Frank Brennan (priest)

Frank Tenison Brennan is an Australian Jesuit priest, human rights lawyer and academic. He has a longstanding reputation of advocacy in the areas of law, social justice, refugee protection, reconciliation and human rights activism.

Early life and education
Brennan is the first born son of Sir Gerard Brennan, a former chief justice of the High Court of Australia, and Patricia O'Hara, an anaesthetist. He is a fourth generation Australian and is of Irish descent on both sides of his family and also has German ancestry from his paternal grandmother.

Brennan studied at Downlands College in Toowoomba, and at the University of Queensland, where he graduated with honours in arts and law. He then studied at the Melbourne College of Divinity, where he graduated, again with honours, in divinity. He was awarded a Master of Laws as a result of further study at the University of Melbourne.

He was admitted to the Queensland Bar in 1977 and the Victorian Bar in 1978.

In 1975, Brennan was admitted to the Society of Jesus and ten years later was ordained a Catholic priest.

Career
Brennan's contact and involvement with Aboriginal Australians began early in his priestly ministry. In 1975 he worked in the inner Sydney parish of Redfern with priest activist Fr Ted Kennedy, where he also met and worked with Mum Shirl among others who were founding Indigenous Australian legal, health and political initiatives.

In 1997, he was rapporteur at the Australian Reconciliation Convention. The following year he was appointed an Ambassador for Reconciliation by the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation.

He is known for his 1998 involvement in the Wik debate, following the 1996 court decision in Wik Peoples v Queensland.

On 10 December 2008 he was appointed chairperson to the Australian Government's National Human Rights Consultation Committee. In 2009 this independent committee consulted with the Australian community about the protection and promotion of human rights. On 30 September 2009, it reported its recommendations to the attorney general, Robert McClelland.

Brennan was a professor of law in the Public Policy Institute at the Australian Catholic University, and a visiting professorial fellow at the University of New South Wales. He served as the founding director of the Uniya Jesuit Social Justice Centre in Sydney from 2001 to 2007. In 2005, he returned to Australia from a fellowship at Boston College.

During 2011, Brennan was critical of the refugee policies of the then Prime Minister of Australia, Julia Gillard, saying that she had led the Labor Party of Australia into moral decline and that the Malaysia Solution was morally derelict and tantamount to "offshore dumping".

On 15 August 2017, Brennan stated that if the law was changed to require clergy to report child sexual abuse learned of during confession that he would consider breaking it. Brennan told ABC Radio National that "I as a Catholic priest would have to make a decision, whether in conscience, I could apply with such a law." He also said that "I think it would make children more vulnerable and not less".

During the 2017 Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey, Brennan dissented from traditional Catholic teaching, telling the media he would vote in favour. He stated that, while in the context of Catholic marriage he would continue to uphold marriage as being between a man and a woman, he considered the issue of civil marriage to be separate. Following the survey, Brennan was appointed by then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull to serve on a Philip Ruddock-led review into religious freedoms.

In November 2019, it was announced that Brennan would be one of 20 members of the Senior Advisory Group to help co-design the Indigenous Voice to government set up by Ken Wyatt, the Minister for Indigenous Australians. The group was co-chaired by Wyatt, Marcia Langton and Tom Calma.

In 2019-20, Brennan was critical of the prosecution of Cardinal George Pell for child abuse. He equated the trial to a left-wing version of the broken criminal justice system in Queensland during the 1970s, saying that even Aboriginal people had not been treated as prejudicially by the worst of 19th-century judges.

Honours
In 1995, Brennan was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) in recognition of service to Aboriginal Australians, particularly as an advocate in the areas of law, social justice and reconciliation.

In 1996, he was jointly awarded with Pat Dodson the inaugural Australian Council For Overseas Aid Human Rights Award.

In 1998 he was named a National Living Treasure by the National Trust during his involvement in the Wik debate.

In 2002, Brennan was awarded the Humanitarian Overseas Service Medal for his work as director of the Jesuit Refugee Service in East Timor.

Brennan was made Doctor of the University by the Queensland University of Technology and was awarded a Doctor of Laws from the University of New South Wales in 2005.