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The Catholic Leader, March 22, 2020
www.catholicleader.com.auArchbishop John Bathersby
This is the homily of Archbishop
Mark Coleridge at the solemn
pontifical requiem Mass of
Archbishop John Bathersby at St
Stephen’s Cathedral, on March 16
IT must have been all those moun-
tains he climbed – not Everest per-
haps but certainly Tibrogargan.
Long after everything else seemed to shut
down, his heart kept beating, even though the
Bathersbys were supposed to have weak hearts.
He lingered far longer than we expected;
at one point we thought he’d never die. But
finally in the morning light of Monday, March
9 John Alexius Bathersby, sixth Bishop and fifth
Archbishop of Brisbane, breathed his last in the
eighty-fourth year of his life.
News of his death came as the Bishops of
Queensland were preparing for morning Mass
with the students of the seminary at Banyo.
There was a touching symmetry in this. John
had entered the seminary straight from school in
1954; he had returned as spiritual director years
later; and then as Bishop of Cairns and Arch-
bishop of Brisbane he was responsible for some
of the bigger decisions in the seminary’s history.
Here we were at the place that had so marked
John’s life and, as I said to the seminarians, at a
place where they were more deeply marked by
John Bathersby than they realised.
I first met John way back in the late 1970s
when he was spiritual director of the seminary
and I was a recently ordained priest of Mel-
bourne.
He invited me to come to Brisbane to preach
the Holy Week retreat to the seminarians.
When I met him, I was surprised; I’d expected
something more in the imagined mode of spir-
itual directors – ascetical, solemn, other-worldly.
What I found was something quite different:
an Aussie original and a Queensland classic.
I’d never struck anything quite like it; and
through the years since then my sense of surprise
at John Bathersby has never left me.
He seemed the quintessential little Aussie
battler, but he was in fact – as I came to see more
through the years – a man of high intelligence
and deep spirituality, straight-forward yet decep-
tive, a very accessible character yet with great
distances.
There was even a touch of the mystic about
him.
Another small man called John once wrote
a book called The Ascent of Mount Carmel;
he was also into mountain-climbing, but of the
metaphoric kind.
His book is one of the great classics of Chris-
tian mysticism, and in it he sees the spiritual
life as a kind of mountain-climbing – a long and
winding ascent from darkness towards the glori-
ous light of the summit where, according to the
prophet Isaiah, “the Lord of hosts has prepared
for all peoples a banquet of rich food and finest
wines” (25:6).
That was St John of the Cross, and John Bath-
ersby saw the spiritual life in the same terms.
It was a search, at times a struggle for the great
banquet on the summit of God’s mountain when
all the climbing would be done.
John certainly loved a meal.
After our first encounter at the seminary, we
were together again in Rome in the early 1980s
– he doing a doctorate in spirituality and I the
Masters in biblical studies.
There was quite a group of young Australian
priests studying in Rome at the time, and we’d
meet regularly on a Saturday night for a meal,
eating our way through the menu and drinking a
bit too much wine.
Those meals were one of the more important
and memorable moments of my years in Rome,
and John Bathersby was at the heart of it all,
master of the banquet in a most unpretentious
way.
He was delightful, often hilarious company,
regaling us with stories of extraordinary charac-
ters of the Toowoomba diocese and eye-popping
events from his time in Goondiwindi.
But there was more than the fun. There was a
human solidity and a spiritual depth which were
precious in our time away which most of us
found humanly and spiritually taxing.
He was a bit older than the rest of us and had
a wisdom to match. As I look back now to those
Reaching the end of the climb
years and those meals, I can see that I owe John
Bathersby a deep debt of personal gratitude in
ways that are not easily expressed, at least in a
forum as public as this.
But thanks, Bats, for everything.
Beyond those years in Rome our
lives became more and more
strangely interwoven until
finally I was appointed to
succeed him in Brisbane
after his retirement
in late 2011. When
news of my appoint-
ment came through,
I thought of other
times at Banyo and
in Rome – and how
bizarre it was that I
was to follow him as
Archbishop. I’d never
really thought of John
as the kind of man they’d
appoint to Brisbane, and
I had absolutely no sense
that they would appoint me to
succeed him. I thought of the mo-
ment when, after one of those Roman meals,
John offered to take me home on the back of his
motor-scooter.
The night was wet, the cobbles slippery – and
I clung on for dear life. I’d never been
more relieved to make it home,
and I vowed never again
to ride or go pillion on a
motor-scooter, at least
not with him.
