‘A Man Who Was Very Well Loved’ – FATHER SEVERINO MAMBRINI OFM

By Dr Bianka Vidonja Balanzategui

The Catholic parishes of the Herbert River district have had their fair share of characterful, dedicated and inspiring priests over the decades. There would probably be few people alive today who recall Father Severino Mambrini OFM, yet for years after he had left the district, he was recalled with great love and for the way he ‘sacrificed himself for the people, giving away everything he had’.

It is hard to imagine now, but when Father Mambrini arrived in the district in 1923, Ingham was still little more than a frontier town. Among the earliest European settlers, Italians made up a significant portion of the population, and it was already customary for St Patrick’s Parish to appoint priests who spoke Italian.

Father Mambrini came to make a report on the Italian immigrants. Accompanied by one of St Patrick Parish’s assistant priests, Italian-speaking Father Morley, they travelled the district in a sulky and later motor car, taking a census over a period of two months. He was shocked but nevertheless understood why a large number of children were not baptised and that 96% of the Italian population had not been to Sunday Mass since leaving Italy.

He and Bishop Shiel recognised that the remedy might be English or Irish priests who spoke fluent Italian and Mercy Sisters who would visit the Italians in their homes to encourage the parents to send their children to the convent school.

Father Mambrini remained in the district for ten years, living in both Halifax and Ingham. He was a man of character, conviction, and unfailing “can-do,” remembered for his astuteness, racy style, zeal, and pragmatism. An amusing example of his pragmatism was that when meat was served for Friday's lunch during a home visit, he would make the sign of the cross over it, declare, “I bless you the fish,” and then sit down and partake heartily of the ‘fish’!

His zeal seems to have got him into trouble because he often came up with ideas that were either vetoed by those in authority or fell through. For instance, Bishop Shiel was not impressed when Father Mambrini suggested that the district could do with additional convent schools. The Sisters of Mercy had not long before opened a convent school in Halifax. The Bishop felt Father Mambrini was better visiting State Schools for religious instructions than suggesting impossible schemes!

is aim to provide more Catholic schools in the district was realised when Father O’Meara brought the Canossian Daughters of Charity to Trebonne to open a convent school, and when the Mercy Sisters founded another at Victoria Estate. In addition, by building small country churches, Dean Thomas Grogan brought the Church to Italians living in the farthest reaches of the Parish, just as Father Mambrini had suggested the nuns try to do.

Father Mambrini arranged for the construction of the Sacred Heart Monument in the old Ingham Cemetery, which stands over the graves of the victims of the 1927 flood. It stands as a tangible legacy of his presence in the district.

He died in Sydney aged 65 on December 16, 1940. Though absent from the district for nearly a decade, he was never forgotten and recalled fondly.