Parish Priest, St Christopher's, Airport West
Creative Director for Stations of the Cross, WYD08

I quote from Pope John Paul II’s Letter to Artists delivered on Easter Sunday 1999 on the eve of the millennial celebrations.  The echoes of St Augustine’s own search and late finding of the ultimately beautiful as the search for God is intentional and unmistakable:

“The artist has a special relationship to beauty.  In a very true sense it can be said that beauty is the vocation bestowed on the artist by the Creator, in the gift of artistic talent.  Those who perceive in themselves this kind of divine spark which is the artistic vocation, feel the obligation not to waste this talent, but to develop it in order to put it at the service of their neighbour and humanity as a whole.”

I wish I had said that to my highly skeptical and dismissive principal at our parting 3 minute interview on the last day of my secondary schooling, for, knowing of my artistic dreams and fantasies, he farewelled me with – “you might well end up doing something useful with yourself one day when and if you come down to earth like the rest of us.  Your head is up in the clouds.”

I thanked him for his practical advice and there and then made a firm resolution to keep my head up there – where it belonged…

My university years were a sheer delight and unfortunately all too brief.  They were the years that opened up a whole new world of political idealism, books, music, theatre, opera and cinema as forms of Art; not to mention the heated debates and passionate discussions that often ran into the early hours of the morning.  For the first time in my life, the idea of the pursuit of the beautiful had become a realistic life option as I entertained thoughts and plans for a future career.

Given my migrant background it was only logical that my parents strongly insisted I give serious consideration to something sensible and secure like teaching, since I clearly had no aptitude either for Law or for Medicine – those classic upwardly mobile migrant professions.

But for my part, I had dreams of becoming an international director like Luchino Visconti who could effortlessly move from drama to opera and then on to cinema at whim and become very rich, famous and enormously respected and admired in the process.

My parents were not convinced and so we compromised.  After my arts degree I settled for teacher training and taught for one year at far away Swan Hill High School, but during those very long 12 months I was mapping out my artistic career very much like a military campaign.

The year 1973 saw the official opening of the Sydney Opera House and I found myself armed with a generous scholarship from the Australia Council and a job at the Australian Opera as a trainee director.  And hence the following year, I departed for London where my career as a director in my own right took off and flourished.

My prevailing sense of the aesthetic from those beginnings and throughout my artistic life was the scrupulous and never to be satisfied quest for the beautiful, the true, and the telling moment – all held together in the creative tension between form and content.

Simultaneously with my opera work I was involved in the launching of a new drama company here in Melbourne that would encourage and showcase new contemporary works that celebrated us, the migrants, and our own particular foibles, fears and joys.  At around the same time I took on direction of the Italian Arts Festival which gave me many opportunities to present an image of Italian culture that was not shackled to the merely folkloric or the quaint.  Conscious of tradition and deeply respectful of its legacy, I set about presenting a yearly program that entertained, surprised, uplifted and challenged all at the same time.

It is from those early experiences that the current Melbourne International Festival was born…but that’s another story!

In spite of the fact that during those years I would have to say that I considered myself quite dismissive of most religious practice, I nevertheless had an enduring sense of being especially blessed and somehow looked after by God.

I was often asked where all this artistic interest and passion came from.  Perhaps it was my imagination as a child that had been nourished by my father who used to read to us after the evening meal…

Back in Italy as a 5 year old, I was certainly enthralled and completely captivated by my first experiences of being taken to church.  I found myself enraptured by the mystery, the darkness, the statues, the bells, the candles, the incense, the music – and the reality of the unseen world that touched me profoundly and emotionally.

I recall that as a child my imagination and the world of games and make-believe were all taken up with re-enactments of religious rituals.  While my peers were outside kicking a ball in the street, I was inside in my mother’s nightie, with a coloured towel over my shoulders, acting out a Mass or the Corpus Christi procession.

The other children were made to sit on my mother’s kitchen floor while I harangued them from a high chair with my version of impassioned preaching.  My mother’s visiting friends and neighbours would also be commandeered and cajoled into becoming unwilling penitents so that I might absolve them through a colander.

After that, everyone would be lined up to receive little round bits of white cardboard that I had cut out.  Clearly, I was smitten!  And with that sort of background where else could I be at home but in the opera house?!  

In my 35th year, after a very brief stint as Director of the Melbourne Film Festival, I found myself assisting the Italian composer Giancarlo Menotti with his restaging of a much admired production of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

One morning during a break in the lighting rehearsal and while sitting next to this great composer/director, I looked around at the opulence and the magnificence of the interior of this – one of the great opera houses of the world – and saw it with new eyes.

Quite suddenly, the crystal chandeliers, and the plus red velvet, and the gold tassels all looked depressingly tawdry, cheap and phoney.  I experienced a sense of profound disappointment.

It was during those days that the idea of priesthood surfaced after having been dormant for so many years.

At secondary school my early religious fervour, which had seriously entertained the idea of priesthood, was knocked out of me and, as such, I was subsequently forced to find God elsewhere.

Back home, when I summoned up enough courage to bring up the topic, my parents and close friends were shocked and appalled that I would even consider such a thing.  “We simply can’t imagine you giving up all those things that you find so stimulating, for a life time of bingo and chook raffles!”, they said.

I would like to be able to say that I generously made the decision, right there and then, to give it all up for God, but alas, the reality was a particularly painful ten year struggle that pulled me this way and that.  I felt that the price was simply too high, and hope sincerely that God would change His mind and choose someone else.

And then the moment of truth arrived for me in 1991, at my father’s death.  At the funeral I tried to imagine my own death.  What would I say to God?  How had I used His gifts in the service of my neighbour?  How did I leave the world a better place than I had found it?  And then the words of Prince Myshkin in Dostoevskij’s novel The Idiot returned to haunt me:  “The world will be saved by beauty.”

Cardinal Martini’s pastoral letter to his diocese in 1999 frames those words in a more telling question “Quale bellezza salverà il mondo?” – Which beauty will save the world?  Instinctively my heart provided the answer.  I knew, finally, what I had to do.

And thus the quest had brought me to the end of one journey - the beauty of holiness, the beauty that is God, the beauty that is the priesthood that serves Him.  A beauty that, just like St Augustine, I found late in life, but one that remains surprisingly and refreshingly ever-new, and sustains me on a new journey.

And yes, my head is still very much in the clouds…