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Born: 15 September 1894,
Entered: 27 November 1911, St Stanislaus College, Tullabeg, County Offaly

Left Society of Jesus: 06 June 1918

Born: 18 February 1932, Bailieborough, County Cavan
Entered: 07 September 1950, St Mary's, Emo, County Laois
Ordained: 31 July 1963, Milltown Park, Dublin
Final Vows: 02 February 1968, Milltown Park, Dublin
Died: 01 July 2020, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Left Society of Jesus: 09 February 1973

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_McShane

Philip McShane (18 February 1932 – 1 July 2020) was an Irish mathematician and philosopher-theologian. Originally trained in mathematics, mathematical physics, and chemistry in the 1950s, he went on to study philosophy from 1956 to 1959. In 1960, after teaching mathematical physics, engineering, and commerce to undergraduates, and special relativity and differential equations to graduate students, McShane began studying theology. He did his fourth year of theology in 1963 and in 1968 began reading economics.

In a period that spanned over sixty years, McShane published numerous articles and twenty-five books.[1] His publications range from technical works on the foundations of mathematics, probability theory, evolutionary process, and omnidisciplinary methodology, to introductory texts focusing on critical thinking, linguistics, and economics. He also wrote essays on the philosophy of education. Beginning in 1970, he participated in and helped organize a number of international workshops and conferences addressing topics such as "ongoing collaboration,"[2] reforms in education, and communicating the basic insights of two-flow economics.[3]

Two Festschrift volumes were published to honor McShane, one in 2003[4] and the second in 2022. In the first, eighteen individuals contributed essays, and, at the request of the editor, McShane submitted an essay as well.[5] He also replied to the eighteen contributors in the essay "Our Journaling Lonelinesses: A Response.”[6] In the second Festschrift, twenty-four individuals wrote essays remembering and honoring McShane,[7] who was nominated for the Templeton Prize in 2011 and 2015.

Life and education
McShane was born in Baileboro, County Cavan.[8] When the McShane family moved to Dublin, Philip went to O'Connell School. He continued his education while training as a Jesuit at University College Dublin (BSc and MSc in relativity theory and quantum mechanics), St Stanislaus College, Tullabeg (Lic. Phil), Heythrop College (STL) and Campion Hall, Oxford (D.Phil.).[9] He lectured in mathematics at University College Dublin (1959-1960) and in Philosophy at the Milltown Institute of Theology and Philosophy (1968-1973).

McShane entered the Jesuits in September 1950 and spent two years in spiritual formation.[10] In 1952, in spite of having "acquired a 'broken head,' which meant he was unable to study, or even to do any serious reading, he was also allowed to risk a very challenging programme of mathematics, mathematical physics, physics and chemistry."[11] Eleven years later, after completing a B.Sc., an M.Sc. in relativity theory and quantum mechanics, and a Licentiate of Philosophy, he was ordained a Jesuit priest.

In 1956, McShane "shifted from graduate studies of mathematics and physics that included such works as the classic Space-Time Structure by Erwin Schrödinger,"[12] and embarked on what would be a lifelong venture of reading and appropriating the works of Bernard Lonergan, initially through a careful study of Lonergan's Verbum articles,[13] followed by a startling study Insight.[14] In the years that followed, he co-authored (with Garret Barden) Towards: Self-Meaning and wrote Music That Is Soundless. In the mid-1960s, he studied at Oxford University, where in August 1969 he successfully defended his doctoral thesis "The Concrete Logic of Discovery of Statistical Science," which soon after was published as Randomness, Statistics, and Emergence.[15] After the First International Lonergan Conference in Florida 1970, McShane took on the task of editing two volumes of the papers presented at that event.[16] In 1972, he decided to leave the Jesuits.[17]

"Towards a New Economic Order," Nashik, India, September 2010
In 1975, along with Conn O'Donovan, McShane founded the Dublin Lonergan Centre, in Milltown Park, Dublin.[18] In 1979, he served as visiting fellow in religious studies at Lonergan College, Concordia University, Montreal. In his course, McShane encouraged students to work through the exercises in his introductory book Wealth of Self and Wealth of Nations.[19] From 1974 until 1994, McShane taught philosophy at Mount Saint Vincent University, Halifax, Nova Scotia. When he retired from teaching in 1995, he began writing prolifically.[20] After retiring, McShane also accepted invitations to speak at international conferences and workshops. He gave keynote addresses at gatherings in Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America.

