Australia: Ted Kennedy - The Aboriginal people’s priest
By Joëlle Battestini <jbattestini@ausnet.com.au>
On 24 May 2005, I attended the funeral of
Father Ted Kennedy, an Australian Catholic priest. Ted has left behind him a
legacy of commitment to dispossessed Australian Aboriginal people, and a
theology of the poor and the alienated which has not only radically changed
what it means to be Church for those who joined him, but continues to inspire
the community he left behind.
The funeral was an unforgettable event. It
took place in the Aboriginal heart of Sydney, a section of the inner city
suburb of Redfern known as ‘the Block’. The Block is a portion of land which
was returned to the Aboriginal people in the early seventies by the then Prime
Minister of Australia, Gough Whitlam. It became the place where many Aboriginal
women and men came to find members of their families. The Block was Ted’s
stamping ground for thirty years while he was parish priest at St Vincent’s
Church Redfern. An enormous marquee had been erected for the funeral in the
middle of a grassy square enclosed by run down houses which speak of
dispossession. In the near distance were the towers of the Sydney central
business district, this time speaking of wealth. Behind the altar set at one
end of the marquee the congregation could see a huge black, yellow and red
Aboriginal flag painted on a long brick wall. In all there were more than 1500
people present, from all backgrounds, black and white, rich and poor, ordinary
and famous, who had come from various corners of Australia to pay their
respects to the great and humble man. Around the altar were seventy priests,
among them a number of bishops.
Ted was carried by local Aboriginal men
into the marquee. Starting with a traditional Aboriginal smoking ceremony led
by a Song Man, the
requiem mass lasted five hours during which people sang, spoke, prayed,
cheered, laughed and wept.
Ted was born in 1931 into a family of Irish
background. His mother was deeply religious but suspicious of the institutional
church. His father was a doctor, a compassionate man who did not charge
patients for whom payment would be difficult. Ted trained for the priesthood in
the late nineteen forties. He was chaplain at the University of Sydney for
seven years during which, a friend of his Peter Willis tells us, he gave his students a vision of ‘Christianity drawing on
justice and radical equality’. Ted was a scholar and a leader who affirmed people, and his popularity as a chaplain won him many
friends and supporters for what was going to become his life’s work.
In 1971, with two other priests who wanted
to try out new and communal styles of ministry, he came to Redfern. Poor
Aboriginal people came to the door of St Vincent’s to ask for food and shelter
and from that moment on the door of the church remained open night and day to
them. It was the start of what Ted called his ‘love affair’ with the Aboriginal
people. Early on Ted Kennedy met Shirley Smith, a fearless Aboriginal activist
known to everyone as ‘Mum Shirl’, and became a close
collaborator in her work, naming her as the greatest theologian he had ever
met.
Ted lived with, provided for, and offered a
sanctuary to the Aboriginal people of Redfern. Peter Willis
talks of Ted’s welcome:
(T)he
presbytery of St. Vincent’s parish was handed over week after week, month after
month to waves of homeless and broken Aboriginal people who came for shelter
and eventually occupied the whole place while Ted retreated to a bed in the
Sacristy of the church. And of course Ted didn’t actually own the presbytery
and the church officials were concerned that church property in his care was
not being well maintained.
A community member, Judith Salmon, comments on
Ted’s ‘approach’:
One of the qualities I most appreciate in Ted is
his vigorous disrespect for false authority. He approaches the Word of God
expecting good news and he finds it. He interprets the teachings of Jesus
unfettered by institutional viewpoints and lifts the mantle of prejudice.
Ted’s understanding of
Christian love is that in loving our most needy neighbour we are attending to
Christ. Rowan Williams says: ‘The neighbour is our life; to bring connectedness
with God to the neighbour is bound up with our own connection with God’. Ted’s
theology grew from his experience in the midst of Aboriginal people, and others
learnt along with him. ‘Oh
yes, I did learn something from coming to Redfern all those years ago,’ Maureen
Flood says, ‘something about the links between contemplation and social
awareness/action.’
In a letter he wrote in 1975
to the Archbishop of Sydney, Ted outlined his vision of the St Vincent's
community:
There are various ways of describing what this
community is about. I think I would prefer to think of it first as a community
of prayer. It is not difficult to turn our life into prayer here. Living as
close to the poor, as we are, means that we are consistently confronted by the
Gospel. We are being compelled to meet them and each other in Gospel terms. In
our formal morning prayer and in our daily Eucharist, we are endeavouring to
break the Word of God to each other. Secondly, we are trying to be a pastoral
community. It is our aim to know and love every Aborigine in this district,
every Aborigine who is passing through.
