Community & Business
7 October, 2022
Fr Rod preparing to head west
Popular local parish priest, Father Rod MacGinley will take up a new appointment with the Catholic Church at Chinchilla in the new year.
Fr Rod has been based at Clifton for the past eleven years and has covered parish work at St James’ and St John’s Church at Clifton as well as the Allora, Leyburn, Greenmount and Cambooya areas.
He also travelled as far as Deuchar when the Catholic church existed there.
Fr Rod grew up in the local area, having been born in his parents’ home on their dairy farm at West Haldon, where he was the youngest of eight children.
He was ordained to the priesthood on 9th August, 1972 by Bishop William Brennan, D.D., in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Toowoomba.
Fr Rod’s first appointment was to St. Anthony’s Parish in Toowoomba after which he served in Cairns, Oakey Pittsworth and Cunnamulla, although not consecutively.
His service in Queensland was broken on three occasions when he worked in Chile.
The first stint there was in 1978 when he left Cairns and went to work with the St. Columbans Mission Society.
He returned to the Toowoomba Diocese in 1985 and was appointed to Oakey but two years later he chose to return to Chile to work as a prison chaplain to 1200 high security prisoners, remaining there until 1992.
Returning to Australia, Fr Rod was appointed to the Pittsworth Parish in 1993 where he remained until 2005, although during that time he spent a further 18 months in Chile.
He moved from Pittsworth to Cunnamulla in 2005 until 2010, when Bishop Morris arranged for Fr Rod to return to his childhood district with his appointment as parish priest at Clifton and priest director to the parishes of Allora and Cambooya.
As people in this district who have come across Fr Rod would know, he is pretty much down to earth.
He’s often seen riding his bicycle around town and keeps fit by adding a few extra kilometres when he rides out to the golf club or along Dungannon Road.
It’s a habit he seems to have developed at Cunnamulla where, he said, it helped to keep him in touch with the locals - and still does at Clifton.
It was at Cunnamulla where he also took a job - with the Bishop’s permission - stacking shelves at the local supermarket one day a week, which also gave him the opportunity to get to know the locals and they him.
Fr Rod said he had come to see that the Church was quite ambiguous about priests being blue collar workers.
He realised while in Chile that priests working at grassroots level have many varied talents, so tackle pastoral challenges in a variety of ways.
Priests working as educators in secondary or tertiary roles are quite common, but if they were to take up a blue collar job, Fr Rod doubts they would command the same respect.
As he prepares to leave the Clifton district, he reflects on the fact that returning here has made his life much more meaningful and pays tribute to the “lovely, kind, generous people” in the area and the many volunteers who help to keep the parish functioning.
At 75, Fr Rod MacGinley has no plans to retire.
He accepts that he is coming to the stage in life where “I change one tyre and the other one goes flat” and prays that he’ll have the courage to accept the coming years gracefully.
When his time to part this life does come, he wants to be laid to rest in the Greenmount Cemetery where many members of his family have been laid to rest.
From 1st January, the new Catholic parish priest at Clifton will be Fr Warren Padilla, a native of the Philippines, who is currently parish priest at Charleville.
