Page 83 - Gonzaga at 60
P. 83
Semper
et ubique
fidelis
Michael Bevan tells me that as a reirement celebraion he is asking for some short relecions: “not the usual
jolly memento of school days, but a selecion of life-choice pieces by a variety of the Past.” So what to say
about the life-choice that Gonzaga helped me make? Well, I am a Jesuit of twenty-eight years standing and,
in fact, I would like to ofer these relecions in the light of the delicate issue of the crises being experienced
by the Catholic Church in Ireland in the wake recent of sex-abuse scandals.
I let Gonzaga in 1978 and joined the Jesuits in 1982 ater doing a university degree. Since then, I have
spent most of my life outside of Ireland as a missionary in Africa. In recent years I have been assigned to
teach theology in the Gregorian University in Rome, an insituion that teaches seminarians from around the
world. Living in Europe I am able to get back to Ireland more oten and am trying to make sense of what I see
and even to “it in” enough to work in parishes during the summer and such like. ‘Fiing in’ in today’s Ireland
is quite a challenge. For one thing, I missed the whole Celic Tiger. Yet more disorientaing is the changed
role today of the Church in Ireland. As I have tried to listen to Irish people who tell me about their feelings
towards the Church, I recognise that my diference from them is not only because of the years I have spent
abroad but also because the experience of the Church that I had as a young person was diferent from what
most other Irish people had – and my experience of Church was primarily enjoyed in Gonzaga.
Many of those I listen to now experienced a Church which primarily told them to “pray, pay, and obey.”
Some tell me that for them it seems that to become adult is to stop being a Catholic. My experience of
the Church could hardly have been more diferent. From the day I arrived in Gonzaga I was encouraged to
think for myself, and quesions of religious faith were integrated with a formaion of the whole person. One
aspect of this wider formaion was the number of extramural aciviies we pursued: I travelled with Michael
and Fr F.X. Buckley to Greece on a school tour in the summer of third year, and appeared in a staging of
George Eliot’s Silas Marner (with its message of redempion through love) in Sixth Year, directed by Michael.
However, in addiion to these extramural aciviies, within the classroom too there was a quality to the
teaching in Gonzaga that was simply excepional. This quality was related to the determinaion of Gonzaga to
resist the obsession with the points-race of the Leaving Cert and to “educate for life.” This was perhaps above
all evident in the teaching of English and I had Mick for this subject from Fourth to Sixth Year.
Our group studied Shakespeare’s King Lear, a play in which we were taught to recognise that we were
touching on the deepest and most adult of life’s issues.
Another inspiring quality of Mick was that he would speak to us of his personal experience. I remember
how in response to a Yeats poem about aging he spoke about his own feelings of becoming old (feelings that
even thirty ive years ago we accepted as being perfectly jusiiable!). He did this in a way that touched me
and which I remember sill today when similar feelings come my way.
It was in this environment that thoughts of priesthood arose for me. From men like Fr Alan Mowbray
I learnt about the long formaion that Jesuits undergo before ordinaion and this seemed to me simply like
a coninuaion of what I had already been experiencing in Gonzaga. In some ways, the presence of Alan
Mowbray to our class right through secondary school typiied what was diferent about Gonzaga.
He was called Spiritual Director of the school and took us for classes in either French or Religion
at various stages throughout our student years. However, we all knew that his real concern was to
et ubique
fidelis
Michael Bevan tells me that as a reirement celebraion he is asking for some short relecions: “not the usual
jolly memento of school days, but a selecion of life-choice pieces by a variety of the Past.” So what to say
about the life-choice that Gonzaga helped me make? Well, I am a Jesuit of twenty-eight years standing and,
in fact, I would like to ofer these relecions in the light of the delicate issue of the crises being experienced
by the Catholic Church in Ireland in the wake recent of sex-abuse scandals.
I let Gonzaga in 1978 and joined the Jesuits in 1982 ater doing a university degree. Since then, I have
spent most of my life outside of Ireland as a missionary in Africa. In recent years I have been assigned to
teach theology in the Gregorian University in Rome, an insituion that teaches seminarians from around the
world. Living in Europe I am able to get back to Ireland more oten and am trying to make sense of what I see
and even to “it in” enough to work in parishes during the summer and such like. ‘Fiing in’ in today’s Ireland
is quite a challenge. For one thing, I missed the whole Celic Tiger. Yet more disorientaing is the changed
role today of the Church in Ireland. As I have tried to listen to Irish people who tell me about their feelings
towards the Church, I recognise that my diference from them is not only because of the years I have spent
abroad but also because the experience of the Church that I had as a young person was diferent from what
most other Irish people had – and my experience of Church was primarily enjoyed in Gonzaga.
Many of those I listen to now experienced a Church which primarily told them to “pray, pay, and obey.”
Some tell me that for them it seems that to become adult is to stop being a Catholic. My experience of
the Church could hardly have been more diferent. From the day I arrived in Gonzaga I was encouraged to
think for myself, and quesions of religious faith were integrated with a formaion of the whole person. One
aspect of this wider formaion was the number of extramural aciviies we pursued: I travelled with Michael
and Fr F.X. Buckley to Greece on a school tour in the summer of third year, and appeared in a staging of
George Eliot’s Silas Marner (with its message of redempion through love) in Sixth Year, directed by Michael.
However, in addiion to these extramural aciviies, within the classroom too there was a quality to the
teaching in Gonzaga that was simply excepional. This quality was related to the determinaion of Gonzaga to
resist the obsession with the points-race of the Leaving Cert and to “educate for life.” This was perhaps above
all evident in the teaching of English and I had Mick for this subject from Fourth to Sixth Year.
Our group studied Shakespeare’s King Lear, a play in which we were taught to recognise that we were
touching on the deepest and most adult of life’s issues.
Another inspiring quality of Mick was that he would speak to us of his personal experience. I remember
how in response to a Yeats poem about aging he spoke about his own feelings of becoming old (feelings that
even thirty ive years ago we accepted as being perfectly jusiiable!). He did this in a way that touched me
and which I remember sill today when similar feelings come my way.
It was in this environment that thoughts of priesthood arose for me. From men like Fr Alan Mowbray
I learnt about the long formaion that Jesuits undergo before ordinaion and this seemed to me simply like
a coninuaion of what I had already been experiencing in Gonzaga. In some ways, the presence of Alan
Mowbray to our class right through secondary school typiied what was diferent about Gonzaga.
He was called Spiritual Director of the school and took us for classes in either French or Religion
at various stages throughout our student years. However, we all knew that his real concern was to
