I first met Frank Brennan almost 20 years ago, when I was in Australia as a part of an international Jesuit formation program. I had no idea who he was, the work he’d done over many decades with First Nations people and refugees, how connected he was politically and with the press. And for his part he seemed entirely content with my lack of knowledge. He seemed to delight in just getting to know me.
It’s something I’ve noticed about Frank many times since: For as prominent a priest and lawyer as he is, he wears his standing lightly. He’d rather tell you stories about his parents, his siblings and their kids; an Aboriginal friend who just came to visit; or the book club of concerned Catholics that he’s a part of than trumpet himself. And though he always seems to be doing 100 things, he somehow always also has time for a chat, a visit, a meal.
Over the years I’ve had many good conversations with Frank and been welcomed into his home. And each time I have found myself in the midst of meals, Masses, and other gatherings filled with wonderful people whom Frank has similarly welcomed into his life.
Last weekend Frank and his Jesuit classmates Peter Hosking and Steve Astill celebrated 50 years in the Jesuits at a Mass at St. Francis Xavier Jesuit Parish in North Sydney. Before he left for the event, Frank kindly sat down to do a Zoom interview with me from his community in Brisbane, where among many other things he is finishing the 2-volume collection of the essays of his father, the High Court Chief Justice Sir Francis Gerard Brennan, celebrating having just become a great-uncle for the 35th time, and had just returned from giving a series of talks in Perth. “You just keep trading,” he said, laughing.
Was being a Jesuit or a priest something you had thought about growing up?
I’d thought about being a priest. I’d never really thought about being a Jesuit. I came from Queensland and Northern Australia, where there were very few Jesuits. I had an uncle who was a Jesuit, Tom O’Hara, but I hardly knew Tom. He’d spent most of his time in Rome at that stage.
'Always make sure you’re eyeballing both the decision maker and all who are disadvantaged by the decision. If you’re eyeballing both, at least it stops you from becoming sanctimonious.'
I’d been taught by a very good group, the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart, who had a very down-to-earth spirituality. But they told me if I joined them, I’d probably teach in schools or work with Aboriginal people, and at that stage I wasn’t much interested in either of those, so I looked farther afield.
In my last year of university I went to Melbourne and I stayed a few nights with the MSCs. And the Aboriginal leader Pat Dodson, who at that stage was a Missionary of the Sacred Heart, said you should go and check out the Jesuits at Parkville. It was holiday time, so there were not many of them around, but I was very fortunate in that two of the Jesuits I met and had long conversations with were Mark Raper, who later became a lifelong friend, and Bill Dalton, who was a very fine scripture scholar, later rector of the Biblicum.
Bill had an infectious love of young people, and he was very enthusiastic about the prospect that someone like me who’d studied law and was interested in politics might be interested in joining the Society. Insofar as I understood anything about the Holy Spirit, I thought this made sense. So I decided to check out the Jesuits.
What made the priesthood appealing as a child?
I think it was a sort of simplistic, naïve thing of I wanted to help people. But also, I wanted to help people in terms of their relationship with God. I came from quite a religious family: my mum’s brother Tom was a Jesuit; I had an aunt, Dad’s sister, who was a Sacré Coeur nun; Dad had a first cousin who was a very charismatic sort of priest, always full of enthusiasm for life. I think they were role models, as well.
You entered the Jesuits in 1975. In the States at that point, numbers in the seminaries were collapsing. Was that true in Australia as well?
Numbers were still fairly strong. Not as strong as they had been, but I was one of 10 novices, and the year before me there were ten, and the year after me they were ten. So through a 2-year novitiate, I was exposed to 30 other fellas my age who were trying to work out what they wanted to do with their lives.
I sometimes get in trouble with my superiors when I point out that if I were 21 today, I wouldn’t be joining a group of 30 over a two-year novitiate period. I’d probably be on my lonesome, and I’d be thinking that I’m going to join a group where most are as old as my father or my grandfather. It was a very different situation in 1975.
I’ve been left with the quandary, What would the Holy Spirit ask of me today if I were 21? I don’t know the answer, but I think it would be a very different process of coming to decide to be a Jesuit now, 50 years later, than it was in 1975.
I remember one fella a while ago who was joining, I took him out to dinner and I said, Look, I’d find it hard to imagine doing this myself now, but if you’re going to do it, make sure you only stay if you’re really passionate about what you’re about, and you can see a clear path that you would be able to fulfill that passion in what is being put before you.
