08 October 2015, The Tablet

It’s a bit strange to hit your chest and call out ‘Say g’day to Jesus’

by Richard Leonard

 
A few days ago, we celebrated the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary. Every time I say the rosary the seven-year-old in me comes out to pray because that was how old I was when I first went to “Oaklands”, Uncle Maurice and Aunty Claire’s property in outback Australia.I come from a large, extended Irish-Australian Catholic family. For 20 years Maurice invited his 32 nieces and nephews to Oaklands for school holidays. There could be up to 10 cousins there at a time. Maurice and Claire married in 1948. Every night until Maurice died a few years ago, they said the rosary. And even though the nightly devotion was falling off in our homes during the rebellious 1970s, when we went to Oaklands we would all kneel and recite five decades after dinner. Because Maurice and Claire had b
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