Father Phil of Jillamatong

He who is wrapped in purple robes,

With planets in his care,

Had pity on the least of things,

Asleep upon a chair.

– William Butler Yeats

JILLAMATONG TIMES
7 November 1955

CLASSIFIED ADS:

LOST: Father Phil’s Brown Mare.
Answers to Molly.
Bring Back to Presbytery.
No Reward.

A busy-body parishioner, most likely Mrs Hannebery, snipped out the ad and mailed it to bishop Collins, with a note of disapproval scribbled in the margin.

“Botheration take it! Not again!” (This is as close to cussing as his Holiness ever ventured), then he sent for Monseigneur Ryan : “Another complaint about Fr Phil out there at Jillamatong! What does he want a horse for? We got him that old Ford. There’s not even a stable there.” The Monseigneur agreed. “Your excellency, I’ll instruct Fr Phil to get rid of the animal and, henceforth, pay more attention to his pastoral duties.” The bishop sighed, “It’s only six years since I ordained him, but it seems like 20. I’ve done everything I can. Yet, the parishioners, in fact the whole township, like him. What else can I do? Jillamatong’s already the diocesan equivalent of Siberia!”

Christmas came and went. So did Lent, Easter, and All Saints Day, yet there was Father Phil still clopping around the parish on Molly, save for a few hours every other week when the mare, without telling anyone, went for a quiet walk by herself. The bishop tried and tried, but somehow his formidable authority was all for nothing; talk about old fashioned passive resistance!

A month later, Fr Phil called the 4th grade back into the church to repeat their Saturday Confessions. “Bless me Father, (they went), for I have sinned. I threw peanuts in the lake.” One by one, the whole class confessed to exactly the same thing!? Fr Phil gently, explained to each kid, that this was not a real sin.

When the last child knelt before him, Fr Phil said, “And, I suppose, you threw peanuts in the lake too?” The child said, “No, I’m peanuts!”

Fr Phil was perturbed; his response had been wrong; he was duty bound to straighten it out; it took quite a while, in fact it was almost dark before each child had been brought back and told that, in fact, to throw a person in the lake really is a sin. In an attempt to make light of it though, Fr Phil imposed a novel penance: the boys were to stand on their head against the wall for five minutes while they said two extra Hail Marys. Mrs Hannebery came along just then but decided not to stay when she saw the boys standing on their heads. “I’m not dressed for it. I’ll come back next week,” She said. As usual, bishop Collins heard the whole story from her. He crossly sent for Father Phil’s file once more. Fr Phil thought it was more bad luck than bad priestly management; and he was a victim too, because he missed out on his peaceful evening jaunt on mare, Mollie.

Angst about the Peanuts incident had faded into the past, and life was mooching along serenely. Molly had expired. Knowing the bishop was a busy man, Fr Phil opted not to bore him with the trivia associated with the purchase of a new horse. Had he done so, he would have mentioned that the new mare was to be named Molly in memory of the old Molly.

But enough of that, Fr Phil had to get to work on his Sunday sermon. He’d already chosen to base it on the parable of the loaves and fishes, and when he ascended the pulpit on Sunday, he started with an impressive oratorical flourish: “And the Lord fed a few people on 5000 loaves and fishes.”

A slip of the tongue, a small mistake, they knew what he meant, but they heard what he said. Now, Pat Hannebery, obnoxious lad, a cheeky devil, a real show-off, couldn’t let it go. He hops to his feet and yells, “Now there’s an easy thing, Father, I could do that me self!“ Everybody laughed. Even the sisters in the Nuns’ Chapel twittered. Humiliation! No doubt about it.

Fr Phil was enraged and remained so for most of the week. Spent three days riding Molly around the countryside he did, reliving the public embarrassment, and thinking awful things about that vile little reprobate, Hannebery. By Friday, he had a plan: redo the sermon and get it right this time. So it went: “And the Lord fed 5000 people with a few loaves and fishes.” Then he lent forward, stared down at Hannebery, and shouted, “Now could you be doin’ that, Hannebery?”

Right away, that , awful young rat-bag, Hannebery, stands up and calls back at Father Phil, “Sure I could Father, I’d use what was left over from last week!”

The congregation let forth with loud laughter and catcalls that should never be heard in a Catholic church. For once, though, Mrs Hannebery didn’t tell the bishop; after all, it was largely her son’s fault. As for Father Phil, he prayed to God for guidance and was told to go ride the mare, and remember that the effluxion of time cures everything. And so it did.

I’ve lost track of just when, during Fr Phil’s Jillamatong career, these things happened, nor can I recall the order in which they took place, but he’d been there 27 years when Molly disappeared; the usual ad in the Jillamatong Times didn’t do any good. The parishioners scoured the town to no avail. In due course, they realized that Molly was gone for keeps and as Fr Phil was looking sadder by the day, they chipped in to purchase a replacement mare, the new one to be named Molly, as usual.

