FATHER Pat McKenna is supposed to be retired, and at 86 years of age nobody could blame him for putting up his feet.

But the Gympie-raised Catholic priest will head to St Stephen's Cathedral in Brisbane on June 30 to have his 60 years of service recognised as the archdiocese celebrates the anniversaries of priests across Queensland.

"I was there ten years ago when it was my 50th anniversary," Fr McKenna said.

Fr McKenna has worked all over northern Queensland, and now lives in a retirement home in Cairns while he looks after his parish.

"Technically I retired when I was 86, but I still had two parishes," he said.

He said the church was happy to keep him on as long as he's "fit and you can do weddings, baptisms, funerals masses and all that business".

He still oversees the Good Counsel Catholic Parish in north Cairns, and makes the trip back to Gympie about once a year to celebrate mass with old friends.

He will make one such visit on July 1, leading the Friday 5:30pm mass at St Patrick's.

"You see quite a few old friends there, they're all pretty ancient, like myself," Fr McKenna said.

He said Gympie was almost unrecognisable since he was a boy.

"There were a lot of places in Mary St that don't exist now," he said.

"A lot of places over on the Southside didn't exist when I was there."

He said as much as Gympie had changed, the walk down Mary St is still a "walk down memory lane".

"There are a lot of memories, a lot of memories," he said.

"As kids, we used to enjoy the floods.

"They'd come up and be around where the buses pull up."

Fr McKenna was born in 1929, and his family moved to Gympie in 1935, where his parents ran the Empire Hotel in Mary St.

He attended the Christian Brothers school on Calton Hill, long before the girls' and boys' schools united to form St Patrick's Catholic Primary School and St Patrick's College in 1982.

In 1946, at 17 years of age, Fr Mckenna moved to Maryborough to work at the Commonwealth Bank.

After "a couple of years", he left the bank for the seminary.

"The second year I was there, they were looking for volunteers," he said.

That volunteering led him to northern Queensland, where he has spent most of his time as a priest.

That didn't stop him from returning to Gympie to lead his first mass on June 30, 1956.

He said he must have been nervous before his first mass.

"It was all in Latin in those days," he said.

In his 60 years of service since then, he has lived in North Queensland the towns where he celebrated mass include Weipa, Mt Isa, and Thursday Island.

He even spent time as chaplain at the Lotus Glen Correctional Centre.