Victoria, Father Kevin Saunders OP reflected on his calling and the different places it has taken him.
Kevin Saunders was a typical country kid who liked playing cricket and footy – and wasn’t a big fan of milking cows.
His parents moved to the northern Victorian town of Nathalia from Melbourne under the soldier settlement scheme and Kevin grew up with his two brothers on a dairy farm.
Nathalia is famous for producing Richmond Football Club legend Francis Bourke, who was a year older than Kevin but played in the same cricket team.
“We were, and still are, good friends,” Fr Kevin said of the Richmond captain/coach.
With no primary or secondary Catholic school in Nathalia at the time, Kevin boarded at Assumption College in Kilmore, long regarded as a breeding ground for Aussie Rules champions such as Bourke.
“Peter Crimmins was in my class, he was later captain of Hawthorn but sadly he died of cancer fairly young (at 28 years),” Kevin recalled.
“I remember visiting him at St Vincent’s Hospital not long after I was ordained, I think it might have been his last stint there.”
While Kevin’s interest in sport helped him settle into boarding school life, he was also “reasonably” academic but more so in the humanities than maths and science.
During an annual school retreat run by the Franciscans, he developed an interest in a religious vocation and started making inquiries with the Dominicans.
“I read a lot about different orders and the one that attracted me most was the Dominicans who were similar to the Franciscans in lifestyle but had a different ethos; they were more interested in study, in teaching and preaching, rather the Franciscan ethos of simplicity, poverty and closeness to nature,” he said, adding teaching had been his other career option.
“Occasionally we’d go down to Melbourne with school to go to a footy match or something like that and I remember going to have a chat with one or two priests at St Dominic’s.”
His parents weren’t “excessively devout”.
“I remember the family rosary was tried on a couple of occasions, but it never lasted terribly long, once television arrived…,” he said.
But his parents were supportive of Kevin’s decision to join the Dominicans straight from school and off he went to the novitiate in East Camberwell, Melbourne, before a new priory was established in Canberra in 1967.
“I guess in the aftermath of Vatican II it was realised that seminarians shouldn’t be too cut off from the outside world and hence it would be good for us to go to university,” said Fr Kevin, who completed his Honours at the University of New England in Armidale.
Being on campus didn’t deter him from his desire to be a priest and he can’t recall any ribbing on the football field either.
“I never had any sort of vocational crisis because of being at university,” he said.
“And I wasn’t the only seminarian on the football team.”
His father died while he was completing his seminary studies but his mother and brothers were present at his ordination on August 30 1975 at the Bendigo Cathedral. His younger brother, who was the lead singer in a band, sang How Great Thou Art at the Mass.
The following day he celebrated his first Mass of Thanksgiving at his local church in Nathalia. At his 50th jubilee Mass this year, his brother sang the hymn again, this time a slightly jazzed up version accompanied by a talented parishioner on guitar.
“It wasn’t too bad, but a bit different to the first version,” he quipped.
Fr Kevin’s first appointment as an ordained priest was Vocations Promoter which involved youth and school chaplaincy work.
That set the trajectory for much of his ministry which involved running university colleges at Armidale (UNE), Canberra (ANU) and Melbourne (Monash).
Fr Kevin first came to Adelaide in 1984 when he was elected prior of the Blackfriars community house on Prospect Road. For the next six years he taught religion and coached football and cricket teams at Blackfriars Priory School across the road.
In 1989 he moved to St Albert’s College at the UNE in Armidale where he was head of the co-ed college for eight years, followed by five years at Mannix College at Monash University.
“Whether at Blackfriars or residential colleges I always enjoyed working with young people,” he said. “A lot of the students were country kids, or from interstate, so I suppose I related to that.”
In 2004 he was again elected prior of the Adelaide community (by then there was only one Dominican community at St Laurence’s). He again worked at Blackfriars over the next four years, and provided pastoral support at Aquinas College, until the beginning of 2008 when he was elected Provincial of the Province of the Assumption which encompasses Australia, New Zealand, the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea.
“I spent a lot of my time travelling around visiting different communities – we had houses in every capital city, except Hobart, as well as Armidale…and I dealt with other matters that affected the province as a whole.
The role included representing the province at various overseas meetings in the region, including annual regional conferences held in cities such as Tokyo, Manila and Hong Kong, and general chapter meetings in Rome and Bologna.
His last general chapter in 2016 included a general audience with Pope Francis.
While shaking the Pope’s hand and explaining he was the Australian provincial, the Pope inquired about the health of Archbishop Anthony Fisher OP who had been in hospital with Guillain-Barré syndrome. The language barrier meant it took a while to explain, much to the bemusement of Fr Kevin’s travelling companions.
“We were just shaking hands while he talked a little bit, when I got back down people thought I’d been talking for longer than normal, and kept saying ‘what were you talking about…’,” Fr Kevin recalled.
While Italian isn’t his forte, Fr Kevin has been scrubbing up on his French which he learnt at school and practised a little at international meetings with French, Spanish and English being the three languages of the order.
After his term as Provincial finished, Fr Kevin undertook a three month ‘refresher’ course at the Institute for Continuing Theological Education on grounds of North American College in Rome. He also met up with friends from Canberra and travelled through Italy, France and Spain.
In 2017 he returned to Adelaide for the third time after being elected again as prior of the community at North Adelaide.
Describing himself as “semi-retired”, the 77 year old still celebrates Mass regularly at St Laurence’s and Our Lady of the Rosary churches.
Besides taking French lessons, he goes to the gym twice a week and of course in the summer there is the cricket to watch on television.
“I don’t go anymore, I used to get tickets through a friend of David Hookes when he was playing but that was back in the ’80s,” he said.
Asked what the highlight of his 50 years as a Dominican priest was, Fr Kevin found it difficult to pinpoint but said his work at university colleges and Blackfriars was definitely up there with celebrating Mass and travelling widely.
“I still tend to regard that as my main work, I spent more time in those colleges than anywhere else,” he said.
As for the future of vocations like his in a highly secularised Australian society, he admitted it was “dwindling” but added in his pragmatic way:
“You just do what you can while you’re here, and do what you’re able to do.”
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