When the presentation took place, right after Easter Sunday Mass, Father Phil, standing with his arm around the new Molly, made a most heart-rending speech of thanks that caused even Mrs Hannebery, by then a fan of Fr Phil, to shed a tear or two. The bishop, in the meantime, vaguely wondered about the lifespan of horses generally, and of Molly in particular, but he was never told anything about it.

The mystifying disappearance of the previous mare, Molly, was forgotten once the new Molly proved edifyingly efficient; maybe she was even a little slower, a non-fault as far as Fr Phil was concerned.

Once each calendar month, Mass was said at outlying Havilah. They had a really tiny wooden church some 15 miles away. Fr Phil had to say the Jillamatong Mass quite early before heading out to St Jude’s at Havilah ( I forget the exact Mass times). One such Sunday, Fr Phil forgot his eyeglasses. Kind of a disaster really. He couldn’t read the gospels and he couldn’t read the epistles. Nor could he make out any of the other prayers. He asked for someone to lend their specs for the morning, but several pairs proved to be unsuitable, so he sent the altar boys round the church to collect everyone’s glasses. A good idea, surely, but it took a bunch of tries before the right pair was found. These were perfect, so Fr Phil went right ahead with saying Mass, ignoring the big old tray of spectacles just sitting there.

After Mass, Fr Phil hopped on Molly and headed back to Jillamatong without another word. The folk, many half blind, were left there for a long spell, matching themselves to their correct glasses. The bishop was kept out of that loop too, but Havilah’s Christmas contributions were way down.

It was a priestly chore to drive the ladies of the women’s guild to meetings with their counterparts in the neighboring parish. Normally, this was monthly on Wednesday afternoon. The road to Carisbrook was short, but very rough, bendy and hilly. On the day I have in mind to tell you about, it was raining pretty hard, yet the five ladies were enjoying the outing, each nursing a plate of cakes for afternoon tea. For some reason, best known to the Lord above, Fr Phil had chosen a road less travelled, and no wonder, it was not paved. And (guess what), they got hopelessly bogged; no use getting out and pushing. Besides, the ladies were, as Fr Phil said the previous Sunday, “skin and bone under-achievers,” not to mention they were wearing their Sunday dresses. They saw a faint light in the distance, and toward it plodded a lone Fr Phil, leaving the guild ladies in the Ford.

The farmer, Eric and his wife, Edith, greeted Fr Phil with such generous hospitality that he forgot to explain about the guild ladies, anxiously cooling their heels in the Parish Ford till he should come back to drive them through the endless rain to their homes, it being, by then, far to late to continue on to Carisbrook.

What, with getting the priest dry and comfy, and with serving a libation, and with attending to the inner man via a nice hot meal, topped off with plum pudding and whipped cream, not to mention sharing the district news, the waiting guild ladies were relegated to the back burner of Fr Phil’s memory. The lovely ladies meanwhile watched the rain stream down the Ford’s windows in the fading light.

No cell phones in those days; the ladies just had to wait. The rain, at least, could have stopped, but it didn’t.

Around 9 pm, Fr Phil and farmer Eric Dempsey turned up on the latter’s McCormick-Deering tractor and pretty soon they’d extricated the bogged Ford. Fr Phil thanked the farmer all over again, waved goodbye exuberantly, then took the driver’s seat and headed for home. At least the ladies hadn’t gone too hungry whilst waiting all those hours in the Ford: Thank God for the cakes they’d made for afternoon tea at the meeting. Fr Phil did notice a stony silence in the car, but assumed the ladies were just a bit tired.

Next day, the guild secretary, Mrs Morgan, sent a polite letter of regret, for not showing up, to her counterpart in the Carisbrook Guild. In it she managed, with loyal eloquence, to insulate Fr Phil from blame for the debacle. Fr Phil himself remained blissfully unaware that the day had been awful for the guild ladies. He did say that all would have been well if only they’d left the Ford at Jillamatong and ridden to Carisbrook on Molly instead, but he didn’t explain how that could possibly have worked.

Fr Phil was a little older when the affair of the statues took place. Across the street from the presbytery, there was a body of water, a shallow lake, of size about a hundred acres. The Jillamatong folk used it for boating, fishing and swimming. Not Fr Phil. He used it to dump the church’s every statue; one night he did the whole thing, in all, a total of 18 of the painted plaster images were carried to his little rowboat, rowed well beyond the shore, and consigned to the depths.

Or so Fr Phil thought. Cheap religious statues are molded from plaster. They are hollow. In water, they appear to sink, but they do nothing of the sort. Thus, by the time Fr Phil was back in bed, all the statues were bobbing around in the water, keeping the ducks company.

