Parer was at Mass and Communion the morning that he died. He always had a deep reverence for the Mass and went whenever he could – if possible to daily Mass.

His other great devotion was to Our Lady. He loved the Rosary especially. Among the papers that he left behind was the Treatise of De Montfort on ‘True Devotion to Our Lady’.

Damien Parer’s closest friend, Ron Maslyn Williams, said of him that he was often ‘theatrically religious’ … When a man constantly and unselfconsciously invokes sacred images or pious references and kneels down to say his prayers in a crowded mess hut, it may be necessary to explain not only what religion is, but how it affects an artist at his work. To some people in this secular age he may have seemed simply eccentric. But whatever one’s views of religion, there can be no doubt that it played a major role in his artistic life. Because it moulded his attitude to life and death it was a major influence in what some saw as his bravery and intrepidity. He did not have what one well-known Australian saw as a ‘death wish’. It was because of his religion that he simply did not care about death or survival. But more important than his indifference to danger, it was his religion that gave him a view of mankind and moulded his attitude to soldiers in particular. It dictated his choice of photographic subjects … 

Prayer was as natural to Damien as breathing. He would kneel for his morning and evening prayers in the most unlikely places and at the most unlikely times. Beside a slit trench in the western desert. In a hotel room in Cairo. In a tent, while his comrades drank beer and told army stories. In a tree in New Guinea, from which he was filming a Japanese airstrip.

On one occasion he was filming the destruction of a Greek village by German Stukas. He lay full length, feverishly recording the horrors below him and his companion could hear his prayer: ‘Holy Mother of God, save the poor bastards!’ It was an unconventional prayer – but Parer was an unconventional man and no one would doubt its sincerity ...

… for Parer, prayer was not just the time when he was on his knees speaking to God. He was deeply conscious of the fact that his work itself was a prayer; that done well it was something that pleased God and brought him closer to God. Brought up in a Catholic family, educated in Catholic schools, associated with the first beginnings of Catholic Action in Australia, he knew well that ‘to work is to pray’.