When Brisbane Catholic priest Peter Kennedy was sacked in February 2009, banned from serving the church anywhere in the world, it caused an international scandal.
His crime wasn’t committing or covering up systematic child sexual abuse, backing autocrats, or fraud.
Under Kennedy’s rule, women could preach, the clergy did not wear vestments, they blessed LGBTQ+ marriages and amended the liturgy, the ritual of worship, to better reflect the community he served. For this he was threatened with excommunication.
“They’ve got a product for selling and we’re a threat to it,” his fellow renegade priest Terry Fitzpatrick says.
“That’s why they kicked us out, because we were threatening the business model.”
About 700 parishioners left St Mary’s Catholic church, going into exile at the Trades and Labour Council building one block down the road. They’re still there, 15 years later.
But after a decade and a half in the wilderness, the rebel church is facing perhaps its biggest challenge yet – ageing.
With numbers dwindling, Kennedy long retired and his pupil, Fitzpatrick, now 67 and set to retire this year without a clear replacement, the former priest believes the flock’s days are numbered.
Not your usual service
The Sunday service starts with an electrical bug.
“Maybe it’s a message from above – stop doing this,” the pianist jokes as the parishioners file in, with no sound coming out of her instrument.
Exactly 50 attended that day, half-filling the “church”, a standard office meeting room on the second storey of the 1980s building lit by fluoro lights.
It’s not the only sign that this won’t be your usual Catholic service.
The Lebanese, Palestinian and rainbow flags have pride of place on the wall.
Another sign reads “act justly, love tenderly, walk humbly”, which could serve as the church community motto. The service is conducted in the name of the “creative spirit”.
Though for someone raised Catholic, some of the service is familiar, even old-fashioned. St Mary’s still uses “and also with you” as a response during mass, a decade after Rome changed it.
Other parts are outright unorthodox. Parishioner Margaret Clifford, a former school principal from Yeppoon, leads the homily: the role of priest or deacon in a Catholic church, where they must be male.
It quotes Luke, but also mystics, poets, Albert Camus and the Nagasaki Peace Park.
Most of the church-goers the Guardian spoke to either flat-out don’t believe in God at all, or have a more complex view of the beyond, including both Fitzpatrick and Kennedy. Most don’t call themselves Catholic; one described herself as a “Catholic alumnus”.
So why does a person who doesn’t believe in God attend a Catholic-style church?
“Your job in life is to make things better for the world that you live in,” parishioner Margaret Ortiz says. “I think that’s really important to be reminded all the time”.
The traditional church is about an authority making an occasion holy, Fitzpatrick says. But at St Mary’s “it’s because we come together it happens, not because this priest comes in and says the magic words”.
“They still create community. They come together to make sense of the realities of their lives,” he says.
The average age is above 60. One member of the parish, Barbie, who turned out in a fine white dress with gold inlay, stood up to declare she had turned 90 a few days before. She was once a cloistered nun, a member of the Sisters of Perpetual Adoration, who silently pray in shifts around the clock, every day. Others are former religious leaders themselves.
In a section set aside for public prayers, another, a first timer, talked about his years of severe drug addiction.
“One of the things about this community is that people have lived very rich and full and challenging lives, and many have experienced great hardship, great grief,” Clifford says.
“Whereas in our institutional church, you have a limited richness … you might have a bishop and three priests. You’ve got a very limited perspective coming from very limited lives.”
There’s a celebrated story from the days before exile. The silence and peace of midnight mass was disturbed when a homeless man entered. Two parishioners made to move him on. Fitzpatrick or Kennedy stopped them. He was welcome, just like everyone.
They meant it too. Members of the church founded Micah Projects, now Brisbane’s largest homeless not-for-profit.
St Mary’s v Catholicism
At one point St Mary’s was one of the best-attended churches in Brisbane.
There are many theories about why numbers have dwindled in the years since. And it’s far from the only church facing the problem. Only about 8.2% of Australian Catholics attend church on a given weekend, a rate barely higher than overall church attendances in the country.
But the Catholic church is hardly making things easier.
The Guardian heard stories of parishioners who’d struggled with funerals and baptisms as a result of attending St Mary’s, even before they left the fold. One says a member of her family had been baptised twice in order to receive priority enrolment at Catholic system schools because Fitzpatrick’s amended version didn’t count. (His marriages, though, are recognised under Australian law).
“Teachers within the Catholic system have been told, ‘We prefer you not to go to that church’, actually, ‘We encourage you not to go to that church’ if you are looking for an ongoing career,” Fitzpatrick says.
There have been attempts to reconcile, none of them successful.
Just last year, St Mary’s was invited to use a church building in Brisbane’s north-west by the Jesuits and held a few Sunday services there in October.
Several members of the St Mary’s community told the Guardian that all was set for the group to move to the inner Brisbane suburb of Auchenflower until a meeting between the Jesuits and the archbishop.
According to church members, the final decision to refuse St Mary’s was on the basis that it was “consecrated ground” – though it will allow others to use church ground, even Protestants. Many saw it as suggesting theirs wasn’t truly a church.
In a statement the a spokesperson for the archbishop of Brisbane, Mark Coleridge, said he was not involved in the matter and declined to comment further.
“It says to us that we’re sort of contaminated and we would contaminate a site, a consecrated space, if we were there,” Fitzpatrick says.
“And I think that’s the way our mob saw it as well. We’re unholy.”
Michael Kelly, the chair of the board, says many blamed their lack of a front of house for the decline, something they’d hoped to resolve with the move.
But others believe it was always a doomed endeavour.
Parishioner Madonna Treschman says “they wouldn’t want us because we’re renegades”.
“What it is, it’s fear. It’s fear that if we come in there, their mob might go we like your liturgy. We don’t like this other liturgy,” Fitzpatrick says.
Reforming the future
In the heady decades of Catholic reform after the second Vatican council, St Mary’s in Exile didn’t seem so radical.
Schools and seminarians were fiddling with the liturgy to make it more relevant – just like the pope was.
But under popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, the movement was “crushed”, as the church swung back to the right, Fitzpatrick says.
“We became an island,” he says. “Benedict was exiling, excommunicating theologians. So the tide was coming, it was going to catch up.”
The church was just waiting for the wave to hit, he says.
On Fitzpatrick’s LinkedIn page, he lists his profession as a “spiritual animator” and “community worker”. Since Kennedy retired in 2020 he’s been the closest St Mary’s had to a priest.
He will retire from both those positions later this year. He hopes it won’t spell the end, gradually phasing out his involvement and handing over to the church as a self-governing institution.
But Kennedy thinks otherwise. He thinks the whole church will “just retire” without “crying or weeping or gnashing of teeth”.
“It’s going to slowly die, it’s happening now. It’s happened the last few years. We’ve got an ageing population. I mean, there are people in their 60s, 70s, 80s. Why do you want to go to church when you’re in your 70s and 80s?” Kennedy says.
If the church does finally fade away, does that mean the Catholic church wins?
“Well yes and no,” Fitzpatrick says.
“No, in the fact that we were able to maintain and be a vibrant community for at least 15 years or whatever time it takes. That’s been enormously meaningful and bought a lot of life and inspiration to people.”
The reform movement would still exist in Catholic school communities – and the minds of many.
“It didn’t win in that sense,” Fitzpatrick says.
“But in terms of us ceasing to exist, the church would prefer us not to exist, because it challenges their reason that they have to change. Our presence has always continued to challenge their inability to change and transform. That they weren’t prepared to offer us hospitality was symbol of that.”