February was a month of great celebration in the SVD AUS Province, as two confreres celebrated significant anniversaries of their vows, with Fr Frank Gerry SVD notching up 65 years as a Divine Word Missionary and Fr Michael Hardie SVD marking his 25th jubilee.

Fr Frank, who now lives in retirement, celebrated his jubilee with family in Brisbane, while Fr Michael shared the milestone with confreres at Dorish Maru College in Melbourne, where he is Rector.

Frank was born and bred in Brisbane and remembers being entranced as a teenager by the story of the Dorish Maru, the ship on which more than 100 SVD missionaries, Holy Spirit Sisters and civilians were taken prisoner by the Japanese during WWII and then shot at by American air forces.

“All through my young years I had an interest in the Missions. There was something enchanting and inviting about the mission fields,” Frank says.

Responding to his missionary call, the young Frank joined the SVD in 1948 and in 1951, he left Brisbane to undertake formation and theological study in the United States.

Following his final vows and ordination, Fr Frank was appointed to the AUS Province as Vocations Director, and then Novice Master. In 1979 he undertook a Research Fellowship at Yale Divinity School, spending a year working with the renowned spiritual writer Henri Nouwen. He was then assigned to the Philippines, where he became Assistant Novice Master to 90 students at the Divine Word Seminary in Tagaytay. In 1986 he returned to Sydney and was elected Provincial.

“It was an interesting time,” he says. “I saw it as a time of great openness to Asia. There had always been an openness to PNG, but because of my experience in the Philippines, I was able to help open up the Province to Asia. At my invitation, we started to get students from the Philippines, Indonesia and Vietnam come here for study and formation and we can still see the benefits of that today in the students we have.”

Following his time as Provincial, Frank was appointed Rector of Dorish Maru College in Box Hill, Melbourne and became a facilitator of the Siloam Program at the Heart of Life Centre.

In 1999 he spent two months at an Interreligious Dialogue Centre in Japan and went to India with the Christian Meditation Community for a three-day conversation with the Dalai Lama and some of his Tibetan followers. In 2004 he did a tour of the Holy places of India and in 2008 opened the Janssen Spirituality and Interfaith Dialogue Centre for the AUS Province, in Boronia.

Since retiring in 2010 and returning home to Brisbane, Frank has been helping out in the SVD parish in Hamilton and giving spiritual direction. He now lives in retirement at Boondall.

“When I look back, I can’t believe it’s been 65 years and I wonder how it all happened,” he says. “With this life, you don’t sit down and calculate how it will all unfold. It’s the vision that attracts you and you follow it,” he says.

“It doesn’t feel like 65 years, but I’m just grateful that I’m still here and that it’s been such a rich life.”

Fr Michael Hardie says he first had some intonation of a call to the priesthood when he was about 15, and an altar boy in his home parish in New Zealand.

“But it wasn’t’ very strong and I didn’t really act on it, but then it came back many years later, when I was about 35,” he says.

After leaving school, Michael had a successful career in electronic engineering, working mostly with broadcasting systems. He moved to Australia in 1970 and worked as a television production engineer at what is now Channel 10 in Melbourne, before moving to Saudi Arabia and working for the Ministry of Information’s Saudi Television System. During this time he learnt Arabic, a skill he continued to find useful when he moved to Kuwait for work.

“I really found that my vocation came from meeting the many workers and labourers coming to Kuwait from places like the Philippines, Thailand, Afghanistan and Pakistan,” he says.

“These workers were being treated very badly and this triggered my sense of justice. So, using my Arabic language skills, I started working in advocating for a fairer deal for the people, and I started to ask myself, could I be doing something more to help address this unjust situation?”

After exploring other avenues, such as working in the UN, some friends suggested that Michael consider religious life as a means of working towards justice.

“And that seemed to sit well with me,” he says. “I knew I didn’t want to be a diocesan priest. I felt I was called to be working in the world. I saw injustice as being located internationally and so, I felt for me, it was clearly a missionary vocation, especially as I felt I had a gift with languages.”

Michael returned to Australia in 1989 to join the SVDs and begin his formation and, following his final vows and ordination, he gained teaching qualifications and took up his first mission assignment to Vietnam in 1997, where he taught English in the National University Language Centre for 14 years.

He learnt Vietnamese in that period, and was involved in administration, including a time as Province Treasurer. He also continued to address issues of injustice where he saw them.

“Because of the Vietnamese government I couldn’t really be a priest in public in Vietnam, but my teaching was public, and for me, my teaching was a sacrament. So I had to really reinvent myself, my vocation and my priesthood in order to contribute to the need of the people in society and particularly young people,” he says.

In 2011, Michael was invited to return to the AUS Province, where after a period at the Janssen Spirituality Centre, during which he enjoyed working with refugees and asylum seekers who were being housed there, he was appointed to Dorish Maru College, first as OTP Director and currently as Rector, a role he finds challenging and rewarding.

Michael has also started teaching again at the English Language School for Pastoral Ministry at Yarra Theological Union and has recently started working in prison ministry with the Catholic Prison Ministry Team at Melbourne Remand Centre.

“Prison ministry is a very fulfilling ministry for me,” he says. “I feel very much at home in some way with the men I meet there.”

Fr Michael says that when he looks back on his 25 years as a Divine Word Missionary, he sees three key threads running through his life – other cultures, mission and justice.

“When I look back I realise that I could not have done all this myself,” he says. “If I’d tried to plan my own life I couldn’t have done the things I’ve done except through the SVDs.”

PHOTOS

Top Right: Fr Frank Gerry SVD

Middle: Fr Frank farewelling friends in the Philippines, where he was a missionary.

Bottom Left: Fr Michael Hardie SVD