In the last years of his life, McShane wrote about the negative Anthropocene age in which we live and a future positive Anthropocene age of luminous collaboration.[21] In Questing2020, his final series of essays, he wrote of the possibility of human collaboration mirroring the psychic adaptation of starling murmuration.[22] When McShane died in July 2020, colleagues and former students around the globe paid tribute to him. A theologian from Africa described him as akin to an "African elder,"[23] another as someone who "gave counsel to think long-term, in terms of centuries rather than years or even decades,"[24] and a third as "someone I could always be myself around, even when I was angsty, anxious, or depressed … a friend, mentor, professor, and family member all at once."[25] A former student described "being amazed, when I asked him some questions, at his generosity—he tore out a chapter of something he was working on and gave it to me there and then."[26]

Influences
By his own account, McShane was humbled as a young man by the works of Chopin and fortunate to have discovered Descartes' achievement in geometry.[27] He wrote about "the luck of working with Lochlainn O'Raifeartaigh in graduate studies of mathematical physics in the mid-fifties."[28] He also studied and had a keen appreciation for Richard Feynman's Lectures on Physics, especially the third lecture.[29] McShane was fond of and often quoted the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Patrick Kavanaugh. "Having music in his genes,"[30] he often referred to particular pieces of music. For example, the quiet emergence of five notes that grow to dominate Bruckner's 8th symphony was symbolic for him of the slow emergence of effective global collaborartion. "Bruckner's 8th has been symbolic for me of the climb to effective functional scientific collaboration: a five note echo trickling in at the beginning of the second movement and finally taking over the symphony: so, we trickle in at, we hope, the beginning of the second movement of the Anthropocene."[31]

In his "story of history,"[32] McShane referred to the works of Karl Jaspers, Arnold Toynbee, and Eric Voegelin and identified an axial period of "fragmented consciousness, a transition between what Lonergan calls the two times of the temporal subject."[33] There are references to the teachings of the Buddha, the music of Beethoven, and the works of James Clerk Maxwell in Bernard Lonergan: His Life and Leading Ideas.[34] In an essay written for a conference on peaceful coexistence,[35] he cited Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "Aurora Leigh" and William Shakespeare's Henry IV, and referred to Archimedes' "leap of inventiveness" when he created a hydrodynamic screw to raise water. In the same essay, he referred to Ezra Pound's image of a vortex as symbolic of a global community "committed to a science of cosmic care ... redeeming time from the mad destructive greed of the 'civilized' majority of the present global population."[36]

Various women influenced and shaped McShane's worldview. His extensive writings on the "Interior Lighthouse"[37] were inspired by Teresa of Ávila's Interior Castle.[38] McShane resonated with the English novelist and poet Mary Ann Evans, who went by the name of Georg Eliot. He regularly cited this line from the middle of Eliot's Middlemarch: "If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well-wadded with stupidity.”[39] McShane cited more than a dozen times the lyrics of songs on Sinead O'Connor's album Faith and Courage in Lonergan's Standard Model of Effective Global Inquiry.[40] His appreciation and admiration of greatness extended to the performances of Serena Williams and Venus Williams on the tennis court,[41] the lifework of Nadia Boulanger, who was very much on McShane's mind when he wrote Process in the late 1980s,[42] and to “Molly Bloom’s long Gospel-speech,”[43] which McShane cited time and again. In his writings on economics, he regularly cited the British economist Joan Robinson, who was well known for her disagreement with standard economics, especially American economics.[44] He also referred to the work of Jane Jacobs, with whom he corresponded.[45]

McShane and Lonergan at the Milltown Institute, Dublin, in 1971.
In a lecture introducing the economic analysis of Lonergan at Fordham University in January 2000,[46] McShane quoted Stephen McKenna. When McKenna discovered the writings of Plotinus in his late 30s, he pondered the possibility of translating The Enneads from Greek into English and decided "this is worth a life." It could be said that McShane made a similar decision when he discovered the works of Bernard Lonergan. He described the "central contribution" of his doctoral thesis in these terms: "It is an attempt to establish on a wider basis of contemporary mathematics and science the position of B. Lonergan on the nature of randomness, statistics, and emergence."[47] Thirty years after completing his thesis, McShane edited for publication Lonergan's economic manuscript For a New Political Economy,[48] and two years later Phenomenology and Logic: The Boston College Lectures on Mathematical Logic and Existentialism.[49] He regularly referred to the final two chapters of the latter as a resource for trying to identify and come to grips with both the ontic and phyletic aspects of the "existential gap."[50]

