Val Noone Biography, Age, Height, Wife, Net Worth and Family

He is an Honorary Fellow of the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. He was awarded a medal of the Order of Australia in June 2009. In 2013 the Senate of the National University of Ireland (NUI) in Dublin conferred on him the degree of Doctor of Literature, honoris causa, for his contribution to Irish Studies in Australia.

After several years of study he achieved a doctorate in the Humanities at La Trobe University on religious attitudes to war. Noone then became a lecturer at Victoria University. During this time he was active in Australian-Irish affairs. He wrote extensively on Australian religious and political issues particularly as convenor of the Melbourne Irish Famine Commemoration committee and as founding editor of Tain, a magazine of Australian Irish affairs, which ceased publication in 2007.

In May 1970 Noone and McLoughlin were instrumental in organising a national meeting of priests in Coogee, a beachside suburb of Sydney. They hoped this conference would discuss some of the burning issues of the day, namely the War in Vietnam, the question of priestly celibacy and the imposition of birth control on married Catholics. These controversial issues did not get much traction due to the resistance of conservatives. It was, however, considered a beginning at some level.An important outcome of the Coogee Conference was the formation of a National Conference of Australian priests. This took place in Sydney in 1970 with the participation of 400 priests from all over Australia. This National Conference of Priests was still active in 2020.

In late 1970, Noone closely assisted in the organisation of the Australian tour of the New York based catholic social reformer and peace radical, Dorothy Day, organised by Roger Pryke. While in Melbourne Val Noone and his associates arranged an address by Dorothy Day on the American Catholic Worker movement at Melbourne University. Noone also assisted in the organising of the Sydney Town Hall meeting of Vietnam Moratorium Supporters convened by Dr Jim Cairns and featuring discourses by Dorothy Day and her companion Eileen Egan. In 1976 Noone and Doyle visited Dorothy Day in New York. They freely acknowledge the Catholic Worker movement as being a major inspirational influence on their personal lives.

From 1970 Val Noone earned his living as a driver, builder’s labourer, and later a proof-reader at the Melbourne Age. Val Noone married Mary Doyle in 1974.

Historic video of 1970 National Conference of Australian Priests – https://vimeo.com/230104192 –

On leaving the catholic ministry, Val Noone became involved with a group of dynamic and idealistic young Catholics who, in the inner city Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy, informally practised community living, voluntary poverty, and open house hospitality including the provision of caring accommodation for homeless men. The original instigators of this house in June 1969 were Val Noone’s brother, Brian Noone, a former worker for the Salvation Army, and Mary Doyle, a social worker who had been assisting alcoholics. It was also home for Vietnam War Draft Resisters during the time of opposition to the Vietnam War. These included Michael Hammill-Green, Tony Dalton, Merv Langford, John Wallen and Roger Naphthine. Noone and Doyle risked imprisonment themselves by harbouring fugitives from the law in Victoria and from other states.

In May 1968 Noone was assistant priest in the Parish of Frankston. His shocked reaction to the papal encyclical Humanae Vitae (On Human Life) and his disagreement with his archbishop, James Knox, was leading to a personal crisis.

In the mid 1960s Noone was appointed assistant priest to Con Reis, the parish priest of St Albans. In the turmoil and change of the 1960s Noone found himself, in addition to his normal priestly duties, challenged by a range of social and moral issues. At the time the catholic-pervaded Australian Labor Party experienced a serious division which led to the off shoot Democratic Labor Party. There were bitterly opposing views about support for General Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Some Catholics were passionately advocating rural alternative living as antidote to the evils of capitalism. There was serious moral argument and angst about the indiscriminate atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Above all there was a fearful consciousness of the nuclear arms race and the possibility of world annihilation.

In 1957 at the age of almost seventeen, Val Noone began his seminary studies for the Catholic priesthood at Corpus Christi College at Werribee, a suburb on the southern outskirts of Melbourne.

Noone spent eight years (1957–1964) at this college and experienced the last years of a unique and dedicated way of life and training regimen.

In 1955, aged 15, Val Noone was specially chosen to represent Victoria in the Sun Advertiser Youth Travel Group, dubbed “Australia’s Schoolboy Ambassadors” which involved an educational journey to parts of the Middle East, Europe, and Great Britain.

Partly because of the nature of his intended vocation, and partly because the intellectual turbulence of the 1950s and 1960s, Noone, though officially studying scholastic philosophy and theology, found himself grappling with other issues.

Valentine Gabriel Noone (born 9 May 1940) is an Australian writer-editor, historian, social activist and academic. He is a recognised authority on Irish emigration to Australia, especially Victoria, since the time of the great Irish Famine (1845-1852). Noone has a particular interest in the history of the Irish language in Australia, its preservation, and the understanding of its social, cultural and linguistic aspects.