Extract from oral history of Tom Fitzgerald by Ken Inglis

John Curtin Prime Ministerial Library. Records of the National Library of Australia. Interview of Tom Fitzgerald, 01/02/1988 - 3/09/1988. JCPML00658/1. Original held by National Library of Australia TRC 2247

My father felt somehow that it was incumbent on him to press forward this wish as he saw it of my mother. I...anyway with my mother’s sudden death I turned...well before she died I turned to prayer and going to the sacrament at church. And I suppose one might say I was acting on the hope or assumption that there was truth. That at that desperate time if there was any chance at all one should try to do what one could. And after her death, by the same token, in case there was anything in the doctrines of purgatory I reverted to a kind of effort to help her, despite my doubts.

Anyway the question of whether I should become a priest was finally resolved, a bit messily really, in the negative. And my father didn’t raise it again at all….But after his death religion faded right out of my thinking. I had been struck at school by the implications of the theory of evolution and I’ve been a devoted lay reader on that subject ever since.

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