The Perth Archdiocesan Catholic community has lost one of its best-known lay leaders with the passing of Reg Firth, who founded the Perth branch of the Disciples of Jesus Covenant Community and served as its senior coordinator from 1993. Reg was also instrumental in the establishment of the Acts 2 College of Mission and Evangelisation, 24.7 Youth Ministry, and bringing the Youth Mission Team to Perth
Mr Firth passed away on 25 May at the age of 81, three years after a diagnosis of blood cancer.
The Community now has branches across Australia, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea and Indonesia. When founder Colin Sutton died in 2018, Reg travelled east to give one of the eulogies, describing him as visionary, focused, humble and loyal.
Speaking to The Record in 2015, when the Community coordinated Fr John Rea’s Perth healing tour, Reg called his ministry a genuine gift from God for Perth. This ministry has continued through Miracle Prayers.
Born at St Anne’s Hospital, Mt Lawley, on 31 January 1945, Reg was the youngest of Raymond and Alice Firth’s three children.
The family lived in Mount Lawley and Collie before settling in Doubleview, “when Scarborough Beach Road was two planks of wood and the blocks around it cow paddocks.”
Reg cheerfully described himself as a ratbag. He and a group of local boys once kidnapped a boy from a rival gang, tied him to a tree and forgot about him until dinnertime.
Home was harder. Reg’s father, once a successful businessman, lost the business, the house and the savings to gambling and alcohol, and died when Reg was 12.
At the bedside, Reg promised his mother he would never drink, and he kept that promise for the rest of his life.
Alice died when Reg was 16, worn down by the three jobs she worked. Neither parent reached 50. His sister Raeal left school to raise her two younger brothers, and Reg left in Year Ten for odd jobs at the Perth Metropolitan Markets.
Researching his father’s childhood years later, Reg discovered the rejection his father experienced, writing in his journal that the more he found out, the more he grew to love and forgive him.
Reg found his calling in sales, first in real estate and then life insurance, eventually heading Capita Life Insurance’s WA division. He met Janny de Vries at the opening of a Perth wine bar, an unlikely setting for a ‘lifelong teetotaller.’
When Janny returned to Holland, Reg followed and persuaded her staunchly Protestant parents to let her marry an Australian Catholic.
The couple raised six children, Natasha, Mark, Luke, Pete, Anouska and Paul, in Perth, then Sydney, then Perth again. Eight grandchildren knew him as Opa.
His children remember a father who wrote love notes to their mother on the bathroom mirror with a bar of soap and taught them that the highest compliment you can pay anyone is to sneak up to their car and lift the wipers.
The Community became his second home. He left the insurance industry to work for it full time, and its Osborne Park venue, where he once broke his back falling from the roof whilst laying cable in the dark, took the hours he did not give family.
Illness barely registered. He broke his pelvis in three places on a silent retreat with monks in Europe and telephoned Janny to report a small fall.
When anyone raised his cancer he waved it away, saying he refused to be sick because he had so much more to do. Asked by hospital staff how he felt, he would always smile and say, “with my fingers”.
Reg’s Requiem Mass was celebrated on 29 May at Holy Spirit Catholic Church, City Beach, by Parish Priest Fr Emmanuel-tv Dimobi, with Emeritus Archbishop Barry Hickey, Auxiliary Bishop Nelson Po, Fr Nino Vinciguerra, and Fr Ken Barker MGL concelebrating.
His six children carried his coffin, and no alcohol was served at the gathering afterwards.
Reg Firth will be remembered for his faith, humour and the work that continues.