AUSTRALIA
Eureka Street
Frank Brennan | 23 June 2014
Frank Brennan launches Benedict, Me and the Cardinals Three by Bishop William Morris.
I am delighted to be asked to participate in the launch of Bishop William Morris’ book. Bill was bishop of Toowoomba for 18 years. This book is the story of his forced retirement at the insistence of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI and at the instigation of three Roman curial cardinals all of whom have now left the Vatican, having passed retirement age. Naturally, we were not expecting any of those four to be with us this evening. Sadly Bill could not be with us either, being laid up in a hospital bed in wintry Queensland.
In the 1960s, I lived for five years in the Toowoomba diocese while attending Downlands College, a boarding school for boys conducted by the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart. At that time, I had regularly to deny any relationship to the then Bishop of Toowoomba William Brennan who gave very long sermons on hot and cold days much to the displeasure of the Downlands students. I used to emerge from chapel rightly claiming to be from another branch of the family back there in the bog.
Some of the key priests who appear in Bill Morris’ book also were educated at Downlands. The MSCs had a no nonsense style to them, enjoying their independence from the local bishop while being very dedicated to the pastoral care of people in the far flung country diocese and always attentive to the pastoral requests of the parish priests, a disproportionate number of whom went to Downlands.
I remember one MSC arriving unexpectedly at the school mid-year to teach French. It was just after Humanae Vitae and he had expressed some reservations while ministering south of the Tweed River.
One of the ex-Downlanders to appear in the book is Bill Morris’ Vicar-General Peter Dorfield who, true to form as one of the world’s most punctilious note takers, provided a detailed account to Bill about his unfortunate meeting with the papal visitator Archbishop Charles Chaput who came to the diocese for four days (including Anzac Day) in 2007 to report on the state of the diocese. Chaput told Dorfield that Morris was:
a good, humane and prayerful bishop but innocent and naïve and open to manipulation because of (his) great desire to see good in everyone, and that people had taken advantage of (his) goodness and trust. (He) had been captured, manipulated and misled by a so-called progressive group of priests in the diocese who were in fact ‘running the diocese’; as a result of the actions of these priests, (he) had been led astray and now needed to recant, and in effect throw (himself) on the mercy of the Vatican authorities, promising a more orthodox and obedient future.
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