ChristLife VOL 145 21 August 2025 - Patrick O’Reilly, Marist180
Across 2025, Marist180 is celebrating a very significant milestone - 30 years of service. These celebrations are in a variety of forms, at different times and locations. One of these was with the Marist community of NSW and the ACT, with a Eucharist and Dinner celebration at St Joseph’s College, Hunters Hill, on June 20.
We were delighted, and privileged, to have Br Michael Green deliver a stirring address at the dinner. Michael has very generously agreed to share the transcript of this. Read, savour and enjoy.
Address and Toast on the Occasion of the Thirtieth Anniversary of Marist 180
Brother Michael Green FMS
“Thirty years. Thirty years of dreams and expansion, of road-bumps and challenges, of extraordinary commitment and compassion. We have so much for which to be grateful and to celebrate. But I’d like to open my remarks this evening by taking us back a lot more than thirty years, way before the start in 1995 of what was then called Marist Community Services. And, indeed, some time before 1896 when the Marist Brothers first took over management of St Vincent’s Boys Home, in new purpose-built buildings at Westmead. The year that I want to re-visit for a few moments is sixty years before that, in 1836. The place is Lyon, and the main player is St Marcellin Champagnat. I do so to give some context and rationale for why we are all gathered here.
Not dissimilar to the experience of the current Board and leadership of Marist180 in 2025 – and to its experience right through these last thirty years, as I know first-hand through being a Director and one-time Board Chair – the funds available to Marcellin were never quite a match for the either size of his heart or the pressing needs of young people. In the year in question, 1836, Marcellin had agreed to take over the care of an orphanage which was run by laymen associated with St Nizier’s Church – the same parish in which Frédéric Ozanam, Founder of the St Vincent de Paul Society so significant in the history of our own work, was baptised and grew up.
We still have the one-page contract co-signed by Marcellin on 9 April of that year. There are just eight articles, most of which are administrative. But two stand out for me. One is the annual stipend that would be paid for the Brothers – just 200F for each of them and 300 for the Director. This was considerably less than Marcellin typically demanded from other parishes where the Brothers had schools, and it would not have covered expenses. That was unusual for the money-savvy Founder who was always careful to ensure that he could pay his bills and was known for driving a hard bargain. We can deduce that this project – an inner-city orphanage for the poor, one of three that he took on before his death four years later – must have been quite important for him. Second, and more arresting for me, is one article that describes the kind of approach that the Brothers were to take – indeed contractually mandated to take. Let me quote:
Art. 5: The Brothers shall show truly fatherly concern for the orphans; they shall exercise the greatest of care when overseeing the boys’ religious and moral conduct, endeavour to inspire them with a love of work, manage them with gentleness and firmness, intelligence and wisdom, always trying to bring them back to their duties by using affection rather than severity, and when correcting them, they shall never allow themselves to strike them.
This is quintessential Marcellin. For him it was not simply a matter of meeting a need, but of how that need could be best met. Let’s pause on both the emphasis and the balance in the words of the article: “fatherly concern”, “greatest of care”, “inspire them”, “gentleness and firmness”, “intelligence and wisdom”, “affection rather than severity”.
Not for Marcellin any sophisticated societal analysis into the causes of structural poverty or the insidious effects of the disenfranchisement of an underclass. No, his intuition was much simpler. But at the same time, it was profound. His essential insight? These kids did not have a home and someone to love and believe in them. Neither did they have opportunity. They had a right to both.
The boys in that orphanage would have been regarded by many as tough kids. In the 1830s, Lyon was at the vanguard of industrialisation in France – and all the ugly, unregulated, exploitative, disassociating treatment of people and families that went with that. We can imagine that the alternative to what Marcellin offered those children would have been a hand-to-mouth life on the streets and/or some abusive kind of factory employment. Either way, they would have been manacled by poverty, illiteracy, poor health, and who knows what psycho-emotional dysfunction.
But Marcellin would not have seen the boys through those eyes. The lens he brought, and which he required his Brothers to bring, was one of a father or of a sibling. One underpinned by love, driven by belief, and fuelled by hope. One that expressed itself through personal relationships, creative imagining, educating and skilling. That determined everything. A culture evolved, a way that things were done, a way that priorities were ordered, and values shaped. People were attracted to this Marist way of doing things, and they embraced its culture and developed it. It is the same culture that today defines the work of Marist 180.
It is telling, I think, that in just over twenty years after they arrived in Australia, the Marist Brothers were doing something quite similar to that project of Marcellin in Lyon, and doing it in partnership with the St Vincent de Paul Society. St Vincent’s Boys Home – known from the start simply as “the Home” among us Marists – was no small undertaking. After the College in which we gather tonight, it was, at the time, the next largest single project that the Brothers undertook here in Australia. We can forget that. The 1890s in Sydney was a decade of severe economic recession; amidst the slums of inner Sydney, it was reported that “destitute children” – as they were described – numbered in the hundreds, if not thousands. The Marist response was generous, visionary and shaped by those same intuitions that Marcellin wrote into his 1836 contract in Lyon.
