DIVINE Word Missionaries Fr Tim Norton considers himself an unlikely choice to become Brisbane’s new auxiliary bishop.
Almost 40 years of missionary work has taken him from the inner-city streets of Sydney, to the slums of Mexico City, to positions of leadership with the Society of the Divine Word (SVD) including heading the Australian province and most recently, running the society’s worldwide program of courses from a mountain retreat outside Rome.
“I’m hoping as a pastor coming back to Australia, I’ll have some chance to be in ministry with the poor,” the 63-year-old bishop-elect said, reflecting on his most recent years of teaching and administering Divine Word Missionaries programs away from the nitty-gritty of parish life.
“I’ve been doing a lot of internal stuff … there will hopefully be some opportunity for me to be with people again – to have some level of regular contact with people who are marginalised in the Brisbane archdiocese.”
Originally from suburban Ryde in Sydney – about 3km from the Divine Word Missionaries’ main house – Fr Norton trained as a physiotherapist.
Even during his seminary days he was drawn to those living on society’s margins.
He put his health science skills into practice providing physiotherapy for inmates of Melbourne’s Pentridge prison.
In inner-city Sydney, he worked with young street people in Darlinghurst who were experiencing homelessness, addiction and mental health issues.
Before and after his ordination he did this work with the charity Cana Community.
“That was an enormous formation for me,” Bishop-elect Norton said.
“That’s where I started to celebrate Eucharist, around a coffee table, after my ordination, with those people.
“To this day that experience has been extremely meaningful to me.”
For overseas mission training as a seminarian he was sent to Mexico City and he later returned to become a parish priest there for five years.
“To be with the poor in Mexico all I had to do was walk out the front door,” he said.
“There would have been about 80,000 people in that two-and-a-half square- kilometre parish … and 120 catechists. Mass was celebrated in the streets.
“There was lots of energy, lots of enthusiasm, lots of making mistakes, but lots of possibilities to do new things with responses.”
Bishop-elect Norton sees missionary work in Australia today as equally vital, if not more complex, especially during COVID times, when the number of people physically attending church has dropped significantly.
“People are a lot more anxious. Older and disabled people are a lot more isolated than they were before,” he said.
“If they aren’t making it through the (church) door, how do we find them, especially the ones who need us?”
After six years of carrying out key formation roles in Melbourne and Sydney, and nine years as the Divine Word Missionaries’ Australian provincial, Bishop-elect Norton was asked to go and run the society’s renewal programs for priests and brothers outside Rome, in the mountain retreat town of Nemi.
“There are 6000 of us (Divine Word Missionaries) across 75 countries and everybody gets an opportunity, if they have the language, to do a renewal course,” he said.
The courses are run in English, Spanish and Portuguese, and most recently Bishop-elect Norton introduced courses in Indonesian to cater for the society’s 1500 contingent Indonesian members.
Those courses also train hundreds of diocesan and religious men and women from around the globe, including from Africa and Latin America.
“So I’ve been running those courses for the last seven years, but increasingly, and even in Australia, I was asked to assist women and men religious in what’s called interculturality,” he said.
Bishop-elect Norton has become a champion of interculturality, describing it as “living and working together for mission across cultures” – “to help people understand one another a little better”.
He said most religious orders were declining in numbers and needed to find a more strategic approach to introducing personnel to ministries across the world.
In a diocesan setting, he said it was important to reflect on the primary culture and whether it was a “welcoming culture”.
It applies to priests coming from overseas as well as for migrant parishioners.
“Are we really welcoming new people, or are we actually trying to keep out certain people and only welcoming people that are like us – because that’s pretty normal – we all do that,” Bishop-elect Norton said.
“But in Christian life, when things are becoming so diverse and different we really have to take time to sort out how we are different and how we are understanding ourselves and others as we are on this Christian journey together.
“One of the important things about interculturality is that it needs to be intentional.
“It doesn’t just happen by a bunch of coincidences – it needs to be done with a lot of work, intention and prayer.”
Bishop-elect Norton said his order already ministered to multicultural communities in Brisbane archdiocese.
While head of the Australian province, he worked with Brisbane Archbishop Mark Coleridge to set up a Divine Word Missionaries presence in two parishes.
“The SVD are active in the parishes of Inala and Kingston-Marsden, both very multicultural, and therefore places where the SVD confreres do their best work,” he said.
Bishop-elect Norton also worked with the local St Vincent de Paul Society in arranging for one of the order’s properties in Brisbane to serve as a shelter for people fleeing abusive relationships.
When his appointment as auxiliary bishop was announced in November, Archbishop Coleridge agreed that his appointment, as a Divine Word Missionaries priest, was “in some ways surprising”, but added Bishop-elect Norton “brings to the ministry of bishop many gifts and experiences required now more than ever as the whole Church seeks to become more missionary”.
Bishop-elect Norton’s ordination to the episcopate will take place on February 22, starting at 10am.
The event will be livestreamed on Brisbane archdiocese’s website.
