Father Richard Sloan and Father John Southworth reflect on their shared milestone of 50 years as priests on 9 May.
 

By Simon Hart

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“Thousands witness Ordination Mass” ran the Catholic Pictorial headline on 16 May 1976. The previous Sunday, the Metropolitan Cathedral had celebrated the Ordination Mass of two new priests, and the Pic featured the pair – Father Richard Sloan and Father John Southworth – on its front page, together with the main celebrant, Archbishop Derek Worlock. 

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As the Pic’s article explained, “more than 3,000 people” attended the 5pm Mass and “many people were forced to stand. Coaches came from Wigan, Chorley, Crosby, and Liverpool parishes.” 

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It may be 50 years ago, but Fr Richard remembers it well. “The cathedral was jam-packed, standing room only,” he recalls. “It was an amazing celebration.” 

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Both he and Fr John, then 24, had initially been set for ordination in the summer, but Archbishop Worlock, installed in March that year, had other ideas. Fr John explains: “We were planning to be ordained in our own parishes, but then it was decided that, as it was Archbishop Worlock’s first year, it’d be appropriate to have an ordination on Vocations Sunday, and so we were ordained in the cathedral by the new archbishop.” 

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“He wanted to make a big thing of it as the new archbishop and to promote vocations,” adds Fr Richard. 

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The day after the Ordination Mass, each man celebrated his first Mass at his home parish – Fr Richard at Saints Peter and Paul, Crosby, and Fr John at St Mary’s, Chorley. 

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Half a century on, the two men, both 74, will celebrate their golden jubilees with Masses at the parishes they call home today – St Agnes and St Aidan in Huyton for Fr Richard, and St Paul and St Timothy in West Derby for Fr John. For each, there will be much to be thankful for – and much to reflect on too. 

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In the case of Fr John, he has served at parishes across the diocese, beginning with Sacred Heart, Leigh, and St Teresa’s, Penwortham – stints which sandwiched a decade on the staff of the junior seminary at Upholland, prior to its closure in the late 1980s. 

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His first experience as a parish priest came at St Michael’s, Ditton, for a decade leading up to the turn of the millennium. Then, in 2000, he moved to Toxteth to take over Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church. As he explains, on the reorganisation of parishes later in that decade, he “became parish priest of St Patrick’s and St Vincent’s too”.

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“I’ve enjoyed everywhere I’ve been,” adds Fr John, who has acted as dean of nearly every area he has served, and witnessed much change over the decades. “There’ve been changes of archbishop, from Archbishop Worlock, to Patrick Kelly, and to Malcolm [McMahon], and now our present archbishop [John Sherrington].

 

Things morph from one thing to another. They retain some sort of stability and sameness, but at the same time everything becomes different according to the personality of those who are there, particularly archbishops and auxiliary bishops – and we’ve had several in my time.”

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And yet through it all, he notes, “Liverpool and the cathedral have always been a real anchor.”

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Away from Liverpool, Fr John summons another highlight of his priesthood – namely a summer spent in Sierra Leone in the 1980s, during his time teaching at Upholland. “You can read about countries where the Church is thriving or developing, but you really can’t get anything like the real picture until you experience it,” he explains.

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“I was helping out in two parishes in the main city, Freetown – both the cathedral and an outlying parish. The administrator there wanted me to get a feel of a different style of ministry and so he arranged me to go for a week into the bush. That was in Kenema, in the heart of Sierra Leone. It was a fascinating experience. It just gave me a wider awareness of the Church and how varied it is.”

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With Fr Richard, his own experience of ministry overseas proved even more transformative. Ten years after ordination, he embarked on a seven-year spell as a priest with LAMP, the Liverpool Archdiocesan Missionary Project in South America, serving the Pius X parish in the town of Oruro in Bolivia.

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He remembers: “It was a tin-mining town in the Andes. I’d only been in the parish for about six weeks when the bottom fell out of the world tin market. We went from 10,000 miners to 400 in a matter of weeks. And the consequences of that were women and children left while the husbands had to go looking for work lower down because we were 12,500 feet up.

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“There were people struggling to exist and, all of a sudden, we were thrust into the challenge of trying to feed hundreds of people every day to keep them going. That had the biggest impact on me. It quickly knocks off any airs and graces – you’ve got people struggling to survive and at the same time you’re amazingly impressed by the faith that they have.

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“I’ll never forget one woman who lived in terrible poverty. We went to visit her home, which was a one-room house with a dirt floor. The only way the parents and kids had separate bedrooms was to break open cardboard boxes and tape them together from ceiling to floor. For somebody to come out of that house with shining eyes and say to me, ‘Oh, Padre, isn’t God good’ was stunning to see.”

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Before Bolivia, Fr Richard had experienced parish and school ministry – first at St Cuthbert’s, Pemberton, where he was chaplain to St Thomas More High School, and then at St James, Orrell, and St Mary’s, Lowe House, where he was chaplain to St Peter’s High School and St John Rigby Sixth Form College. There was also a spell at St Clare’s, Liverpool. Yet despite those experiences, his return to the archdiocese in 1993 brought a sense of dislocation.

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“After living with people who were up against survival,” he explains, “everything seemed superficial and ridiculous. I was really bereaved for the life and the people I’d left behind.”

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A bout of depression led him into therapy and that was his cue to train as a psychotherapeutic counsellor. After spells as parish priest at Our Lady of Sorrows, Liverpool; St Agnes, Huyton; and then Our Lady of Good Help, Wavertree, he received support from Archbishop Patrick Kelly “to go down to London and train in counselling and psychotherapy.”

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Fr Richard stayed in London from 1999- 2012, working in professional practice while assisting at the Church of Our Lady, St John’s Wood, and later serving as chaplain to the Catholic Hospital of St John & St Elizabeth. “I had a job as the counselling supervisor for the Islington Churches’ Bereavement Service,” he adds. On turning 60 he returned to Huyton, focusing on “counselling, therapy and spiritual direction” and working with the Helpers of the Holy Souls in offering Ignatian Spirituality Workshops both in the UK and Romania. “It’s a great joy to be back once again in the lively parish community of St Agnes and St Aidan, to help out wherever possible and to work alongside our most dedicated parish priest, Father Anton [Fernandopulle].”

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Fifty years ago, the Pic described Frs Richard and John as “two new shepherds” for this diocese. In the years since, they have certainly served their flocks well – in places near and far.