Celso Romanin was born in Melbourne in 1941, the eighth child of Giuseppe Romanin and Cesira Vendrame. Six of their children were born in Italy and Celso was the second  born in Australia.

Celso's parents came from the north of Italy; his father from the region of Friuli, just a few kms from the Alps; his mother came from Treviso, in the Veneto region. They met during the First War when his father was on home leave from serving in the Italian Air Force. Celso's uncles, on his father's side, took it in turns to migrate to help the family survive. It was the youngest brother's turn to come to Australia, but he had recently got engaged, so Celso's father took his place and never returned to Italy. Eventually all Celso's uncles migrated and the family farm was sold.

Giuseppe migrated from Italy in 1930. During the depression years he worked as a logger in East Gippsland, and eventually managed to get a job as a plasterer (a trade he had learned in Germany and France) in Melbourne. The family was reunited after seven years and lived in a small house in Carlton.

Celso grew up in Hawthorn, which explains his still being a Hawks supporter.  He began his schooling with the Brigidine Sisters, then to the Marist Brothers and eventually to Xavier College. Ferruccio, an elder brother, joined the Jesuits in 1948, and Celso entered the Novitiate at Watsonia in February 1959. He was ordained priest in December 1972 and was assigned to the parish of Richmond in Melbourne where he became Parish Priest in 1977.

In 1985 he became the first coordinator of the Jesuit Refugee Service in Australia. Over the next four years he visited and worked in refugee camps in Asia and in Hong Kong in particular.  He established the Refugee Advice and Casework Service in Melbourne as part of a network, together with the Refugee Council of Australia, to assist refugees and asylum seekers.

After four years he returned to Parish work in Sydney, first of all in Lavender Bay/Kirribilli, and later in Neutral Bay/Kirribilli, then a newly formed parish. In 1996 he volunteered for the Jesuit Refugee Service again, this time in Uganda. He headed a specialised team to provide education to Southern Sudanese refugees in Adjumani, Northern Uganda. He later moved to Kampala as Country Director.  It was in Uganda that he was shot, of which incident he says: 

Getting shot? One of those things. I happened to stop some bullets at that time, but we were living in a war zone - and we were not equipped for it - so dodging bullets and land mines became almost a daily thing.  When I left Uganda, we had to abandon three projects because of the ongoing war, and had seven evacuations in the last year because of invasions. Once we lost the whole compound and had to rebuild it, only to have to abandon it a couple of months later.

He became Parish Priest at Norwood in April 1997 and has already left his mark on Norwood with the refurbishment and tasteful redecoration of the church.