One of the qualities I’ve always appreciated in you is that you seem able to stay free when it comes to things like the future of the church or Society. You don’t seem afraid or like you have to push one way or another. Where does that come from?
My first week in the novitiate, we were given the document [from the just-completed 32nd General Congregation] “Jesuits Today”: “What is it to be a Jesuit? To know that I am a sinner, but called to be a companion of Jesus. What is it to be a companion of Jesus? To be engaged in the struggle of faith and the struggle for justice that it includes.”
For me, that clicked. I’ve trained as a lawyer, I’m interested in politics, I want to be a priest who can put people in touch with God. Here is a document which basically sets out the template.
I looked it up today. There is one phrase which often got to me in that document: “The common task of radiating faith and witnessing to justice.” I’ve always thought, that’s what I’d like to be able to do in life, radiate faith and witness to justice.
You don’t do that by hitting people over the head. You do it by respecting their dignity and enhancing their exercise of human freedom, and trying to create the social conditions where each and every one of us can find our natural flourishing, and the acknowledgement that we’re created in the image and likeness of God.
The other big thing for me about that document “Jesuits Today” was that it unapologetically said, It’s all very well having one-on-one relationships trying to put the world right, but you’ve got to do something about systemic change. I was always convinced of that. So it meshed. And thankfully it’s meshed ever since.
In later years with GC 33, 34, 35, I used to say to myself, These guys, they’ve gotten around with their word processors and they’re just trying to finesse this and take the edge off it. And I’ve always unapologetically said, I’m just a GC32 Jesuit. It’s enough for me to go on for life.
Did the novitiate take a lot of getting used to?
Oh yeah. In the first week I went to the novice master and I said Look, Father—we had to call him Father—Look, Father, I’m here under false pretenses. You have us praying the book of Isaiah or whatever, and this isn’t me. I’m very rationalistic, I’m very pragmatic.
He said, Look, just stay with it for a while and see how we go.
The big things for me in the novitiate were the experiments. After the long retreat the first experiment I had was to a hospice for the dying. I don’t think I’d ever seen anyone dying before. And I was thrown in at the deep end: In those days, we literally could work as nurse’s aides alongside trained nurses, even though we weren’t trained, and care for people as they died. That was an extraordinary thing.
Another key experiment for me was, because I had some interest in Aboriginal issues by that time, I was sent to Redfern in inner Sydney where there were a lot of Aboriginal people basically living on the streets. And there was a very charismatic priest, Father Ted Kennedy, and an indigenous woman, Mum Shirl, who was his offsider. I spent a couple of months basically as Mum Shirl’s driver, going around getting aboriginal kids out of bed, getting them into court, and going into the court where Mum Shirl would read the riot act to the judge on what he or she could not do. To see this coming from a Black person, a Black woman, I had never experienced anything like that. And she had a simplicity of faith that was extraordinary.
I think those two experiments were very significant for me in terms of [helping me see] Yes, I’m available to go where I’m sent, but they better make sure they put me to good use.
You’re well known for the work you’ve done with Aboriginal rights. How quickly did the Aboriginal community become a priority of your life as a Jesuit?
We had quite a visionary though enigmatic provincial, Pat O’Sullivan, when I was a novice. In 1977, he set up a committee of a half a dozen of us, including me as the newly-minted vow-professed, and he said, I want you people to be leading the return of the Jesuits to the Aboriginal apostolate. He deliberately called it “the return.” The first Jesuits to come to Australia were Austrian, and they went to South Australia and then up to the Northern Territory. But then the Irish came to the East Coast, and they were not so much interested with the Aboriginal people, they were more concerned about setting up the educational institutions so that the poor Irish could pull themselves up by their bootstraps and hopefully make a difference to society.
So there we were 100 years later, O’Sullivan saying we should return to this apostolate. And he said to me, you’re trained in law, I want you to do something about Aboriginal rights. So it was carte blanche from the provincial in my first year out of novitiate.
That’s extraordinary.
Yes. But then as I went and did my philosophy, we had a new provincial come in, and he was not so much interested in that. He said, Particularly with your family and legal connections, we’d like you to influence the influential. So we’d like you to teach at Xavier College in Melbourne for a year, then go to Newman College and get to know the Catholic lawyers of Victoria, etc.
And I went back to him and said, Yeah, that’s fine, I’ll do that. But how about we make it a three-year regency, and in the third year I’d be able to do the Aboriginal work.
Well, it was extraordinarily providential, because that was 1982, the year of the Commonwealth Games. And those games were to be played here in Brisbane, where the treatment of Aboriginal people was the most oppressive of any state in the country. There was no recognition of land rights, there was no recognition of self-determination.
