Madonna - May/June 2007

What a coffin can teach us: Monsignor Joseph Cusack - Edmund Campion

Some priests consider that the best sermon they will preach is the one they give when they are lying, dead, in their coffin before the altar of the parish church. A coffin poses ultimate questions: What’s life all about? Why are we here? What does it all mean? Like a good sermon, a coffin asks questions without easy answers; you have to answer its questions for yourself.
Monsignor Joseph Mary Cusack of Mosman parish in Sydney was one such priest. When the doctor told him he had only months to live before stomach cancer killed him, he set about turning his death into a parish event that would give his parishioners an ultimate instruction.
On the last possible Sunday, he went to each of the four parish Masses, sat in a chair on the sanctuary and told the people about his imminent death. Then he went back to his bed, which had been moved into the presbytery dining room, and waited for the end.
Before this, he had already been to a printer to get memorial cards done with space left for the actual date of his death, 16 May 1960. Thus parishioners who came to his funeral would be given a finished card asking them to pray for him. As well, he had wanted the church bell tolled as soon as he died; but since this was at night, his order was countermanded.
His foresight extended even to the cemetery. Those who followed the cortege there found, somewhat to their surprise, a tombstone, complete with the date of death, already in place. (Forward planning does not always work: the coping stone around the grave would not allow the undertakers to lower the coffin into the ground, so they had to come back and complete the burial later.)
We learn these fascinating details about the death of Monsignor Cusack from a new book, Changing Orders: Scenes of Clerical and Academic Life (Brandl & Schlesinger) by Paul Crittenden. A former dean of the faculty of Arts and professor of philosophy at the University of Sydney, Crittenden was once a priest. Changing Orders explores both sides of his life. Readers will know that in Australian libraries there is now a shelf of books of this genre. Crittenden’s is simply the best: even-tempered, reflective, grown-up and noticeably well written.
Ordained in 1910, Joseph Cusack was part of the generation of priests from the Manly seminary who were fiercely Australianist, loving the Australian bushland and Australian poetry. Above all, they wanted an Australian priesthood and, some time in the future, an Australian episcopate. To promote this they set up an association, the Manly Union, in 1914, with a motto Pro Deo et Australia (For God and Australia).
In Sydney the Manly Union priests could not help noticing that their archbishop, Michael Kelly, was ageing. Might he appoint a coadjutor bishop to help him in the complex diocese? They hoped he would choose, if not an Australian, the star of the Manly professoriate, Dr Tommy Hayden, an Irishman who had taught them all and was sympathetic.
The lot fell on another Irishman, Michael Sheehan, a scholar from Maynooth, Ireland’s national seminary. Disappointed, Joe Cusack wrote an abrasive article in a Melbourne Catholic paper, for which he was punished by being sent to the bush.
But Sheehan was unhappy in Sydney and he kept threatening to resign. This gave the Australianists, who now included the pope’s man in Australia, the Apostolic Delegate, their chance. They knew that the Irish lobby among the bishops, given time, would block the appointment of an Australian. So the next time Sheehan resigned they must have an Australian bishop, already consecrated, whom they could immediately put into Sydney. Thus, in 1937, when Sheehan did resign, the Australian Norman Gilroy, then Bishop of Port Augusta in South Australia, was put on a train and sent straight to Sydney.
Cardinal Gilroy (as he became) used to visit the dying Monsignor Cusack. Crittenden records that on one such occasion the dying man took the opportunity to criticise a recent decision in the diocese, which Gilroy deflected with practised suavity, ‘Oh, but Monsignor, you are an inspiration and example to us all. You must pray for us’.
Cardinal Gilroy presided at Cusack’s Requiem Mass, the Mass he had hoped would teach his parishioners a last valuable lesson about the meaning of life. Had they known of their parish priest’s small but significant part in the Cardinal Archbishop’s rise to eminence, they might have seen it as another valuable lesson—about the church.