For more than 60 years, McShane diligently read and reread Insight: A Study of Human Understanding,[51] and is arguably the leading interpreter of this compendious work. In the essay "Insight and the Trivialization of History," he described having been "enormously fortunate in coming to Insight in 1957 after graduate studies in general relativity and quantum electrodynamics."[52] In 2011, McShane was recognized for his contributions to Lonergan studies at the West Coast Methods Institute's 26th Annual Fallon Memorial Lonergan Symposium at Loyola Marymount University.

Capacities, needs, and interests
Towards an Adequate Weltanschauung[53]
The cultivation of an adequate worldview was a focus of McShane's early writings, and remained so throughout his life, although in the later years of his life he would write of Praxisweltanschauung.[54] In his rather peculiar doctoral thesis,[55] McShane aimed to reorient the philosophy of science away from general considerations towards a reflection on scientific praxis, again, through a two-fold attention of the mathematician, physicist, biophysicist, and biochemist. He claimed that the world view "emergent probability"[56] is a verifiable, anticipatory heuristic that is not "abstract" in the pejorative sense of the word.

The Weltanschauung thus given is not a set of abstract propositions or a speculative metaphysics, but a structured anticipation. Moreover, that anticipation may not be the methodical anticipation of the results of just one science, but an integrated anticipation of the results of a hierarchy of sciences, such indeed as our inclusive principle of emergent probability provides.[57]

Regarding the publication of his Oxford doctoral thesis, McShane wrote that "the book might well have been subtitled Towards an Adequate Weltanschauung."[58] This claim might appear odd, even exaggerated, given the questions he dealt with in his thesis—ostensibly specialized questions in the philosophy of math, physics, biophysics, and biochemistry. McShane's position, stated in the original preface, is that a viewpoint on the relationship of physics to chemistry and chemistry to botany is part of an adequate worldview. "Without that thought one lacks a basic component for the conception of world process. The present work deals with the central element and the heuristic conception of world process."[59]

In Music That Is Soundless (1969), he wrote about what he considered a core component of a comprehensive worldview: our human capacity and need for conversations, or what he called "Bud A,"[60] a "bud in our birth that clamours in solitude."[61] The book is an invitation to attend to "the conversation that we are" (Hölderlin) by asking self-attentively: "When was I last understanding, understood? When did I last speak? When did I last listen?[62]

At the heart of the worldview that McShane wrote about, taught, and advocated is the human capacity and need for a particular doubling. We humans are capable of having conversations about conversations while asking ourselves what happens when we are truly understanding, listening, and speaking.[63] Patient contemplation can lead us to a better understanding of understanding, a better listening to listening, and a better speaking of speaking. Regarding the basic question, When was my last real conversation? "one may honestly find that one has little or no data,"[64] especially if cultural conditions are not favorable to real conversations: "Ten thousand people, maybe more / People talking without speaking / People hearing without listening."[65]

"The Inside-Out of Radical Existentialism," chapter 5 of Wealth of Self and Wealth of Nations.
In the introductory book Wealth of Self and Wealth of Nations (1975), which might have been subtitled "Towards an Adequate Worldview,"[66] the double focus took the form of an invitation to appropriate, in as much detail as possible, the "inner"[67] dynamics of the process of understanding why, for example, the rule for getting square roots actually works. McShane included some simple diagrams in this book to help the reader appropriate, or "self-taste," what-ing (chapters 2 and 3), is-ing (chapters 4 and 5), what-to-do-ing (chapter 6), believing (chapter 7), symbolizing conveniently and judiciously (chapter 8), and exploring potentialities for living through the arts (chapter 9).[68] In the final chapter of this book, McShane made the remarkable claim that a change of framework, or point of view, is both possible and desirable if humans are to survive. But there is a Catch-22: "The need for change in point of view is thoroughly clear only from a changed point of view."[69]

