This is the first of a semi-regular page, where we look beneath the collar of a priest from the Sydney Archdiocese and discover a bit about his life and his road to priesthood.
Father Adrian Simmons is the chaplain at UNSW and lives at the St Brendan’s presbytery with Father Matthew. They get on well except when fighting over the TV remote.
“I was born in Bankstown in Sydney and lived in Bass Hill until starting university. My father was a chef, and my mother worked in retail. I have a twin sister and a younger sister.
The Catholic faith came naturally to our family; Mass on Sundays, and holy days of obligation. We went to Catholic schools, but there was no push; my parents simply allowed me to discover my relationship with God and what he was doing with me.
We’d spend our summer holidays at the caravan park in Blackheath in the Blue Mountains and I’d swim with my sisters at the council pool across the road. We were very much a working-class family.
I wasn’t really into sports. I was much more interested in music. My first single was The Year 2000 by Silverchair. This led to a great interest in Australian rock; The Living End, Frenzal Rhomb. I also loved overseas bands like Rammstein, Limp Bizkit, and Korn. The Family Values Tour 1999 album was massive for me.
A favourite song? I could listen to Massive Attack’s Nothing Else Matters on repeat for the rest of time.
In 2003 I graduated from high school and wanted to enter the military but got knocked back. Maybe I was too immature.
I enrolled at UTS to do an applied chemistry degree. I also worked as a carpet cleaner. The job was good for me, because it was a great family business with a high attention to detail, something I had been lacking.
In 2008, just after World Youth Day, I moved out of home and lived at the Surry Hills mission (Open to the Doors to Christ) started by Fr Bill Milsted.
A lot of things were going very, very wrong in my life. My university studies weren’t going well. I broke up with a girlfriend and fell in love with another. All that sort of stuff. Was I still religious? I was a functional hypocrite, but I still loved the church and the Eucharist.
A guy who lived at the mission invited me on a retreat in New Zealand. The retreat made me ask very serious questions about my life and where I was headed. I was desperate to become a biological father. I’d read all the parenting books—The Father Factor, Strong Fathers Strong Daughters. I had my ideas and theories about how things would work.
But then the question was asked, “Are you sure that this is the mode of fatherhood you want?”
On reflection I realised that in the same way that people romanticise the priesthood, I was romanticising the marriage state and family life. I did a lot of thinking, made a consecration to the Blessed Virgin and started to work out my Mariology, because it wasn’t in a good place. A great friend of mine bought me a copy of True Devotion to Mary, by St Louis De Monfort. It was a very challenging book, but I needed to understand it if I was truly able to be a disciple of Christ.
In 2011, I broke up with my girlfriend and dropped out of university. I was determined to change massive components of my life, so I went on another retreat to New Zealand where Fr Jacques Philippe asked me, “Why is it when you speak about your vocation, do you speak so much about yourself? Sure, it’s happening to you but it’s not about you. It’s completely about the other, it’s completely about God.” That was a hard thing to hear. I realised I should be asking, does God want me to be a priest, not do I want to be a priest.
As soon as I came back from the retreat I applied to the seminary in late September and received my letter of acceptance on 23 December. I sold and gave away all the things I couldn’t carry on my back and started in the last week of January. I was ordained in 2022.
Nerf gun wars were a big thing in the seminary, and I had accumulated an arsenal of guns. I also had a PS3 and a whole library of video games. At the time I left the seminary, a huge cyclone had devastated some of the Pacific Islands, and so I auctioned off all my Nerfs and games to the other seminarians to raise money for the relief fund. As far as I know the PS3 is still being used by them.
What do I love about being a priest? Recently, I went to visit a little old lady racked with cancer. And when I came into her room, the way she said, “Hello Father”, it wasn’t just a title…it was a relationship.
In confession, I meet people who are so deeply broken and needing God’s mercy and love. Just being able to say to them, “Look where you are. You’re in a confessional right now, you could be anywhere else but you’re here with me and that thing that you’re working on right now, that’s very, very hard and you can’t do that alone and you don’t need to. God can be with you.”
To be able to be a conduit of that…Why would I want to do anything else? I absolutely love it. I’m the father I was always meant to be.