ARCHBISHOP Francis Rush remained passionate about the priesthood to the end.
In his last interview with The Catholic Leader in March 1999, to mark the 60th anniversary of his ordination, he said, ‘I’m grateful that today I’m as awed as I was on my ordination day at the gift of priesthood.’
Archbishop Rush still had the browning remnants of his ordination card, which lists the names and countries of origin of the ordinands in Latin.
He said he worried when there was insistent talk about the numbers of vocations to the priesthood.
‘I feel God is always going to call men and women to the priesthood and religious life,’ Archbishop Rush said.
‘It is going on all the time, so one is tempted to believe some are rejecting that call. Why?
‘There are pressures of many kinds on them, not the least of which are attitudes by their parents when they are negative about the idea of their child becoming a priest or religious.
‘The limited generosity of such parents doesn’t match the generosity which characterises a large number of young people today.
‘Pope Pius XII used to say to such parents, ‘Don’t be greedy with God’.
‘I’ve often said that if youth don’t seem generous in their response, it’s because we older ones haven’t the wisdom to tap that generosity.
‘There are also people who say their area doesn’t have enough priests and should be allocated more. I am tempted to ask what they would say if a child of theirs came to them and said they wanted to be a priest or religious.’
In the same interview, Archbishop Rush touched on the Church’s future. ‘We too often forget that it’s in God’s hands. Our part is to co-operate generously with the promptings of the Holy Spirit.’
Archbishop Francis Rush meeting Pope John Paul II
Another of Archbishop Rush’s passions was the Second Vatican Council, of which he was one of only two surviving Australian bishops who had attended the sessions in Rome.
He said that in a seldom quoted line from the council, it talked of the wisdom that came from the ability to contemplate and to wonder.
On the laity, who he did much to bring into the Church’s mainstream, he said: ‘Eighteen months before the council, in my first address to the people of Rockhampton diocese as their bishop, I told them what Pius XII had said 16 years earlier, that lay people must grow in the conviction that it’s not so much that they belong to the Church, but that they are Church.
‘The council went on to say that the baptised who aren’t apostolic, prepared to carry the faith to others in whatever way they can, if they haven’t the urge to share their belief in Christ, and their hope, they are useless.’
Francis Rush was 17 when he began studying for the priesthood in 1933 at Springwood in the Blue Mountains near Sydney. Seminarians from Queensland and NSW then studied philosophy there before going on to St Patrick’s, Manly, for theology.
But in 1934 he was sent to Rome, where he studied with 37 men from 18 countries. They were ordained together in Rome on March 18, 1939.
