A friar who's used to the heat

Peter Murnane would rather not be called an activist priest, even though he used his own blood for a vivid anti-war protest last year. Picture / Dean Purcell

Against Father Peter Murnane's predilection for the most god-awful puns, I don't think my little joke about the SIS was too terrible.

He said, gesturing towards a bookcase, "Those over there are our forebears".

He meant four small stuffed bears. Four friars live at the Dominican priory in Newton.

He half-promised to give up the puns for Lent, but neither of us believed it.

I groaned at his joke. But when I thought it would be funny to say, "Where's the SIS? Are we being bugged?", Murnane was kind enough to simply laugh and say, "I'm glad it's you saying that. Who knows? There's no new objects in the room that I can see."

And you would notice. The Dominican brothers live what I would call the frugal life - Murnane calls it "simple".

We are sitting in the priory's living room, as relaxed as you can be in chairs that Murnane cheerfully advises will "ruin your back".

In anyone else this could seem malicious. In Murnane, it is simply a statement of fact. The chairs are in such various states of shabby ruin that an op shop might reject them.

At the priory door, I was asked for photo ID. This is not the way things are usually done, but somewhere in the house is a chap called Ahmed Zaoui.

When I phoned Murnane, who vigorously campaigned for Zaoui's release, the friar said: "You want to interview me? Not Ahmed?"

This was incredulity for the sake of it, because Murnane is well-used to being interviewed.

He is not well-used to having a lot of young things about answering the door and taking the phone calls to help with the load. A lot of people want to meet Zaoui. Murnane likes it though; he finds it lively.

He is a lively sort of fellow himself. He has become known round the city, tootling about on his bike, a familiar bearded figure in his sandals and his simple cross.

His job these days is to be a "wandering preacher", and at 64 he thinks he will be wandering and preaching, God willing, until he is in his 90s.

It is also likely that he will be causing trouble when he is in his 90s. When you bring up his name, people say, "Oh that's that mad monk".

"I haven't heard that one," he says. "I thought that was Rasputin."

Just the other day, he says, he was called "a radical, liberal extremist. I can't quite get my mind around that."

But then he does just that: "I think, if radical means going to the root of the matter, yes. If liberal means valuing freedom, yes. Extremism in human things is bad. We should be moderate in the way we use food and drink and sex and money, but you can't have too much love or too much faith."

I don't think he'd object to being called an optimistic soul. But he doesn't much care for being written about, as he invariably is, as the activist priest.

He was that before he began campaigning for Zaoui, and early on he brings up the "blood protest".

Last year, he and another Catholic activist painted a cross on the carpet in front of the United States Consulate-General in protest at the war in Iraq. The blood was their own.

This was, I say to Murnane, a undeniably dramatic gesture. Is he given to flamboyance?

"I don't think so," he says. "I'm a rather shy person. I was an introvert, oh very much so."

He has learned, he says, through living in the community of brothers "the value of the other side. To enjoy friends' company, to love each other, and to just love chewing the fat."

He went off to become a priest in 1959 when he was 18. He thinks this probably broke his mother's heart; she didn't see him again for seven years because in those days you didn't get holidays.

He might have become a doctor but his maths wasn't up to it, and he liked the idea of community.

"In those days, community was something much more common than it is now.

"People joined the bank for life, or the railways and they couldn't throw you out of the public service ... and I was thinking of priesthood. The community life inspired me."

I wondered whether the church might have thought of him, from time to time, as a thorn in its side but Murnane says he doesn't spend much time thinking about that.

"I try to do the right thing to show what we as a community are not doing."

If this means annoying the church, well, in return he has been angry with the church - at least with individuals within the church. "I suppose my view of justice, as linked to the gospel, tends to lead me to do or say things that are a little bit different from what people expect a church person to do."

His life is curious, he knows, in that "to be a celibate in a very sexual world is an oddity".

"To commit yourself to a community for life is an odd thing in these days of broken relationships and temporary situations."

He has never regretted not having children, "oddly enough, but I do regret not having grandchildren".

This is not the sort of thing one contemplates in youth. He likes to make jokes about how he's very mature and grown up now.

He says he used to be "very, very impatient and very, very fast moving. People who know me might laugh at that now."

He is certainly very good at sitting very still and raising a slow eyebrow at silliness.

He learned stillness partly "listening to my dreams, which are what your deepest self is trying to tell you".

He used to dream of traffic jams and cul de sacs he couldn't get out of.

"And one day I dreamed of a promenade and lovely curving bay and a walkway and hundreds of people in deckchairs with their legs stretched out in my path.

"So I said to myself, in my dream: 'Why don't you join them, you silly beggar?'

"So I did. That's the balance of action and contemplation."

Which is all very well, but it's not a very godly sort of dream, is it?

"Oh why not?" he says. "We all need holidays."

Every year he goes on a week-long retreat; often a silent one. "I once did a Buddhist meditation retreat for 10 days; we sat still for 10 days."

I want to know what his fellow friars think about his talking so much and being in the media.

He says: "I can't judge their thinking but I'm quite sure if I was them I'd say, 'That so-and-so Murnane again'."

I would say no such thing. He is a delightful fellow, although I was quite happy to get away after the second pun which was so terrible that nobody, not even the SIS, should have to hear it.