Jump ahead a hundred years. Momentum for significant change to the St Vincent’s programme had been gathering since the early seventies. By the late 1960s there were 300 boys living at the Home, cared for by a small and, to be honest, quite overworked community of Brothers, most of the boys attending primary and secondary at Parramatta Marist. But change was unfolding with some rapidity and the old model began to strain to the point of unsustainability. The factors and reasons were multiple and correlative: the changing priorities and available personnel among the Brothers; the closing of institutions for younger children – from which most of the Westmead boys had traditionally come; indeed, the whole move away from larger institutions for out-of-home care; the increase in referrals of older boys from government and non-government social welfare agencies, from Juvenile Justice and the courts, and the consequent expansion of needs among the boys – emotional, social, psychological, mental; the accompanying need for more specialist staff and multi-disciplinary care; the financing of all of this; the timely inevitability of more integration and cooperation across agencies and services. Enquiries, meetings, proposals, committees and task-forces all pointed in the same direction: relocation, re-casting and diversification of services – to The Siding at Emu Plains in 1981, Minahan in 1982, to the new St Vincent’s in the Egan and Quinlan cottages when the old building closed in 1985. A foster care program had started. It was a change of era.
As this time of rapid change continued in the ensuing decade, in the leadup to establishing Marist Community Services as an incorporated entity, especially in the increasing part played by government and public funding, there was a need for both agility and tenacity – to be agile enough to see and seize opportunity, and to be tenacious enough to avoid compromise of the Marist values and style that had defined the previous century – family spirit, simplicity, deep knowledge and love of young people, down-to-earth and effective relationships, humour, challenging but realisable pathways.
It is no accident that the Marists emerged from this turbulence and uncertainty as the largest non-government provider of out-of-home care in the State. The naming and framing of that area of service may have changed over the years, but this was always our core business: providing, supporting or rebuilding for young people a place and a set of relationships that they could call home. And from that base, to equip, enable and inspire them towards what they could become. We rejoice to see that the service mix today includes the Intensive Family Preservation program, Short Term Crisis Accommodation and Supported Independent Living, the Unaccompanied Humanitarian Minors program for young refugees, the whole range of Specialist Homeless Services, Intensive Therapeutic Care offerings and Case-Work Support Program – each program helping young people enhance their sense of self-worth and life-direction, their ability to form and sustain personal relationships, and a physical and relational base in which they can be at home and from which their lives can have possibility and opportunity.
The training and skills program in Brisbane, a contemporary iteration of the industrial skills taught at the old Home prior to the 1950s, recognises that the liberating effect of education is part of the Marist DNA. It continues the tradition of the education provided to Westie boys by a range of Marist schools right through to this century, and latter-day initiatives such as Pete’s Place, which made the seemingly impossibility of schooling possible for young people.
The last couple of decades have seen a welcome and purposeful expansion to work with First Peoples: accompanying them – particularly those struggling to stay at school and others who have become involved in criminal activity or may be heading that way – to build their sense of dignity, of cultural identity and connection, and pathways to a healthy future. It is painful irony that development of a sense of home and purpose needs to happen at all for people who are on their own country, but of course it does. How inspiring is the work of Daramu and Mudjin Byala.
In some ways the morphing of the few post-1985 services into the much bigger footprint of Marist Community Services ten years later, all the subsequent expansion of programs, its re-naming to Marist Youth Care in 2002 and to Marist180 in 2016, may seem to have been linear, progressive growth. Yes, there was a certain natural progression and increasing capacity to respond, but those closer to the action would testify to the fragilities, the near-misses, the hard-paddling, the re-positioning, the genuine viability questions that marked the journey.
“Can I say, on behalf of both the Marist Brothers and also of the Marist Association, to everyone associated with Marist180: you do us all proud. You make us better Marists.
”
The modest start with two or three programs, headquartered with a tiny team in the old Brothers’ scholasticate at Dundas, the move to the former convent next to Nagle at Blacktown, then to its impressive current premises on First Avenue, all front a bigger and challenging story of seeking to accompany and support, enable and educate, some of the most vulnerable and at-risk young people in this State, and beyond it. That is where the agency, as a Marist entity, has sought to position itself. It’s been a sometimes edgy, but always noble pursuit. Can I say, on behalf of both the Marist Brothers and also of the Marist Association, to everyone associated with Marist180: you do us all proud. You make us better Marists.
To all who have served on the Board since the first one under the chairmanship of the late Ron Mulock AO KSCG, himself fostered as a child, to the one led so well today by the Honourable Barbara Perry, we thank and congratulate you. Your vision and strategy, your fidelity to mission, your prudent oversight, your wise policy settings in an often unpredictable and fraught sector have all served Marist180 effectively and fruitfully.
To each of the CEOs, senior leaders and program managers, for your commitment and heart, your professional expertise and grounded wisdom, you have the congratulations of all Marists. And with you, we celebrate the hundreds, indeed thousands, of women and men who have served as youth workers, carers, therapists, social workers, teachers, unit managers and case managers – some for many years. You have made a home for at-risk and wounded young people, and that is because you yourselves have come to be at home. Marist is you; you are Marist.
And the countless volunteers, partner organisations and specialists, and sponsors, we also offer our gratitude and appreciation. The Marist village is large.
Can I invite everyone to charge a glass and to be upstanding … The Marists of Marist 180.”
Patrick O’Reilly
Director Mission, Inclusion and Identity
Marist180