For our next Plenary Member, we are pleased for you to meet Redemptoris Mater Seminary Rector, Fr Michael Moore SM.
Hailing from a Catholic family of six children, Fr Michael grew up in Camden, New South Wales, attending St Paul’s Primary School Camden with the Sisters of St Joseph and later St Gregory’s College, Campbelltown with the Marist Brothers.
Fr Michael explains that it was his calling to be a missionary priest that led him to enter the Marist Fathers. Being a teaching order, Fr Michael studied mathematics at the University of Sydney.
“My priestly formation and studies were at the Marist Seminary in Hunters Hill. I studied in the 70’s and our classes were imbued with the spirit and doctrine of the Second Vatican Council for which I am still grateful.”
Following his ordination in 1980, Fr Michael went on to teach in secondary schools for a few years, before being appointed to a parish in Melbourne.
“In the parish I came face to face with the lives of many peoples from different cultures and countries,” Fr Michael recalls. “I saw and experienced their sufferings and problems in what I believed was the “lucky country”; however, I found my faith was inadequate to cope; the faith that had brought me to the priesthood was beginning to wane. I needed to have a personal meeting with Jesus Christ.
Fr Michael continued by explaining that in that time he understood that if he could not find answers to his own problems, how could he offer the good news to anyone else?
“Without him everything real that the Church had given to me, including communal life, the Sacraments, the Word of God, all I had received to offer to people, appeared without taste. This crisis of faith was positive.”
Fr Michael continued by explaining that in 1984, Christ came looking for him through a team of Catechists of the Neocatechumenal Way.
“They diagnosed my crisis,” details Fr Michael, “as a lack of faith and invited me to enter a post-baptismal catechumenate to grow in faith.
“This itinerary of Catholic formation is followed in a community of people from all walks of life, different nationalities and varying situations in a parish. Walking in a community of brothers and sisters in Christ has and is renewing my vocation as a priest and restored and brought to life the elements of faith I received through my family, my schooling and my priestly formation. I have seen the announcement of the Gospel change the lives of people, of families, priests and religious.
“With this history God has led me to be the founding Rector of the Archdiocese of Perth’s missionary seminary, Redemptoris Mater. The mandate of the seminary is to provide, in conformity with the charism of the Neocatechumenal Way, a formation for clergy which is attentive and open to the missionary needs of the universal Church.
Let’s hear Fr Michael Moore’s response to what he thinks the Holy Spirit is saying to the Church in Australia at this time.