And the bishops of Queensland went to my provincial and said, can we have Brennan as our advisor during 1982? So I was thrown in again right at the deep end, but it was a wonderful opportunity and a wonderful education.
By 1985, the year of my ordination, I was appointed as the advisor to the national bishops’ conference as they negotiated with the federal government about national land rights.
It’s striking to me that your first two provincials had dramatically different ideas about what you might do, and in the end you fulfilled both their visions.
That’s true. Yes, they had diametrically-opposed views. And I was your classic obedient Jesuit, I did what they asked me to do.
I’ll make a slight confession, I did play very hard to get in terms of higher studies. They would have liked me to have gone on and study moral theology or something like that, but for the life of me I just could not imagine spending my life being a theology professor and teaching young Jesuits. I really wanted to be engaged at the coalface in the world.
Would you say over the years you’ve wished you could have done one or the other, Aboriginal work or influencing-the-influential, instead of both?
No. I’ll tell you a line I’ve used in a lot of sessions with church groups on social justice: Always make sure you’re eyeballing both the decision maker and all who are disadvantaged by the decision. If you’re eyeballing both, at least it stops you from becoming sanctimonious. So much of the church social justice stuff is sanctimonious utterances about ideals which bear no relationship to what is the lived reality, particularly in a democracy of people determining what it is that is practically achievable.
I want to ask you a couple questions that look at your whole life as a Jesuit so far. First, what would you say is the most unexpected thing that’s happened to you in 50 years as a Jesuit?
I’ve always had very rude good health and been able to just go as I please. But 18 months ago I had a very radical prostate cancer with metastases, and there were questions at one stage about whether or not we could get on top of it. In Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises there’s his Principle and Foundation where we say we’re going to approach things with complete indifference. Well, I used to give notional assent to that but basically thought to myself, I’m very pleased that I’m happy, that I’ve got wealth around me to do what I need to do, that I enjoy a good name, and that I’ll probably live like my parents to my 90s. All of a sudden that gets pulled from under you, and Well, Frank, do you actually have the indifference to seek neither long life nor short life, health nor illness, praise or obloquy, wealth or poverty?
And what’s been very unexpected for me is I’ve found that pastorally it’s helped me enormously. There’s a greater capacity for empathy and just being in the shoes of the other and facing those things.
Where I count myself so blessed, the hormone treatment I’m on costs $50,000 a year, but under the Australian PBS — what you Americans would call socialized medicine — it costs me $15 a month. And five years ago this treatment didn’t exist. So if I weren’t living in Australia in the 21st century, we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation. Whereas I’m assured that I should be able to live a fairly normal sort of life.
The other unexpected thing, one I was very pleased about: Most of my work had been in Australia, but when things imploded in East Timor, in very short notice there was a need for a director of the Jesuit Refugee Service in East Timor. I was on the province consult, and the provincial said, Who are we going to send? And I said, Send me.
I had 15 months in East Timor, and it was a wonderful experience. You’re working with nothing but you’re helping to build up the resources of the local community. It was a real privilege.
What’s been the greatest gift of your life as a Jesuit?
I think the capacity to engage with people like First Nations people, refugees, asylum seekers, while at the same time to have the indulgence of being able to do the intellectual work of writing and thinking about these things. Every ten years I’ve had a gig at one of the universities in the States — first at Georgetown, twice at Boston College, once at Santa Clara — where I’ve been able to step back and to reflect on those things. I’ve always seen publishing books as a way of giving an account of myself. Quite a bit of what I do has to go on behind closed doors at the time. I think it’s very necessary to have a transparency about you as to this is what I was up to.
As I think about it, I’ve always prided myself that I think I’m seen to be credible and a straight shooter with both sides of politics. For the Rudd government I did the human rights inquiry. For the Turnbull government I was on the inquiry into religious freedom after the same sex marriage debate. With the Morrison government I was on a committee with mainly indigenous members looking at the design of an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. To be in that sort of situation, it’s a very privileged position.
Would you say being a Jesuit all these years has taught you certain lessons?
I’m from a large family. All six of my siblings have children and five of six have grandchildren. And I think there are a lot of ordinary life lessons I’ve been sheltered from. That would be the first thing I’d say.
