The Southern Cross | November 2024

Queen of Angels Church community farewelled sacristan Bernard Dowd last month but it wasn’t the first time he’d retired from this position. He spoke to The Southern Cross about his long career serving the priests of the Adelaide Cathedral parish.

Bernard Dowd could easily have spent his whole life working in retail if it were not for his decision to start worshipping at St Francis Xavier’s Cathedral.

His move to the highly specialised role of Cathedral sacristan came after the Hindley Street lighting shop he worked for as a salesperson changed hands and he was laid off by the new owner.

In his mid-40s at the time, he was a parishioner at Goodwood but had begun attending Mass and altar serving at the Cathedral when the administrator’s long-time sacristan, Jock, died.

Bernard clearly remembers the day he was serving at Mass and the phone in the sacristy rang. He went out and took the call informing him of Jock’s death.

“I went back inside and Fr (Robert) Aitken was preaching at the pulpit. He turned and came down to me, he knew what I was going to say…he went back to the pulpit and said ‘Jock our sacristan has died, please pray for him’.

“I still get pretty emotional talking about it.”

Jock’s temporary replacement went on a holiday to the United States and Bernard did such a good job filling in that Fr Aitken asked him to take on the position.

“The phone rang one day when I was at home, it was Fr Aitken and he said ‘will you do me a favour, I want you be my sacristan, but don’t say anything yet, think about it very carefully’,” Bernard said, adding that the priest “never jumped into anything too quickly”.

“I didn’t need to think about it, I said I would love to.”

The youngest of six children born in Broken Hill, Bernard was raised by his mother after his father died suddenly while working in the mines.

His mother ran a grocery shop for a few years but then decided her three younger children (the others having left home) would have more opportunity in Adelaide and moved to Goodwood to be near her older sister.

Bernard attended St Thomas School until Grade 6 and then Marist Brothers at Thebarton.

When he was in Second Year, Fr Lou Travers, the Archdiocesan Vocations director, came to the school to speak to students.

“I had a little talk to him and he came and talked to Mum – she knew him because he was the curate at Goodwood,” Bernard said.

At 14 years of age he entered the seminary at Rostrevor, but not for long.

“That didn’t work out,” he said.

“They decided that they could get on without me. I wasn’t getting on with one of the teachers, that might have had something to do with it, and I was at a silly age.”

Rather than return to school his mother suggested he “go and look for a job”.

The owner of the local grocery store, Frank Barrett, who used to come to the house every Friday to take the family’s order, heard Bernard was having trouble finding work and gave him a contact for a job at Myer.

For the next 12 years he was employed in various departments, finishing in lighting. Over that period he was also involved in the Young Christian Workers movement and he helped Fr Patrick Kelly start a ski club which involved bus trips to the ski fields in Victoria.

One year he agreed to be the organiser of the trip in his holidays but when Myer changed the date of its winter sale he was told he couldn’t take the time off.

“I said ‘here we go Lord’, and I left,” Bernard said.

He has no regrets about the way things turned out, both at Myer and later at the lighting store.

“It’s been a very interesting life,” he said.

As Cathedral sacristan, Bernard lived on the premises, in accommodation at the back of the building, and served under various administrators and Archbishops Gleeson, Faulkner and Wilson for 25 years.

He remembered the time Archbishop ‘Jimmy’ Gleeson collapsed at the altar and “everything stopped” while he ran to call for an ambulance. The Mass had “passed the stage of no return” and was supposed to stop but luckily the choir master threw in a few songs and calmed everyone down.

Asked what the duties of a sacristan entailed, Bernard replied “anything that needs doing”.

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