Community members and friends stressed the
authenticity of this statement. Gabrielle and David Nolan:
We were bowled over by Ted's knowledge and care
for each one of the Aboriginal community. He knows everyone by name, they are
his family and their genealogy, their ‘country’ are as important to him as
his own beloved Araluen and Ireland. It's not just because he has a fantastic
memory, he has that, he genuinely loves each and every
one.
Father Peter Maher:
This practical knowledge was
matched with a keen theological insight and edge that came straight from a
political reading of the gospel that left fellow travellers enthralled with its
freshness and cultural critique. Ted had an eye for the angle that gave hope to
the underdog and a passion to those who stood in solidarity with the underdog.
In the same letter to the Archbishop of Sydney, Ted clearly
articulates the need for Christians to recognise that it is not just an issue
of extending welfare to the poor, but of learning from them:
We rest on the help of the Aboriginal people to
help us change our hidden prejudices (…). We would like to think that we are
growing to be a sign of Christ’s love, that every Aboriginal person would think
of this place as a home away from home, that they would all feel known and
loved by us, and assured that we are ready to support them in their sorrows and
anxieties, their aspirations for advancement and their fight for justice ... (W)e are all aware that this stance can carry a double edge,
fraught with the danger of paternalism. But we rely on the Aboriginal people,
and on Christ who is so truly represented in them to keep teaching us the way.
Ted saw the plight of Aboriginal people not only tied with
ruthless colonial massacres and oppression, but with the whites’ inability to
come to terms with a collective conscience of the situation today. Ted’s faith
was that our own liberation as Australian Christians is bound up with that of
the Aboriginal people. He said that the Aboriginal people had evangelised him.
In his book Who is worthy? he wrote: ‘All sin that is to be taken seriously is social
sin, sin that is victim-producing. … (T)o insist that acts of injustice call
for acknowledgment, recompense and reconciliation is to show the only way to
being truly humanised and contributing to genuine peace.’ He argued that we
have so much to gain by learning about the treasures of Aboriginal
spirituality. ‘Catholic theology needs the impetus of creative conscience, of
accepting the sacredness of the earth in a new and fresh way, and our
responsibility to protect and nourish it with new insights and energy.’
Maureen Flood again:
The overwhelming spirit of the (St Vincent's Redfern)
community is of longing for Justice and Reconciliation for and with a People
who have been so comprehensively and unjustly dispossessed.
There was not enough time for me to know Ted
well on a personal level before he was taken seriously ill and stopped coming
to say mass, but I did hear a number of his beautiful homilies. I have been
blessed in my being able to share in Ted’s legacy in the Redfern community.
Since my first Sunday with them, I have been enriched beyond words by liturgies
which bring alive the words of Christ in the Beatitudes.
Alan Hockey said this about the time he first
met Ted, and I feel he speaks for me too:
(It) was somewhat of an anticlimax - shorts,
slippers, a worn stole and a fragile body. Could this be the man of the legend?
He greeted me, seated on an old vinyl chair with a makeshift altar in front of
him and a decidedly dishevelled look about him. He offered his hand to me and I
felt the warmth and strength of the man.
The day after Ted’s funeral, The Sydney
Morning Herald quoted Chris Geraghty, theologian and District Court Judge
who had led the prayers of the faithful at Ted’s funeral:
We have lost a fierce friend to encourage us, a
powerful God botherer, an untidy grimy prophet, a
Jesus figure in our midst.
But there was no need to canonise Ted Kennedy,
Indigenous Elder Sol Bellear had said, because the
Aboriginal people had already acclaimed him a saint.
Quotes:
Maureen Flood, SSS,
Church Mouse website, http://lanuera.com/church-mouse/Reflections/ID_SACREDSITE_9b99Ee.html)
Alan Hockey, Church Mouse website, http://church-mouse.lanuera.com/Reflections/ID_REDFERNANDTEDKENNEDYTHEMANANDTHEPHILOSOPHY_D5n6l.html
Father Peter Maher,
Church Mouse website, http://church-mouse.lanuera.com/
Gabrielle and David
Nolan, Church Mouse
website,
http://church-mouse.lanuera.com/Reflections/ID_untitled_52598B4A.html
Judith Salmon, Church Mouse website,
http://church-mouse.lanuera.com/Reflections/ID_untitled_Q3m5wB43.html
Sol Bellear, Chris Gerarghty as quoted in Sydney Morning Herald, 25 May, 2005.
Ted Kennedy in a
letter to the Archbishop, 1975, Church Mouse website,
http://church-mouse.lanuera.com/TedsLetters/LT_ArchBishopSydney1975.html, and in Who
is worthy? Sydney: Pluto Press, 2000.
Rowan Williams in Silence and honey cakes:
the wisdom of the desert, Oxford: Lion Publishing, 2003.
Peter Willis in ‘Remembering Ted Kennedy’, Eremos Vol 92, August 2005.