What’s being a Jesuit taught me? It’s taught me that walking the tightrope between the church and the world as a Jesuit is a very privileged space to be in. I realized that probably most poignantly about seven years ago. I’d taken on the job of CEO of Catholic Social Services Australia, and we had the same sex marriage plebiscite. I came out publicly and said that I would be voting yes and I gave a talk where I said that I would welcome this change in the law, but that I would hope the government would do the hard work that was needed in order to protect religious freedom.
Well, Cardinal Ladaria, himself a Jesuit and head of the CDF, wrote to the superior general of the Society Father Sosa, and said Please get Fr. Brennan to retract. That set up a few earthquakes around the place, as you can imagine. It was mutually agreed without any great rancor that it was unsustainable for me in the eyes of key bishops to remain as the CEO of Catholic Social Services Australia. I said, Look, I volunteered my services really, they’re no longer required, fine, wipe the dust and move on. And I did that happily enough. (I don’t know how the Society in Rome dealt with it, except that it all went away. I made very clear that I would not be retracting a syllable of anything I said. Thereafter I was appointed a peritus at the Australian plenary council, so obviously my theological errancy was not all-pervasive.)
'As Jesuits, we’re still called to the common task of radiating faith and witnessing to justice. Come hell or high water, we are here taking a stand for justice.'
I think that I’ve been able to learn and maintain good grace in the midst of conflict, and learned that in the midst of conflict, you can make a difference. When I was involved in the so-called Wik Debate, I had a mate that was politically conservative with lots of friends out in western New South Wales and Western Queensland. And he came to me one day and said, Frank, It’s all very well for you as a Jesuit to be talking to all these city audiences about this issue. But where it impacts is on the big pastoral properties, the ranches out in the west of these two states. He said, I’ve got a plane. I’ll fly you around.
So we spent a few weeks going around in his little plane to all these pastoral properties, and my God did we have some tense meetings. But I remember we were running late one evening to a place called Enngonia, which is west of Bourke, a hell of a long way from Sydney. And we walked in to this house and you could cut the air with a knife. One of them looked up at me and said, you should get back to your presbytery and say your prayers.
I was very grateful for that fella. I told him, I do believe in the power of prayer, but I don’t think Wik can be solved by prayer alone. I think it does require some human activity.
And a lot of people say that if it were just left to you, the pastoralists and the miners and the Aboriginal people, you’d work it yourselves. I said, I think that’s nonsense, because you’ve all got so much invested in it. I said, Every now and again, there might be a place for an honest broker, trying to find an answer. That’s what I’m trying to be. We then had quite a fruitful meeting.
For me, being the Jesuit has often been trying to be that honest broker where I’m not just bringing the baggage of the bishops or of a particular interest group, but saying Alright, what is the common good, and how can we achieve something in solidarity, particularly with those who are missing out?
I think most people would expect us to talk about Aboriginal people, asylum seekers, the church, politics. But for me one of the most striking things about you is the way you welcome people. I think of it particularly in terms of meals: Big feast or two-person dinner, you have a way of creating a space that allows people to feel welcome and engage with one another in unexpectedly meaningful ways.
Is that a family thing, or where does that come from?
It is a family thing. There was my mother with seven children, and at big feasts or whatever all of the religious members of the family would be there at the table, so there’d be 15 or 20 people. Several of my siblings are also extraordinarily hospitable, and I see it now in my nephews and nieces. So yes, I think it is a something of a family trait.
Sometimes it’s very hard work. In Jesuit community, it’s very easy just to go and get the takeaway and put it on the table. Whereas I’ve always been a great believer that No, we’ve got to celebrate our life together. If we don’t do that, then forget it. If we’re not providing that hospitality, particularly as celibate men, we’re just living very isolated and often lonely lives.
Obviously the Society and the Church today are very different from how they were 50 years ago.
Hugely different.
How would you characterise that difference?
20 years ago I did a lot of weddings and not many funerals. Now I do lots of funerals and not many weddings. And sure, there’s a lot of spiritual fruit to be gained out of doing funerals, but it’s emblematic of the present state of our church.
Do you think that the mission of the Society is different now as a result of how things have changed?
The manifestations of it might be different, but I’d still go back to saying, as Jesuits we’re still called to the common task of radiating faith and witnessing to justice. Come hell or high water, we are here taking a stand for justice. And whatever the secular spirit of the age and whatever the criticism of the church by the mainstream media, we are here to radiate faith — not faith primarily in the church, but in Jesus of Nazareth, who we think is good news. We’ve got to maintain that no matter what might be the situation in which we find ourselves.
Jim McDermott is an American culture critic and screenwriter.
Main image: Frank Brennan (David McMahon / The Society of Jesus in Australia)