In a human mode — Fr John Wallis

Edmund Campion

He wanted to be a priest but no one would have him. The dioceses of Melbourne, Sydney, Wilcannia and Maitland wouldn’t give him a start. Neither would a religious order. Finally he persuaded the Archbishop of Hobart to take him on, although he had to find his own seminary fees. In time, however, John Corcoran Wallis would become a cornerstone of the Tasmanian church and a hero in the Australian Catholic story.

As a young curate he was sent to Bruny Island, which saw a priest only once or twice a year. On this visit a Catholic mother challenged him about the church’s neglect of islander Catholics: ‘Why cannot we have sisters come here sometimes to instruct our children?’ she asked.

Father Wallis was sympathetic, he could appreciate the problem; but he could also see the difficulties. In those days religious sisters lived in convents and they ran big institutions like schools and hospitals. They did not wander about like gypsies in caravans.
Still, the problem kept nagging at him and he continued to think about it. First, he started a correspondence course in religion for remote, isolated children. In time they would grow to a mailing list of 1000 students and he would add summer schools for the children in their holidays. More and more, however he came back to the islander mother’s idea of a mobile group of religious sisters. Writing and talking about it, he matured the idea over a decade until, in 1944, a group came together under the motto ‘Into the Highways and Byways’.

The Missionary Sisters of Service, as they came to be called, were not tied to buildings. They travelled around the countryside, gathering children where they found them, to instruct them in the faith and prepare them for the sacraments. People called them ‘the caravan sisters’, which catches the strangeness of their story. Invited to the mainland by several bishops, they would become a vital element in outback Australian Catholicism.

Meanwhile John Wallis was getting on with his life as a secular priest. He built a church and opened a school, bringing Dominican nuns to Tasmania to staff it and running a market garden to pay his way. He started a lending library, which flourished for 32 years until a fire destroyed the books. The archbishop put him in charge of fund-raising for the missions (the Propagation of the Faith) and director of Catholic Action. He became the archbishop’s vicar for religious and a member of the senate of priests. A busy life.
Yet he did not allow all this activity to swamp his inner life.

Responsibility for the formation, spiritual and intellectual, of the sisters kept him studying and praying. The Bible was for him the essential book of the Church which he made his own. Then came the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), an event that gave him roadmaps for the rest of his life. The thick volumes of Vatican II documents was his constant companion; his copy, underlined and annotated, was put on his coffin with his Bible when he died, in 2001.

Vatican II taught Catholics how to love God in today’s world. Already Father Wallis was giving retreats and days of recollection, something the forward-looking Archbishop Justin Simonds had encouraged his diocesan priests to do. Now John Wallis would develop this aspect of his ministry, going to the Jesuits for insight and instruction.

Like many priests of his generation, he carried in his memory a store of Latin maxims packed with centuries-old church wisdom. His favourite was Humano modo—that our responses to God should always be in harmony with our human nature, not contrary to nature or anti-human but in a human mode. Smelling the flowers and enjoying the scenery could be a dialogue with the Creator.
Typical of his simple, everyday yet profound teaching was something he once said on one of his retreats. He told the retreatants that he liked to keep a piece of barley sugar in his mouth when he was bushwalking, not chewing it nor eating it but letting it sit there while he savoured its melting goodness that seeped energy gently into his body. Short rich passages from the Bible could be used in the same way, as if they were mantras. Like the piece of barley sugar, the grace of the Bible could seep into you almost unnoticed.

As his reputation grew, Father Wallis came into demand for retreats and conferences across Australia and New Zealand. He became a national figure. To have fostered such a priest is one of the glories of the Tasmanian church.