The all-white 1971 Springbok team had lit Australia up in anti-apartheid protests while Queensland locked down into a month-long state of emergency.
Large numbers of police were bused in from country areas to prevent protests at Brisbane’s showgrounds for the rugby clash between South Africa and Australia.
Fr Frank Brennan SJ. PHOTO: Joe Higgins/Catholic Leader
Emotions were running high. Students walked with placards. Police lines separated spectators from players. More than 700 Queenslanders were arrested.
Jesuit Father Frank Brennan was a young man witnessing the crisis unfold.
“In a strange way, I was in a blessed situation because I was here as a first year law student at Queensland University in 1971,” he said.
The civil unrest in Queensland became the backdrop to his education on issues of justice, of reaching out to those on the margins.
He was also deeply affected by his involvement in an Aboriginal murder trial in 1981, which highlighted the conditions that perpetuated injustice in Aboriginal communities.
He admits he was a “very idealistic” young man, attracted to the idea of “proclaiming justice for all” through his call to the priesthood.
The call to justice and priesthood led him ultimately to the Jesuits, where his uncle Fr Tom O’Hara had also served.
It was a high time for the order in Australia.
The early 1970s saw the post-Second Vatican Council peak in vocations – 10 men professed the year behind him, 10 in his year and 10 in the year ahead.
What he found in the Jesuit priesthood was a “life-giving” ministry unlike anything he could have expected.
In his public life, Fr Brennan has never shied away from calling things how he sees them.
He always felt he was at his best as an “honest broker”, someone who could listen to all the arguments, find the right balance and help create a solution.
It had thrust him into positions of influence by both major parties and put him in the crossfire of national debates.
One such occasion, he remembered flying into a rural community during the Wik debate in the 1990s, which famously tested land deeds against native titles.
He was there to speak to pastoralists, one of whom told him to “get back to the presbytery and say your prayers”.
“Well, I believe in the power of prayer but I don’t think it will be solved by prayer alone,” he remembered saying.
He told the man, he was “not Aboriginal, not a miner, not a pastoralist,” and wondered, “Maybe if you have the occasional honest broker in there… (we) might find a solution”.
‘Moral true north’
Fr Brennan holds concerns for the precarious state of Australia and the west.
He suggested there was a lack of a clear sense of moral direction in the world, making it especially difficult for young people to find a “moral true north”.
He criticised political leaders for being too focused on electoral possibilities and the reaction of the other side rather than “telling it as it is”.
“I think young people as much as older people would love to return to being able to just tell things as they are,” he said.
He was no fatalist.
Moral true north was still within reach, he said.
But everyone, including the Church, had to take a good hard look in the mirror.
He said the Church was a moral leader on many issues, but on others like the sexual abuse crisis, “we were quite blind”.
“One of the benefits of the present age is that everything’s up for grabs,” he said.
“Therefore discussion about moral true north is fair game, but once you’ve had a discussion you need a way of finding some agreement where people can say we’re now going to set course on that not just as individuals but as a community.”
One of Fr Brennan’s recent prominent Church positions was as an expert adviser at the Fifth Plenary Council of Australia.
He described the decrees as “fairly bland overall” and as time ticked on without assent from Rome, he said questions naturally arose about the purpose of it.
He said the first decree covering Aboriginal issues and the “far too simple endorsement of things like the Statement (from the Heart)” required further thought, especially in the wake of the failed referendum on the Voice to Parliament.
He had reservations on Rome’s recent Synod on Synodality too, questioning how long the Church could “talk about process for dealing with things rather than starting to address some of the substantive issues”.
50 years a Jesuit
Fr Brennan commemorated 50 years as a Jesuit and 40 years as a priest with a thanksgiving Mass with his community at Toowong on February 23.
Across his ministry, he has served in parishes, held leadership positions in education, social justice and government initiatives.
Looking back, he said if he could advise his younger self, he would have taken up opportunities for deeper philosophical studies.
He admits that he avoided further study at the time because he “didn’t want to end up just teaching young Jesuits”, he said with a laugh.
Fr Brennan had served as the director for the Jesuit Refugee Service in East Timor for 15 months.
He said, in hindsight, he would have benefited from having done that earlier in life.
His milestone anniversaries coincided with his return to Brisbane after almost 49 years in the south.
He said he was happy to be back, especially to be close to two of his sisters who had families in Brisbane.
Much had changed since those seminal years in the 70s.
The classmates he had joined the legal profession with five decades ago, he said, were all now retiring as judges.
Retirement was not yet on his mind; he could see another 10 good years in Brisbane before he would be ready.
Lately, he has spent time re-reading his father’s works.
He held a deep admiration for his father, Sir Gerard Brennan, who famously wrote the lead judgment on the Mabo decision as Chief Justice of the Australian High Court.
He said his dad was a strong Catholic who often spoke about the importance of bringing the tenets of one’s faith into the public sphere within a pluralistic democratic society.
Fr Brennan had been delving into his father’s writings with an eye to producing a two-volume collection of his works in the next year.
He said it was a “labour of love” to go further inside his father’s head.
This article by Joe Higgins was published in The Catholic Leader.