Saturday, 16 July 1966 was a slow news day in Sydney. The city was shivering in a cold snap, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, with snow blanketing the Blue Mountains. A famous wistaria at Vaucluse House had been put down because of a borer infestation.
The SMH’s lead editorial pondered the burning question of the day: whether the next Anglican archbishop would be an Australian. But despite the miserable weather, Catholics had something momentous to celebrate – 13 men were ordained in St Mary’s Cathedral by Cardinal Norman Thomas Gilroy, the Archbishop of Sydney at the time.
They were part of a cohort of 22 students from St Patrick’s College in Manly, the seminary for the archdiocese, who were ordained that year. For a couple of hours afterwards the new priests gave blessings to family and friends in various parts of the cathedral, reported The Catholic Weekly. On the Sunday they celebrated their first Masses across Sydney.
The last priest left to celebrate the anniversary of that day is Fr Pat Hurley. He recently moved into St Mary’s Villa, a nursing home in Concord next to the parish church in which he celebrated his first Mass 60 years ago.
The Catholic Weekly caught up with him recently to talk about his many years serving the church. Amongst his friends and former parishioners, Fr Patrick Hurley is known as “Brother Pat” because, he says, paraphrasing St Matthew’s Gospel – “Jesus said don’t be like the Pharisees to be called Rabbi, and you must not call yourselves Father.”
Besides, he says, “being in here, where there are so many retired Christian brothers, it’s very easy for people to call me Brother Pat.” Fr Hurley grew up in a deeply Catholic family. His father spent a bit of time in a Trappist monastery in Ireland.
His two brothers both entered the seminary, although they eventually decided not to continue, and one of his sisters was a lay missionary for a while in the Northern Territory.
His brother used to joke that life in the seminary was less religious than life at home.
“I think it was the devotion of my family and the prayers of my family” that sustained him in his vocation, he says.
In the seminary he was a rugby league tragic. “I lived and died for being chosen in the team,” he recalls. He played dummy half and hooker. Nowadays, he is still thin and wiry, but his involvement in rugby league is confined to barracking for West Tigers.
A few years after his ordination, Fr Hurley was assigned to St Andrew’s parish, in Malabar, in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. He remained there for about 25 years, half of his service as a priest.
This assignment had its challenges.
“For years there I was chaplain to Prince Henry Hospital, which was an infectious diseases hospital at the time,” he recalls.
Those were the terrifying years when an AIDS epidemic was sweeping through Sydney’s gay community.
“I prepared any number of young men for their deaths through AIDS,” he recalls. “It was normal for me to get calls during the night, and sit with patients, anxious patients, relatives, and get them a cup of coffee, and say some simple prayers with them.”
He helped perhaps a hundred people with AIDS in their dying moments.
After 2004, Fr Hurley moved out to Sydney’s burgeoning western suburbs, building up the relatively new parishes of Hoxton Park and Carnes Hill.
He had a great rapport with his parishioners. “They still support me, and I know they pray for me, and it’s a big help,” he says.
Over the years, he has kept up close friendships with his cohort in the seminary. He once rode a pushbike to Crookwell to visit one of his classmates. His longest adventure was a motorbike trip from Sydney to Perth.
He is particularly close to Fr Fergus Breslin, the last of 140 years of Irish missionary priests in Australia. Fr Breslin joined the newly-ordained priests of Sydney in their pastoral formation and remained a fast friend ever since, although he has returned to Ireland.
The turbulent years after the Second Vatican Council, the 60s and 70s when Brother Pat was beginning his vocation, were difficult times for priests. A number of his classmates left the priesthood, some of them becoming well-known professionals. “They all went on to do useful things,” he says.
So why did he hang in there? “It was the sense that our Lord would be let down if everybody failed him,” he replies, stressing that really none had “failed”.
“It was a crisis for me when my older brother left the seminary, because he had introduced me to the idea,” he said.
“I remember saying a decade of the rosary, the agony in the garden, and I thought Christ will be let down again if we both leave.”
What were the highlights of his ministry? Fr Hurley was bemused by the question. But one moment that stuck with him was the afternoon of 26 November 1986, when Pope St John Paul II celebrated Mass at Randwick Racecourse.
“To all those who have wandered from their spiritual home I wish to say: Come back! The church opens her arms to you, the church loves you!”
“Come back!” he loved that. In a sense, perhaps, those words sum up ‘Brother Pat’s’ six decades of work in the vineyard.