In the Epilogue to Music That Is Soundless, McShane wrote that "to raise with seriousness the question, What is understanding? is to venture into a quest of scientific dimensions."[70] What 'scientific dimensions' meant to him in 1968 was mediated by his study of relativity theory and quantum mechanics at University College, Dublin (1952–56). In both his doctoral thesis and "Image and Emergence: Towards and Adequate Weltanschauung"[71] (one of two papers he wrote for an international congress that took place in Florida in 1970), McShane was traveling along what he would later call "Butterfield Way."[72]

The study of organic development
Organic development had been a topic of interest for McShane in the 1960s, and in fact was a possible topic of his thesis. "I recall especially wanting to see could I lift the biological logic of someone like Woodger into a full genetic logic."[73] What he knew would have been a "lengthy aside"[74] in the doctoral thesis, became one of his central interests around 2005, when he took a serious interest in development, in part because of Robert Doran's question "What is systematic theology?"[75] In the spring of 2008, McShane decided to write a series of essays to better read a single paragraph in Insight about three steps for studying organic development. A first step is to descriptively differentiate different parts of an organism;[76] a second step is to accumulate a group of insights relating various parts to events and operations; and

a third step is to effect the transition from the thing-for-us to the thing-itself, from insights that grasp described parts as organs to insights that grasp conjugate forms systematizing otherwise coincidental manifold of chemical and physical processes. By this transition one links physiology with biochemistry and biophysics. To this end, there have to be invented appropriate symbolic images of the relevant chemical and physical processes.[77]

Wealth of Self and Wealth of Nations (2nd ed., 2021), p. 91.
McShane identified the three-step procedure for studying organic development as perhaps the most obscure challenge for scholars with an interest in the works of Lonergan.[78] He would add to the obscure challenge by adding the word self to the sentence to highlight the starting point of a study of the developing human: "Self-study of an organism begins from the thing-for-us, from the organism as exhibited to our senses."[79] He referred to the need to bring the study of human development under heuristic control as "a missing link."[80]

In Interpretation from A to Z (2020), McShane was still focused on the methodological study of organic development.[81] The central problem was and is the genesis of a genetic viewpoint that will replace "daft reductionism that chatters away about genes and information theory."[82] In this, the last book published in his lifetime, he referred to the challenge as "the up-grading of Aristotle, whose flaw is merely his time in history."[83] In chapter "J ~ Inventing Techniques," he wrote that the invention and implementation of convenient and appropriate symbolic images is "the honest starting place of a genuine science of humanity," an "issue that has to be faced in the contemporary reality"[84] of what he called aggreformism, a word he coined in 1969 to refer to a sublation of Aristotelian hylemorphism. The contemporary need is to create an ethos of inventing convenient symbols and reading, for example, the semicolons in the expression f (pi ; cj ; bk ; zi ; um ; rn)[85] or another appropriate symbolic expression. In either case, the symbolism protects those studying development from "substituting pseudo-metaphysical mythmaking for scientific inquiry."[86] McShane wrote that "the semicolons point to the complex solution to the root problem hierarchy theory—aggreformism—a problem that baffles the systems theorists—when they notice it—and the followers of Bertalanffy."[87]

Two-flow economics
In 1968 McShane began reading Lonergan's 1944 manuscript "Essay in Circulation Analysis" and made his first attempt to present the material in the summer of 1977. By his own account, he "estimated that [he] had spent twenty hours on each page of the manuscript over a period of about five years."[88] On various occasions and in various countries—including Australia, Canada, India, Korea, Mexico, and the U.S.—he presented the key issues underlying the significant transition from the Marxist, neo-Marxist, Keynesian, and neo-Keynesian analyses to an empirically verifiable analysis.[89] In January 2000, McShane gave a series of lectures on Lonergan's economics at Fordham University's Lincoln Center campus in New York City.[90] Ten years later, he was invited to give the keynote address and lead discussions at a three-day conference on economic theory in Nashik, India.[91]

In his published works on economics, McShane explored different facets of what he called “a triple paradigm shift in economic thinking” that he attributed to Lonergan.[92] One shift is to a theory of two-flow dynamic analysis that will replace one-flow static analysis. With a bow to Schumpeter, McShane identified this shift as “a theory of economics dynamics that definitely crosses the Rubicon.”[93] A second shift is to an emerging framework of global collaboration that, in good time, will subsume all disciplines, all fields of study.[94] The third shift is “towards a deep and precise plumbing of the depths and heights of human desire and imagination.”[95]

