Fr Kevin O'Loughlin

Kevin O’Loughlin was born in 1935 in Pinnaroo, South Australia, the fifth of six children to his parents John Francis O’Loughlin and Mary Ursula McCabe. Kevin was the last of those children to die and he was the second longest living being a young 88 whereas his brother Monsignor Jim was an older 88. It seems that the priests lived longest in that family. Kevin was born with talipes (club feet) which his mother described as looking like two little fists turned inwards.

He and his mother often travelled from Pinnaroo to Adelaide to the Children’s Hospital when he was a baby as he underwent treatment for his talipes. He was put in plaster from his toes to his waist. When he was 18 months old the plaster was reduced to his thighs and then later reduced to his knees. Kevin spent a lot of time attending the hospital in Adelaide. The journey by rail took a total of seven hours and although he often travelled with his mother, he later travelled alone especially on the return journeys after spending a few weeks in hospital. His mother used to buy daffodils in springtime for the journey home and later, when he travelled by himself, Kevin would buy daffodils for his mother. He was embarrassed when his mother told his brothers that he was more thoughtful than them.

The treatment for Kevin for club feet was that he was anaesthetised by ether, his feet were straightened a bit more and replastered. Throughout life he hated the smell of methylated spirits, which reminded him of ether, and he didn’t get plastered very often either. He often had calipers fitted and had to use crutches after some operations. This restricted his movements and his ability to engage in the rough and tumble of childhood activities with his brothers and sister.

In hospital he met loneliness and sadness. He met lovely nurses and grumpy male doctors and scary matrons. He also learned about neatness and hierarchies and regimes and even how to find a little bit of fun amidst it all. In those early years in hospital and enforced stillness Kevin continued his school work and he began to keep notes which turned into journals and then later into a book called ‘Childhood to Priesthood’. Kevin tells some stories of the Mallee through a child’s eyes: events on farms, attending a one-room school, staying with relatives closer to school because he couldn’t walk very far, his brothers pushing him to the train station in a wheeled wooden cart. He also wrote of going to boarding school in Adelaide and how much he hated the bullying and the cadets and the cruel teaching practices. At the same time, he is thankful that the school gave him a strong grounding in social justice and gave him a social conscience.

After school Kevin went back to Pinnaroo where he went to work at the Bank of Adelaide, starting as Office Boy and moving through the ranks over four years to become Acting Teller. He didn’t want to move to another town for promotion as his mother was widowed and his rent was useful to her. Kevin was also a member of the Emergency Fire Service with his brother Maurice and they had to be ready to race to the station, jump on the truck and go and fight fires around the town and district. Kevin was also Honorary secretary of the Pinnaroo South Football Club. He had a second job as night telephonist at the Telephone Exchange in the Post Office and that one pound a week supplemented his bank pay of 5 pounds a week. Six pounds a week in 1955 would be equivalent to a bit over $230 a week now.

When he decided to leave the bank he explored joining the RAAF. He passed the written tests and surprisingly got an interview which he found out later had been wrangled by someone who knew his brother Raymond who was already in the Air Force. Kevin’s medical history meant he couldn’t get a foot in the door of that club and he returned to Pinnaroo a bit relieved as he hadn’t wanted to do all the marching. After resigning from the bank, and not knowing what he would do next, he took up an invitation from three men from the Riverland to go on a working holiday around Australia. Kevin recorded some of their adventures in his journals. There are funny stories of luck and hard work, drinking and gambling, serendipity and solidarity. All through their journey Kevin and one of the others continued to attend Mass on Sundays and feast days and over the course of the journey Kevin said he found the grace to try out being a priest.

Priestly formation at the seminary was challenging but Kevin got through, being ordained a priest in Adelaide on 9 July 1966 and celebrating his first Mass in at Our Lady of the Rosary Church in Prospect.

Kevin ministered in the Cathedral, Thebarton and Woodville parishes. He enjoyed his parish work around the city and parishioners loved him. He brought compassion to the role based on empathy and a real understanding of how people lived their lives. He could quickly connect with people, even with people who had never really spoken to a priest before. He had the ability to gently move through barriers because he had a genuine interest in people and what they had to say and he could engage on a range of topics.

Kevin also served in the country parishes of Bordertown, Barossa Valley and Victor Harbor. These entailed much driving. On one occasion he fell asleep while driving and woke up with the car stalled in a sand drift and him hanging out the open car door. He was uninjured and the car was undamaged, so he woke himself up properly and got back into the driver’s seat and out of the sand and on to his next Mass!

While at Bordertown he was elected as the South East delegate to the Senate of Priests.   

In January 1978 Kevin moved to the Barossa Valley as Parish Priest and remained for nine years. He followed in the footsteps of his brother Jim who had been the second priest in that parish from 1962 to 1971. While in the Barossa Kevin took some time off to attend a course in Pastoral Theology.

His favourite posting as a priest was his last one, at the Women’s and Children's Hospital where he had spent so much time as a patient in his early life. Kevin remembered what he had gone through, and he understood how it felt to be a patient and what it meant to parents to have a sick child. He would provide support through listening and providing advice. He brought fun through an array of jokes; wearing bright cartoony ties, and through his amazing giggling laugh.

After he retired as a priest Kevin continued his ministry in the hospital and when he left he was given a special farewell as he ended his ministry at the hospital over 24 years. At the same time Archbishop Wilson presented Fr Kevin with an Indigenous painting, based on bush medicine, given with good wishes for future health.

Kevin continued to support a range of people and organisations. But he could also be angry and frustrated at injustice and unfairness and mistreatment. He was deeply concerned about the plight of refugees; he wanted justice for the Palestinians and he had shelves of books on the Middle East, especially Jerusalem and Palestine; he wanted the Catholic Church to be more compassionate, including to consider allowing priests to form relationships to provide them support.

Meanwhile he served on various Church committees, including the Justice & Peace Commission, the Senate of Priests, the Priestly Life and Ministry Committee and also the Clergy Appointment board.       

In later years Kevin lived with mild dementia. It changed his world and it limited what he could confidently do. He was aware of these changes and worked with them. His well-structured regimes and his neatness were maintained and helped him to live by himself to the end. He had a very modest wardrobe of clothes; he knew his appointments from his diary; he mapped out and prepared his own meals, and he accepted assistance gracefully and gratefully. He would tell people he had dementia, to let them know so they could adjust to the ways he might be changing.

Kevin had been an avid reader for all his life and now books became much more difficult because it was much harder to retain new information. However that didn’t stop him from buying books and journals in which he took refuge, often reading passages to his visitors. Many years earlier he had been persuaded to edit some stories into a document and this was put into a book of memoirs for him for his 88^th birthday in June 2023. He was very pleased with the book and read some stories to his birthday visitors and his unique laugh rang out. But time was coming to an end.

As he had lived, Kevin died on July 12, 2023, with minimum fuss, with dignity and with grace.

His funeral Mass was celebrated in St Francis Xavier's Cathedral on July 25 and the following day he was buried with his ancestors at Pinnaroo. Kevin's belovedness and the way he ministered to others with compassion will be remembered into eternity.

May he rest in peace.