EVER since young Frank Jones went to the local Catholic youth group to meet girls at age 15, he was inspired by the joy and happiness of the local priests and vowed to join them.
“They told me it was the Eucharist that made them so joyful. I wanted the same joy and my father was a daily communicant and a great witness to me and I started going to Mass every day,” he said.
At 18 he joined the St Columba’s Seminary, Springwood, in the Blue Mountains of NSW.
“I was single-minded in that I believed that God was wanting me to be a missionary and I was advised by missionaries, ‘for goodness sake, do something practical’,” Fr Frank said.
And he firmly believed if you really want to touch the lives of people it was best to do it through service, so “nursing really was a great educator for me”.
Fr Frank had lived in Canberra-Goulbourn archdiocese as a child, however his mother died when he was finishing school at 18 and his father died a year later.
“I came up here to Queensland to see an aunt of mine, a Carmelite nun at Ormiston, whom I had never met before and Ormiston became my home, and it still is,” he said.
“We were the best of mates and the community of Ormiston have been my inspiration. They are wonderful people.
“They’ve supported me all throughout my youth, because it was hard.”
The Sisters gave him a “home” on their farm.
Fr Frank, schooled at St Edmund’s in Canberra, did his nursing training at the Holy Spirit Hospital in Brisbane.
During his holidays from the seminary, he worked at the Mater Private, becoming great friends with the Sisters of Mercy there.
“Not only was it great formation for practical knowledge, but just on the human level it was terrific,” he said.
“I really love Brisbane and my best friends were made in Queensland. When I was watching the game (earlier in the year), the State of Origin, I was sending text messages to my priest mates and friends down in Canberra and New South Wales. ‘Be prepared to cry because you’re going to get slaughtered’ – they know I consider myself a Queenslander.”
Fr Frank began as a missionary in South America in 1990, living with the Mapuche Indians in the south of Chile.
“I was six years alone with the Mapuches,” he said.
Communications were much more difficult in those days of “snail-mail”. It would take a couple of hours to get the mail and then “most of the time your mail would be stolen in Chile in those days. I never got any of my parcels, which was heartbreaking when you’re on your own waiting.”
The isolation was very painful and difficult and there was loneliness – “you have to be calm and contemplative in order to live that life within the Mapuches, and they in fact taught me that I was contemplative by nature”.
Fr Frank came back to Australia and to England for a 12-month course in human development, formation studies at the Institute of St Anselm, founded by the late Cardinal Basil Hume.
“(It was) for the formation of the formators,” Fr Frank said. “It’s a very intense course – it was an international course for missionaries.
“So we had Africans, Asians and Europeans and from South America – you get the collective wisdom of everybody there … I was the only Australian.”
Then it was off to a very different life in Ecuador. His parish had 60,000 people.
“With desperately poor people and atrocious living conditions, sometimes as a priest you say, ‘where am I going to begin?’ and you think ‘well, this is all a bit too much’,” he said.
Inspiration came in the form of Oscar Romero, the martyred Archbishop of San Salvador.
Fr Frank went on a pilgrimage and prayed where the archbishop was assassinated while celebrating Mass.
“Oscar Romero opted for the poor at a time of great civil unrest when there was tremendous violence in Salvador,” he said.
“He spoke out against the repression and would tell the soldiers to ‘stop this, in the name of God’. So they shot him.
“Oscar used to say, when you look at the pastoral and the enormity of it, ‘I’ve learnt, we are not the architects, God is the architect. We’re just the workers. We just plant the seeds’.
“‘Do one small thing and do it well. And God will do the rest.’ And I have.”
Fr Frank started the mission in Ecuador with nothing.
“I had a little block of land that I bought for $8000 – dirt, it was the rubbish tip and I took it and filled it up with soil and rocks and we built a beautiful church there,” he said.
“I had a 24-hour guard because of the mafia … previously in Equador I had been tied up and bashed. That happens quite often in these places and I had two dogs and my doors were made out of heavy steel with bolt locks, it’s another world …
“One of the nuns had a gun and she would shoot it up into the air which would make them run.
“We would have a rule in the society that as priests we would go at night to our communities, but no further.”
Fr Jones eventually got parasitic infections in the lungs and worms that caused damage to his heart and significant lung damage – he was forced to come back home.
“It broke my heart really to leave the mission,” he said.
“It was hard, it was really hard. But it was great to achieve what I did at the time. You’re involved in the struggles of the people and they really need you.”
By the time he left the mission he had built a nutrition centre, childcare centre, a clinic, the church, and had bought the land for the sisters and built the convent, as well as building a school and presbytery and another big “open” church.
“That’s a great deal to be able to do … But that’s God doing that,” Fr Frank said.
Now back “home” in Brisbane, Fr Frank looks after two parishes – coming to Manly first in 2010 and the following year asked to take on Birkdale.
The two parishes and schools are vital and growing – “St John Vianney’s at Manly has about 300 kids and St Mary MacKillop at Birkdale has nearly 700 kids”.
The Mary MacKillop school motto, “Reach out. Embrace. Achieve” could just as easily be applied to Fr Frank Jones.
He came from Ecuador to Brisbane, with Archbishop Mark Coleridge, then Archbishop of Canberra and Goulburn – the diocese for which Fr Frank was ordained – “very kindly” allowed him to work in Brisbane archdiocese, because of what the doctors had said about his heart and lung problems.
“Archbishop (John) Bathersby (retired Archbishop of Brisbane) and Father Peter Meneely (Vicar General) were also very kind to me”.
Fr Frank is relishing his time in the Manly and Birkdale parishes.
“Mary MacKillop spoke that ‘gratitude is a memory of the heart’ and that’s what I’m full of,” he said.
“It’s amazing how in the providence of God you know people – I nursed Archbishop Rush a number of times – that was a great privilege – what a tremendous man he was.
“People like (Corinda-Graceville parish priest) Fr Gerry Kalinowski and retired priests such as Fr Kevin Caldwell, Fr Clem Hodge and Fr Denis Long have been tremendously great friends to me – and Fr Peter Luton when I was nursing.
“Many people come into your life and they have an influence on you.”
Kindness and friendship “resonate in your life” – like the “really welcoming letter” from Bishop Brian Finnigan on Fr Frank’s return to Australia – “You know – encouragement – and you can never underestimate what that does to a person.”
Fr Frank celebrated his silver jubilee at Manly in December last year.
“The two parishes are great, when I got here last August one of the first things I did was begin the RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults) program again that year and we had 14 new people come to the Church,” he said.
Fr Frank sees a good future with Brisbane’s new archbishop, Archbishop Coleridge, “enthusiastic for mission, which is a big thing”.
“Here in Australia you don’t have the violence and injustice, but you don’t have the faith and culture coming together like in Latin America,” he said.
“The culture of Australia doesn’t enhance membership of the Church, though it’s a good culture of justice and equality which you can really marry to our faith. That’s the challenge.”