McShane drew the following analogy to identify the shift to two-flow economics. Newton reached for a theory of motion that would unify the physics earthly motions and celestial bodies, something that was beyond both Kepler and Galileo. In a sense, he reduced two types of motion to one. The leap to two-flow economics is one that does not reduce, but differentiates, for example between the consumption of a submarine sandwich bought at the local delicatessen and the “consumption” of the meat slicer used to make the sandwich. “Instead of Newton’s great leap to get two into one, we have a great leap of getting one into two.”[96]

The Key Diagrams: From One-Flow to Two-Flow Economics.
The basic oversight that permeates the current study and implementation of economic models is the failure to identify a split in the productive process, one that needs to be made before adding variables such as banks, taxes, and international trading. “There is a type of firm that is pregnant with consumer goods: think of the restaurants in Chinatown or Little Italy. There is also the type of firm that is in the business of providing, say, varieties of large cooking ovens in restaurants all over the borough.”[97] Melding two firms into one has been institutionalized by publishers, research universities, and even papal initiatives over a period of more than 200 years. McShane refers to this as “a staleness of perspective and a settled non-scientific attitude that has haunted economic studies for centuries.”[98] He claimed that the perspective and attitude haunts the diligent research of Thomas Piketty and James Galbraith, as “the drive represented by these and other groups who hover round the issue of inequality of income is not sufficiently scientific in its classificatory backing to escape my extremely odd view that their efforts do not escape the category of statistically-infested journalism.”[99]

McShane's view is that the search for new data to cast light on old questions—for example, whether new inequality metrics are needed and how inequality of household incomes might be estimated—must clear-headedly and consistently keep in mind “the fact that there are two types of firms, a simple local analysis that nevertheless leads to there being pretty well two of everything.”[100] Without identifying two-firms, different phases of economic development,[101] and the possibility of dynamically balanced cross-over payments between two distinct economic circuits,[102] intimations of improvements in standards of living without economics slumps[103] tend to sound like pie in the sky, while analyses of national and transnational exchanges tend to be “grossly unhelpful.”[104]

Towards efficient global collaboration
An emergent need to "Turn to the Idea"
In various writings, McShane cited the work of Arnie Næss, the father of “deep ecology.” In 1989, while in Oxford writing Process: Introducing Themselves to Young (Christian) Minders, “detecting, leaning into India, of history’s effort to educate us, I was astonished to find his [Næss's] detecting of a parallel structure of cosmic deliberation.”[105] Thirty years later, while writing “Structuring the Reach Towards the Future” for The 3rd Peaceful Coexistence Colloquium in Helsinki, Finland (June 2019), he returned to Naess's work for the first time since he had read it thirty years earlier in Oxford.[106]

The stair diagram. Interpretation from A to Z, p. 20.
McShane maintained that Næss was on to something, for example, when he wrote: “Applied to humans, the complexity-not-complication principle favours division of labour, not fragmentation of labour.”[107] The challenge is to discover and implement a way to intervene effectively in intertwined cycles of natural-historical processes.[108] The web of intertwined processes currently presents humans of all colors and creeds with a myriad of challenges that include biodiversity loss and species extinction, water scarcity, unemployment, and children’s health and education. It is no mean problem if one is mindful of the needed restart in economics, not to mention other areas in need of reformation such as education.

Beginning in the late 1960s, McShane wrote about this “turn to the idea”[109] of dividing up labor, citing the influence of Bernard Lonergan,[110] who also wrote about dividing up intellectual labor after puzzling about how that might be done efficiently for more than thirty years. In Method in Theology, after briefly describing a conception of method as an art and second conception of method as a successful science, where “science means natural science” and “theologians often have to be content if their subject is included in a list not of sciences but of academic disciplines,”[111] he described the needed “turn to the idea” of efficient collaboration in these words: “Some third way, then, must be found and, even though it is difficult and laborious, that price must be paid if the less successful subject is not to remain a mediocrity or slip into decadence and desuetude.”[112]

The idea is to divide up the labor of caring for the cosmos “functionally,” so not along the lines of disciplinary silos, but along the lines of “distinct and separable stages in a single process from data to ultimate results.”[113] The various stages, steps, or specializations are essentially open and reciprocally dependent successive partial contributions to communicating to “the almost endlessly varied sensibilities, mentalities, interests, and tastes of [humankind].”[114]

