Over seven years of seminary holidays, John Jegorow worked as a postie in Bassendean. At the Bassendean Hotel after their rounds, a fellow postie asked him why on earth he wanted to be a priest.
He thought for a moment. “I think I love God and I love God’s people,” he said.
“That’s a good answer,” the postie replied. “I’ll take that.”
Fr John tells the story in this next episode of The Record Podcast, where he and Fr Peter Bianchini speak with The Record Editor Jamie O’Brien about their vocation.
The pair were among six men ordained at St Mary’s Cathedral on 31 August 1974, the largest ordination the Archdiocese of Perth had held to that point and celebrated their Golden Jubilee in 2024.
Fr Peter grew up with priests in the family home and made his decision after his father took a truckload of football players to the seminary one Sunday.
“Something tweaked on that occasion,” he says.
Asked what kept him going, Fr Peter says he enjoyed the priesthood and its “very precious and tender moments” in the intimate parts of people’s lives.
He calls forming Perth’s permanent deacons a humbling experience.
He has probably celebrated more weddings than most priests.
“The registrar told me it was 5000 and still counting at one stage,” he says. These days he finds funerals more rewarding.
Fr John, who had the Ballajura church built as a village around its altar, says a priest has to accept “that you’re not superhuman, you’re not the saviour of the world, that you are fallible”.
“You’ve got to laugh at yourself and forgive,” he says.
He wrote for The Record for 10 years, filling in as its editor a few times, to reach people not in the pews on Sunday.
“This is my first podcast ever in my life,” he says.
Fr John calls the priesthood “a wonderful vocation” that is “filled with surprises”.
Fr Peter is most grateful for his family and the good people who stand by their priests.
“People are amazing,” he says.