I think now how
extraordinary that
two Archbishops of
Brisbane were on
that Vespa and both
of us could’ve been
killed.
One of the good
things about coming
to Brisbane, I thought,
was the chance to spend
time with John.
But it wasn’t to be. By the
time I arrived the dementia was
already taking hold, and any attempt I
made to pick his brain about the diocese came to
nothing. The blankness was descending.
This became more dramatic as time went by,
to the point where towards the end there was no
recognition, no power of speech.
Knowing what John Bathersby had been in his
prime, the marvellous vitality of the man, there
was more than a touch of tragedy about this.
He had always dreamt of retiring to Stan-
thorpe, perhaps to write some local history. But
that too was beyond him and a move back to
Brisbane was inevitable as the demen-
tia worsened.
In the end his world was
small and simple, but in a
sense it always was. The
younger John had no
episcopal aspirations
or ambitions; and as
Bishop his was never
the grand style.
It took him quite
a while to learn how
to manage a crozier;
he needed the then
Fr Ken Howell to tell
him what to wear and
when; and though he
lived in the big house at
Wynberg his own quarters
could hardly have been humbler.
I took one look at them when
I came and immediately decided to move
upstairs to something more spacious.
Just as Pope Francis is recasting the papal
style, making it less monarchical, less grand
in scale, John Bathersby recast the
episcopal style, making it more
down-to-earth, less princely.
He was more a pastor
than a pontiff.
John had his crises,
perhaps even his
failures, especially
in the later years as
dementia began to
take hold.
But through it all,
in the words of the
Letter to the Hebrews
which he loved and
often quoted, John did
not “lose sight of Jesus”
(12:2).
But perhaps his legacy
is deeper and may prove more
enduring.
Before all else John Bathersby was a lover
of Jesus, and he spoke of this more as he grew
older.
In the Gospel we have heard today, the Greek-
speaking Jews say to Philip and Andrew, “We
want to see Jesus”; and that was what drove
John Bathersby.
He wanted to see Jesus, and that became an
ever deepening passion in his life.
The One he wanted to see was no pale Galile-
an or good old plastic Jesus. It was the crucified
Lord, here and now as presence and power; and
it was no accident that he took as his episcopal
motto Lex crucis, the law of the Cross.
Nor was it by chance that he died clutching a
cross.
There was, he knew, no other way than by the
Cross of Christ that he could reach the summit;
there was no other path. He knew the great truth
spoken by Jesus in the Gospel: “Unless a grain
of wheat falls into the earth and dies it remains
just a single grain; but if it dies it bears much
fruit” (John 12:24). Now the grain falls finally
deep into the earth.
John didn’t speak the language of philosophy
so much; he didn’t specialise in arguments of
intellectual sophistication.
His was the simpler and more mysterious
language of discipleship, and he offered the
arguments of love.
For twenty years he never ceased to point his
flock in that direction, urging them not to “lose
sight of Jesus” in the midst of all the troubles
and turmoil, all the complexities and confusion.
In that sense, John Bathersby was a simple
man, but it was the hard-won simplicity of a man
who had come to know what really mattered
on the long climb of life. That simplicity, that
clarity of vision, is his greatest legacy to the
Archdiocese of Brisbane.
In the Gospel story of the Transfiguration,
which the Church read on the Sunday John lay
dying, Jesus leads Peter, James and John up a
high mountain, and there on the summit he is
transfigured dazzlingly in their presence.
They see him as never before; they see him as
he really is.
Through the years, Jesus has led our John up a
high mountain, and from the summit the view is
spectacular – not the sweeping panorama but the
vision of Jesus. Now that he has reached the end
of the climb, during which he has never “lost
sight of Jesus”, John stands before the dazzling
vision of Christ crucified and risen, the Lord
whose scars shine like the sun.
The climbing is all done, the time for rest has
come, as the Lord of hosts ushers John to the
table of heaven’s banquet where he will surely
be the best of companions as he was all those
years ago in Rome.
Eternal rest give to John, O Lord, and let
perpetual light shine upon him. May he rest in
peace. Amen.
Man of God:
Archbishop Mark Coleridge sprinkles the coffin of Archbishop Emeritus John Bathersby with Holy Water before it is lowered into its
final resting place in the crypt of St Stephen’s Cathedral. Below, Archbishop Bathersby while he was Archbishop of Brisbane.
Photo: Alan Edgecomb