McShane wrote about the needed turn sketched by Lonergan's in the 1969 Gregorianum article in various works.[115] In chapter 5 of The Allure of the Compelling Genius of History, he compared Lonergan's breakthrough discovery to the invention of Hedy Lamarr of a torpedo-guidance system, a system which depended on what she called “frequency hopping.” “In that chapter [5], an article of 1969, Lonergan came ‘to invent a fundamental wireless technology,’† which will slowly come to thrive in post-modern technologies of guidance and communication.”[116]

"Educating for Cosmopolis," First Latin-American Lonergan Workshop, Puebla, Mexico, June 2011
One of McShane’s contributions to implementing transdiciplinary collaboration was to identify disciplinary “sloping.” In the essay "Slopes: An Encounter," he wrote that "as the disciplines move up from research through interpretation to history and to dialectic, there is a convergence of data and interest."[117] He wrote the following about Lonergan's breakthrough to restructuring of theology, indeed of all areas of study—a point that Karl Rahner caught and made[118] against those who might claim the prescribed eightfold division of labor is strictly theological method:

Now he had found it, so to speak, on a string, in a String Theory of the Cosmos of meaning. The scattered beads of disciplinary sweat could be seen now as strung together sweetly. The jumble of theology’s fragmented areas – Scripture studies, doctrines, history, dialectical and pastoral scholarship – strung together in a circle of eight handing-round efforts.[119]

In his keynote address “Arriving in Cosmopolis,” which McShane wrote for the First Latin-American Lonergan Workshop in Puebla, Mexico, June 2011, he estimated the numbers of specialists—identified by Lonergan as researchers, interpreters, historians, dialecticians, foundational (persons), doctrines or policy (makers), systematizers, and communicators—efficiently collaborating around the globe when the earth's total population reaches 10 billion. In the same essay, he placed what is called the Standard Model in physics within a larger standard model of global collaboration, one that situates the dynamics of physics within a dynamics of human progress.[120]

The structure of dialectic
While McShane identified the implementation of genetic method as Lonergan's most obscure challenge to his disciples, he identified dialectic as his clearest challenge,[121] though by no means the easiest. It is hard to say how many tens of thousands of words he wrote about the structure of dialectic,[122] which he described as a “shocking, brilliant, innovative, invitation."[123] To arrive at an approximation, one would need to consider various website essay series,[124] as well as published articles and chapters in books.[125] As with other areas of focus and interest, McShane's prodigious writings and teachings on the structure of dialectic call for the kind of creative research and communal recycling that he did his best to initiate.

In an attempt to communicate the challenge popularly and without footnotes, McShane wrote three chapters on dialectic in Futurology Express. There he described dialectic as a mix of private and public tasks of dialectic elders who are flexible, “like the flexibility of a great tennis player meeting the oddest of volleys,”[126] and who have “minds grasping for the flickers of integral human goings-on.”[127] He related this to the task of Comparison, one of six italicized words in Lonergan's terse description of the structure of dialectic. He adds that those doing Comparison are competent in scientific understanding and autobiographically appreciative of the lengthy, patient messing around required to become intelligently competent, as opposed to merely technically competent. “The issue is the personal cultivation of what is called authentic nescience.”[128] Dialectic becomes radically public when dialecticians “lay their cards on the table,” check one another by asking basic questions, even about themselves, and strive for a hard-won consensus on “what might be called an idealized version of previous reaches of humanity, showing the past something better than it was.”[129]

In a book published posthumously, McShane identified dialectic as needed “to link Aristotle’s three [data, theory, verification] with Drucker’s [policy, planning, executive strategies] and fill out the elements in Næss.”[130] He claimed that what is missing and desperately needed by those concerned about sustainability and survival is methodical deliberation about deliberation. “Deliberating over Archimedes’ deliberation is to push us towards a radical effective shift in our view of the disorientations of industrious humanity.”[131]

McShane’s invitation to contemporaries to lay their cards on the table regarding their personal views on serious understanding reached a humorous, brutally honest, and possibly disturbing high point in one of his final essays, “On the Stile of a Crucial Experiment.”[132] In the first paragraph of this essay, he recalled a scene from the film Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, a shootout when Virgil and Morgan Earp called out members of a group of outlaws called The Cowboys. "It was a calling-out of the usual sort in Western films, with the good guys and the bad guys clearly identified."[133] In the last paragraph of the essay, McShane did his own calling-out:

