FATHER Wally Dethlefs is the bearer of Good News.
The retired priest, 74, from Brisbane, has changed the lives of thousands of young Queenslanders crying out for a listening ear, desperate to be seen as dignified human beings.
While the humble priest could live on without any recognition, he was this year awarded a Member of the Order of Australia on the Australia Day honours list.
Reflecting on his award, Fr Dethlefs said he noticed a bit of that St Mary MacKillop spirit in him, with her quoted as having said, “Never see a need without doing something about it”.
“I hope she doesn’t mind that I’m stealing her thunder,” he said.
The Australia Day award recognised Fr Dethlefs’ “significant service to youth through a range of advocacy, social justice and welfare roles, and to the community of Brisbane”.
The concern and hospitality he has for all people speaks loudly as he walks over to greet me in the car park outside his South Brisbane apartment, excitedly welcoming me to his home.
He takes my oversized camera bag from me and, walking into the lobby, he casually suggests I take the lift and, clutching the bag, takes the stairs.
Humour is one of Fr Dethlefs’ great qualities.
“People can never tell if I’m joking or not,” he said.
One thing he doesn’t joke about is his work with young people.
Since his ordination to the priesthood in 1963, Fr Dethlefs has fought for justice among young people, especially homeless, detained or imprisoned youth.
He’s “spearheaded” lobby groups against injustice in Queensland correction facilities, helped initiate youth justice organisations and was a panelist for a national inquiry into youth homelessness in 2007.
It’s the relationships with those young Queenslanders that really stands out in Fr Dethlefs’ life story.
While he can’t count the number of young people he’s met over the years, he can certainly recall stories of the simple conversations about Scripture, prayer, atheism, and inspirational faith, some of which led to serious conversions.
For Fr Dethlefs, it’s the people who justify the fight for social justice.
“People who work for social justice must never ever lose sight of the people,” he said.
“It’s incredibly important that you work with and not for.”
Scattered throughout his apartment are tokens of the people he describes as “real heroes”, young people he’s worked with over the years who live because of Fr Dethlefs’ unconditional love and support.
There’s a moving poem that cites Fr Dethlefs as the only person who could see a young female as more than a “young kid” doing the wrong thing.
Another is a large indigenous painting given to him from a woman who was the youngest homeless person he’s met, at the time, just eight.
These remnants and memories speak of the hope Fr Dethlefs gave to many young people.
Hope, along with compassion, is a quality that Fr Dethlefs said the Church brought to social justice works.
“We should be a Church that doesn’t give up,” he said.
This phrase was not originally his, but actually came straight from the mouth of an atheist.
“I remember working in the prisons, and I was getting on really well with this guy who had a double life sentence – it was incredibly serious,” he said.
“The State Government at the time was talking about bringing in capital punishment, and talking with him one day in the prison, I said to him – and he was a very intelligent man, mind you – ‘What’s your take on this capital punishment stuff?’
“He said, ‘We don’t give up on trying to find a cure for cancer, don’t give up until we’re able to put people on the moon and get a vehicle on Mars, so why should we give up on a human being who commits a terribly serious crime?’
“This guy was an atheist.
“He said, ‘And you Christians, you can’t give up on us because that is something you cannot give up on – you cannot give up on human beings’.”
After developing an interest in the Mass, Fr Dethlefs said the man, whom he called “his atheist friend”, went from being atheist to an agnostic.
“And eventually he found his way back to the Catholic faith, which was very, very strong,” he said.
As chaplain in 1973 to the Sir Leslie Wilson Youth Detention Centre, one of the worst correctional facilities at the time, Fr Dethlefs saw many young detainees have “truly sacred moments”.
Most of the young people in the juvenile detention centre prayed, he said.
“They’d say to me, because they knew I was a Catholic priest, ‘I don’t go to church, but I pray everyday’ with this look on their face, as though they thought I would tell them to go to church.
“I’d say, ‘Good on ya. Tell me about your prayer’, and so they would.
“And I encouraged them in their prayer, wherever they were, and I praised them for that – ‘that is brilliant, that’s a wonderful prayer’.
“I’d say, ‘Prayer is doing what you’re doing, talking to God – as (St) Teresa of Avila would say, a conversation’.
“That was really amazing.”
Fr Dethlefs’ compassionate and personable approach in the prisons and detention centres was his way of bringing the Gospel to young people.
“The Gospel talks about Good News – ‘I’ve come to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim liberty to captives, sight to blind’,” he said.
“So I’d come across homeless young people, thinking about the Gospel, and I’d think, ‘Well, what’s good news for you?’
“Good news for you is, if you don’t have a place to live, finding a place to live.
“If you don’t have dignity, then good news for you is having your dignity affirmed even when you believe, and you have been told, and it’s been bashed into you, that you don’t have any.
“And of course underlying that, is hope.
“Jesus was Good News for all kinds of people – people on the margins, on the outer.”
Bringing Good News to young people also meant challenging certain Queensland laws that, from what Fr Dethlefs could see, was a terrible injustice to young people.
“With many of the young people I worked with in the early years, we had laws in Queensland where we could lock up young people who had not committed any criminal offence at all, and lock them up for an indeterminate period of time,” he said.
“And when we locked them up, we gave them no education at all, even though education is ‘supposedly’ compulsory for all people in this country under the age of 15, 16 now.
“So I was seeing those kind of people, in the juvenile detention centre, applying the Good News principle, asking, ‘What’s good news for them?’
“One is treating them with dignity and trying to help their problems and coping with the injustices of the system that put them in there, but the other thing was, that you try to do something about changing the unjust laws and changing the unjust systems.
“That’s what we did.”
Between 1975 and 1981 Fr Dethlefs and many others working with him set up the Juvenile for Justice lobby group, studying the way the children’s and youth courts dealt with young people, both with welfare and institutional care.
He described a “great abuse” of solitary confinement, and said children as young as eight would be isolated for two or three days, even up to one month, and he fought to change it.
While grateful for his Australia Day award, Fr Dethlefs said the hard work it recognised was slowly being undone, with the State Government halving the funding for Youth Justice Conferencing and the defunding of many peak youth services in Queensland.
He hoped the award would “wake up” the community to see that young people were still worth fighting for, not with punishment, but with compassion.
“The present State Government seems to want to go down the track of punishment, punishment, punishment – the colonial penal mentality, which we haven’t thrown away for 200 years, and we can do better,” he said.
“Maybe it’s that our community needs to wake up to what is best and what is the most efficient way of using taxpayers’ dollars, and how can we support these young people to be good citizens.”
