Our priest this week: Fr Doug Harris – Glendalough.
By Anthony Barich
FOR the longest time, Fr Doug Harris was completely convinced that his calling in life was to be married and have lots of kids. Lots. Like, ten.
This may have been inspired by his mother who, he said, loved children. Yet today, Fr Doug, who turns 50 on October 16, is the parish priest at Glendalough who travels to southeast Asia promoting perpetual adoration.
So what happened?
Put it down to cloistered Redemptorist nuns, John Paul II and God, he says. The product of a non-practising Catholic father and a non-practising Presbyterian mother growing up in Newcastle, NSW, no-one tried harder than him to find a girlfriend. Though the pining was strong, nothing eventuated – his mates seemed to have more success than him.
Despite his non-religious upbringing, he attended daily Mass in his early 20s – which he today admits is still totally inexplicable. He suspects it may have something to do with some nuns who never met him but lived in a cloistered convent in his town of Redhead who would have prayed for the Church and the world.
He did start to feel a calling to the priesthood in his early 20s, but his urge to get married was so strong he felt he’d never have had the strength to say no to the latter. That was until November 1986, when Pope John Paul II visited Australia, and during an event at Sydney’s Royal Randwick Racecourse, where he couldn’t even hear the pontiff speaking he was so far away, “out of the blue” he felt a burning desire to “be single for the Lord, to give myself to Him completely”.
He’d been involved in the Disciples of Jesus Covenant Community for four years, and does not doubt the formation he received under one Fr Julian Porteous – now an Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney – in a house they opened in 1988 for those discerning consecrated life – helped cement his vocation to the priesthood.
The belief developed at that stage that he’d like to spread perpetual adoration if he eventually became a priest.
In 1993 he joined the Missionaries of the Blessed Sacrament Order in the Philippines, completing four years of seminary formation before completing them at St Charles’ Seminary in Perth.
Archbishop Barry Hickey ordained him with seven others in June 2000 in what was the largest group to be ordained in WA to that point.
Now, between running St Bernadette’s parish in Glendalough, he travels Indonesia, to setting up perpetual adoration chapels with Fr Hugh Thomas, a Redemptorist.