A fair innings by long-serving sacristan
Local
Queen of Angels Church community farewelled sacristan Bernard Dowd last month but it wasn’t the first time he’d retired from this position. He spoke to The Southern Cross about his long career serving the priests of the Adelaide Cathedral parish.
Bernard Dowd could easily have spent his whole life working in retail if it were not for his decision to start worshipping at St Francis Xavier’s Cathedral.
His move to the highly specialised role of Cathedral sacristan came after the Hindley Street lighting shop he worked for as a salesperson changed hands and he was laid off by the new owner.
In his mid-40s at the time, he was a parishioner at Goodwood but had begun attending Mass and altar serving at the Cathedral when the administrator’s long-time sacristan, Jock, died.
Bernard Dowd at home with his faithful companion Cato.
Bernard clearly remembers the day he was serving at Mass and the phone in the sacristy rang. He went out and took the call informing him of Jock’s death.
“I went back inside and Fr (Robert) Aitken was preaching at the pulpit. He turned and came down to me, he knew what I was going to say…he went back to the pulpit and said ‘Jock our sacristan has died, please pray for him’.
“I still get pretty emotional talking about it.”
Jock’s temporary replacement went on a holiday to the United States and Bernard did such a good job filling in that Fr Aitken asked him to take on the position.
“The phone rang one day when I was at home, it was Fr Aitken and he said ‘will you do me a favour, I want you be my sacristan, but don’t say anything yet, think about it very carefully’,” Bernard said, adding that the priest “never jumped into anything too quickly”.
“I didn’t need to think about it, I said I would love to.”
The youngest of six children born in Broken Hill, Bernard was raised by his mother after his father died suddenly while working in the mines.
His mother ran a grocery shop for a few years but then decided her three younger children (the others having left home) would have more opportunity in Adelaide and moved to Goodwood to be near her older sister.
Bernard attended St Thomas School until Grade 6 and then Marist Brothers at Thebarton.
When he was in Second Year, Fr Lou Travers, the Archdiocesan Vocations director, came to the school to speak to students.
“I had a little talk to him and he came and talked to Mum – she knew him because he was the curate at Goodwood,” Bernard said.
At 14 years of age he entered the seminary at Rostrevor, but not for long.
“That didn’t work out,” he said.
“They decided that they could get on without me. I wasn’t getting on with one of the teachers, that might have had something to do with it, and I was at a silly age.”
Rather than return to school his mother suggested he “go and look for a job”.
The owner of the local grocery store, Frank Barrett, who used to come to the house every Friday to take the family’s order, heard Bernard was having trouble finding work and gave him a contact for a job at Myer.
For the next 12 years he was employed in various departments, finishing in lighting. Over that period he was also involved in the Young Christian Workers movement and he helped Fr Patrick Kelly start a ski club which involved bus trips to the ski fields in Victoria.
One year he agreed to be the organiser of the trip in his holidays but when Myer changed the date of its winter sale he was told he couldn’t take the time off.
“I said ‘here we go Lord’, and I left,” Bernard said.
He has no regrets about the way things turned out, both at Myer and later at the lighting store.
“It’s been a very interesting life,” he said.
As Cathedral sacristan, Bernard lived on the premises, in accommodation at the back of the building, and served under various administrators and Archbishops Gleeson, Faulkner and Wilson for 25 years.
He remembered the time Archbishop ‘Jimmy’ Gleeson collapsed at the altar and “everything stopped” while he ran to call for an ambulance. The Mass had “passed the stage of no return” and was supposed to stop but luckily the choir master threw in a few songs and calmed everyone down.
Asked what the duties of a sacristan entailed, Bernard replied “anything that needs doing”.
One of his favourite parts of the job was conducting tours of the Cathedral, especially for school groups.
A highlight of his career was being involved in the historic consecration of the Cathedral.
This took place in July 1996 following the completion of the belltower, 145 years after the foundations were laid.
Bernard was chuffed to be asked to do the second reading, especially as Dame Roma Mitchell was doing the first.
He was also in charge of the incense and recalled Archbishop ‘Len’ Faulkner putting spoonful after spoonful of incense on the hot coals in the brazier.
“It had been a very funny day, a weird sort of storm and the atmospherics must have been working on it and this great pillar of incense rose and hit the inside of the roof and gradually fell down…it stayed there for a long time,” Bernard said.
“The ABC man told me after that was the best bit of television he had seen in a long time.”
Another highlight was when he accompanied the Cathedral choir on a tour to Europe in 1991 following an invitation from the Vatican to sing at St Peter’s Basilica.
In Rome, Bernard was delighted, but nervous, when he was asked to do a reading in English at Sunday Mass in the Basilica.
“The PA system was just perfect…I could tell my voice was coming over well,” he said.
“When Mass finished we all marched out and Pope John Paul II was giving his Sunday Angelus; I shocked myself because I could give the responses in Latin, it all came back to me.”
He accompanied the choir as it performed in churches and cathedrals in Italy, Switzerland, Germany and Austria, including in Salzberg on Mozart’s birthday.
It was Bernard’s first overseas trip but it spurred a love of England, where the tour began, with “all its beautiful old churches”.
After living behind the Cathedral for the first 18 years, Bernard moved to Mile End and would ride his bicycle to work.
In 2009 he decided it was time to retire and after a while he began attending Mass at Queen of Angels because it was closer to his home.
One Saturday evening Sr Ruth Egar, the then pastoral associate, was complaining about the confetti from a wedding earlier that day and Bernard told her “don’t worry, I’ve had a lifetime of it”.
She suggested he take on the sacristan role to which he said “no, no” but the seed was planted and he gave in a few months later when Fr Dean Marin said “you’re wasted here, why don’t you take it up”.
“It was just as they were doing renovations, so I spent the next few weeks carrying all the smaller statues over the road to the parish office,” he said.
Funerals have always been his forte and there were plenty of those at Queen of Angels, in addition to making sure everything was ready for the priests at midday and weekend Mass services.
But deteriorating health made it increasingly difficult for him in recent years.
“I thought ‘I’m being stupid, I don’t think I need to be doing this’,” the 83 year old said.
“The Lord has had a fair innings from me.”
When the parish celebrated his retirement, Bernard read a prayer that he felt best described him:
Lord, give me perfect peace so that I may delight in serving you all the days of my life and at the last with our lady’s help I may come safely into your presence through Christ Our Lord.
“When I saw this I thought, that’s me.”
While he enjoyed his time at Queen of Angels, his love of the Cathedral never left and he recently returned for weekend Mass.
“It was like coming home,” he said.
Jump to next article
