On a mission from God
Local
The meaning of life, book clubs and radical renewal of the Church are among the topics on Father Bob Wilkinson’s mind as he reflects on 70 years as a priest.
Fr Bob Wilkinson is a deep thinker, and at 92 years of age his brain is showing no signs of slowing down.
He’s also a born storyteller, not surprising for a former editor of The Southern Cross (1959-1976) and sociologist.
Having returned the night before our interview from a two-week interstate trip to visit friends, Fr Bob explains that his plane was delayed because a passenger decided they wanted to alight just minutes before take-off. He arrived home at 10pm and then got “caught up” in some correspondence and went to bed at 2pm.
“I’m the most disorganised person in the world,” he confides.
The late night doesn’t stop him from eruditely articulating his views – over coffee – on renewal of the Church, nor from insisting that the story should not be about him.
“It’s got to be about the three truths – truth of faith, truth of experience and truth of pastoral practice or method,” he says, drawing from the philosophy of Belgium priest and cardinal Joseph Cardijn who founded the Young Christian Workers (YCW) movement in 1912.
As a 14-year-old seminarian Bob was introduced to Cardijn’s revolutionary theology by his older classmate Joe Grearly who was involved in the YCW as an apprentice boilermaker and went on to become an industrial chaplain.
“I didn’t have a father, Joe was about eight years older and he told me about this idea that every person has a mission in their daily life,” Fr Bob recalls.
“I thought that was so powerful, I built my whole life around it. I taught myself French to read the literature and ever since I’ve been taking it to deeper levels.”
His studies included a PhD on the Church as a social movement, not bad for someone who spent his first six years in foster care following the breakdown of his parents’ marriage. The youngest of seven children, he was reunited with his family after his mum managed to bring all the siblings back together. But that’s another story.
Just as Cardijn came up with three fundamental truths affecting the working youth of the world, Fr Bob has for years been working on a version for the Church today as it struggles to remain relevant, especially to young people.
“Every person is a part of the work of God, through their home, their work and society. It’s the divine dignity of every human person, anything less than that is a loss of faith. That’s the first truth.
“Secondly, the experience or reality of people’s lives is that the world has been reduced to a series of transactions, a ‘gig economy’ where people are reduced to objects and where the powerful, the Trumps of this world, screw people over. The survival of the globe and humanity is at stake.
“Thirdly, the Church, in responding to this, is called to model a people in dialogue with one another, not waiting for some direction but discovering with one another the meaning of their day, their year. This calls for a new normal of parish and Church which is the networking of laity to share life, faith and action.”
He likens the latter to the ‘book club’ model – people getting together to discuss their lives and inadvertently linking those happenings to their faith.
“Book clubs have by and large modelled the dynamic of the laity sharing their lives,” he explains.
“We need a new structure in the Church but only the people can do it. Only the laity can start a book club, and only the laity can start renewal.”
Driven by the statistic that 19 out of 20 Catholics under the age of 35 don’t practise their faith, Fr Bob shared his thoughts in New Visions of Priesting (ATF Press, 2022). In a series of interviews, he looks back on his years as chaplain to the YCW (local and internation), YCS and Christian Life movements but with an eye to the future and how priests can accompany lay people to discover God’s mission in their daily lives.
He worries that clergy have become “primarily ministers of the sacred”.
While the Mass will always be “the source and summit” of faith, he says Christian life is more than that; it’s also people “sharing with each other regularly their own lives, discovering their faith and their lives together”.
“The drama is that Church can either increasingly withdraw behind the scenes, living in its own little pocket, or be a place where people learn they are called to be the heart and mind of God on site,” he says.
“We have reached crisis point where we either withdraw further and further into a false sacred or we see the sacred getting a toehold within the secular.”
Not one to shy away from the controversial, Fr Bob says the exclusion of women from leadership in the Church and the absence of married priests is “disabling the Church as a transformer of society”.
“You can quote me on that,” says the man who edited this paper during the tumultuous days of Vatican II.
On a lighter note, he recalls once telling his congregation that if the Pope decided to abolish celibacy when he was 95, he would “go and throw rocks on his roof”.
His down-to-earth way of communicating has endeared Fr Bob to many. Gentle in manner and with a voice made for radio, he has been sought after for many a baptism, wedding and funeral.
In recent years he has been a dedicated supply priest at Kingswood where he celebrated his jubilee on November 30. The packed church left no doubt about how loved he is.
Former Adelaide Archdiocese chancellor Cathy Whewell, who met Fr Bob through the YCS more than 50 years ago, says Fr Bob “lives and breathes a Church committed to supporting and enabling every human being to be an agent of God’s saving love”.
She says the other hallmark of his ministry is “laughter” and his “incredible capacity for humour”.
“Like so many, my life has been profoundly graced by Bob’s company, wisdom, intellect, challenge, laughter and love.”