Around 6 am, there was loud knock on the door of the presbytery. “Fr Phil, Jesus, Mary and Joseph are in the lake, and angels galore! It’s still dark. What will we do?” Fr Phil said, thinking quickly, in spite of the early hour, “Adam, go home right now, tell not a soul, leave this to me.”

He should have broken the statues to bits, so the air inside the hollow figures wouldn’t cause them to float. “Well, here goes,” he thought, as he donned his riding clothes, grabbed his shot gun and plenty of cartridges and rode Molly round to the little jetty where the rowboat rose and fell in the gentle swell. Rowing out to where he could just make out the floating statues, he systematically blasted them all with number 12 cartridges.

The shattered pieces obligingly sank to the bottom. Fortunately, it was duck-hunting season, so Jillamatong incuriously slept on.

The bishop was toxic with rage when he greeted the delegation of Jillamatong’s parishioners. “But it’s no big deal,” said sergeant Corcoran,“ The statues were old and dusty and were substandard images. Fr Phil has been complaining about them for years. True! He should have raised the issue with the Parish Altar Society. We would have proposed a disposal plan more palatable to parishioners and society generally. As we are all aware, Fr Phil occasionally resorts to precipitate, agricultural-style solutions to everyday problems. But what’s done is done. We must look to the future. To this end, our parish elders have already promised the funds for a set of the latest models of all the statues.”

Poor old bishop Collins! He was placated by Sergeant Corcoran’s fine speech, yet, while nervous and apprehensive, he agreed to let Fr Phil’s latest mischief get covered up as the weeks went by. A letter from the Environment Protection people was promptly answered by the bishop’s office via Monsignor Ryan, who composed a letter that could only be described as a masterpiece of evasion. The statue fragments were never recovered from the lake and no one seemed thereafter to know a thing about the episode. Everyone was delighted with the new statues and the ladies’ guild baked and sold cakes until they raised enough money to repaint the inside of the church a gentle light violet color to better display the new statues.

At the the national bishops’ conference that year, Bishop Collins was approached by an aggressive reporter: “It is well known that a certain priest in a small rural parish has, over many years, been involved with multiple acts of dubious behavior. Yet you have not acted to discipline him. What do you say to this allegation?”

The bishop reacted strongly: “Listen to me young lady! Fr Phil’s sacred duty is to attend to the moral welfare of his flock. In each and every case reported to me, there was no instance where Father’s moral guidance and attention to his flock’s religious instruction was not beyond reproach. Take the report of Fr Phil’s calling back into the confessional, a group of boys who had been told that they had not sinned. Father thought they had merely thrown peanut shells into the lake. When he found that the boys had actually thrown a real live lad (named Peanuts) into the lake, Fr needed to correct this and he resolutely did so. He did the right thing, regardless of town criticism.”

All summer, miles away bushfires had smoked up the air, and aging parishioners were suffering; many were ill enough to call for the sacraments. Fr Phil on Molly gave comfort, day after day. One twilight, He returned very tired to the presbytery and fell gratefully into his verandah chair. “Hard it is,” he sighed, “for, a lone priest, and getting old, and so far from city help, to get enough rest.”

Then, thinking blankly about the day, he dozed, just as young Freddie Hogan, galloped up and called to him, “Father, Mum wants yer to come quick. She thinks Pa’s dying!”

“I’ll be right there,” said Fr Phil, “soon as I water Molly and feed her. She’s worked all day. ”So saying, he filled the little water trough and put some fresh hay beside it and poured some cold tea from his teapot, then sat again while Molly fed. Half numb, he gazed out across the sweeping, plain all bathed in evening light.

The lengthening shadows merged into the land of sleep as darkness descended and, peacefully, the stars bore witness.

It got cold. The priest roused, then came wildly awake and fished out his watch. “It’s nearly morning! Pa Hogan likely has died, and without the sacraments! I’ve betrayed him; my weak priesthood’s done this. Please God let Pa Hogan be still living! My parishioners will lose faith in me as their pastor.”

With that, Father Phil bounded off the verandah, adjusted the astonished Molly’s bridle, mounted roughly and set off for the Hogan farm, in the faint moonlight. For nigh on an hour, Molly carried the anxious priest. Then, up the broken drive she trotted and slid to a halt by the Hogan front porch.

The door burst open and Mrs Hogan rushed out onto the verandah. “Oh Father! You’re back? You’re back again! Pa died at midnight, just after you left. He half sat up, then he smiled and lay back and held my hand and died.”

The dawn light was showing in the sky when Molly stopped beside Fr Phil’s chair. He eased himself down, and sat ever so quietly, staring ahead at the orange light of the rising sun that just then began to appear low on the eastern horizon.