There is, then, my simple calling out, which is just a repeat of Lonergan’s: this is the technique of discomforting intersubjectivity that is capable of “providing a statistically effective form for the next cycle of human action.”[134] There is my broader calling out: I challenge you to check—that word in its many senses—your biased corralled stile-sitting against serious understanding.[135] Both my simple call and my broader call-out is to global humanity and not just to Lonergan students, but I have sung out that joke abundantly already.[136]

Engineering progress
The proposed “turn to the idea” of beautiful, efficient global collaborators intending “cumulative and progressive results,”[137] with a sub-group “bearing fruit”[138] in local communications, clashes with notions of “pure science” as opposed to “applied science,” and notions of “hard sciences” as opposed to arts, humanities, and social sciences. These notions tend to dominate both popular culture and academic praxis. The first set of contrasting notions, which was popularly expressed in the American television sitcom The Big Bang Theory,[139] still permeates many a worldview. The second set permeates current divisions of majors, departments, and schools in higher education. It also permeates efforts to use “strictly” or “purely scientific” criteria to establish a precise meaning of Anthropocene,[140] and to pin down where and when the purported new geologic epic began. The ongoing effort to locate a Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point (informally known as "golden spike") on the part of the Anthropocene Working Group assumes a methodological divide between scientists, humanists, social scientists, and others.[141] It would seem that "aesthetic loneliness" is on the periphery of scientific method while scientific wonder is on the periphery of a liberal arts education.[142]

First page of a 1566 edition of Nichomachean Ethics in Greek and Latin
In various places McShane traced the implicit or explicit views to Aristotelian notions of speculative and practical science.[143] It is an age-old belief and expectation that contrasts practice (from Ancient Greek πρᾶξις [prâxis]—human doing and action, the conduct resulting from deliberations and the choices humans make), theory (from Greek θεωρία [theōria]—contemplation, speculation), and making (from Greek ποίησις [poiēsis]). For Arisotle, praxis differs from theory, making, and the technology used in producing what is made.[144] While both theory and practice involve thinking, the former aims at "speculative" or "theoretical" knowledge of what is unchanging, while the latter aims at practical, less precise knowledge of human actions.[145] It would have made no sense to Arisotle to ask if there were fundamental questions about nature (from Greek φύσις [physis]) whose solution depends on the character of the individual studying nature.[146]

To shake up and out a rather odd meaning of “metaphysics,”[147] as well as what he described as “a psychology conservatively grounded in a certain facticity of the past,”[148] McShane replaced the word metaphysics with futurology,[149] later with engineering.[150] He envisaged a globally shared Praxisweltanschauung of engineering progress, an “adequate geogenetic heuristics of history.”[151] In the last essay of the Æcornomics series, titled “Engineering as Dialectic,” he wrote optimistically of “some few people who will face the details of seeding the slow, serious, self-sacrificing ‘resolute and effective intervention in this historical process.’”[152]

With regard to a possible shared Praxisweltanschauung, McShane regularly posed this question: “Do you view humanity as possibly maturing—in some serious way—or messing along between good and evil, whatever you think they are?”[153] Expressing and defending one's position effectively moves one beyond Weltanschauung to Praxisweltanschauung, even if one's view is that theory and praxis are as different as carrying out specialized research at CERN and signing and implementing the Paris Agreement to reduce greenhouse emissions and limit global warning to 1.5 °C. Furthermore, expressing and defending one's view about the future of humanity autobiographically, and in the company of others doing the same,[154] is an intimation of doing dialectic, which requires brutal honesty, for example, about one's view regarding the place of heuristic structures and convenient symbolisms in engineering progress.[155]

Criticism
Language, style, and clarity
One criticism of McShane's work was that the language he used, the neologisms he created, and the style of his writings were unnecessarily obscure and were off-putting for some readers whom, at times, he addressed directly: “I will not in fact be talking here about systems of philosophy. I will be talking about the reader, you, and asking you to attend to yourself, to ask yourself certain simple questions, to reach elementary answers.”[156] Time and again, he encouraged his readers to take our eyes of the page while reading and cited what Gaston Bachelard wrote in The Poetics of Space about reading a house or a nest with one's eyes off the page.[157] His colleague and long-time friend Conn O’Donovan recalled reading the typescript of Plants and Pianos in 1971 and “thinking that McShane’s written expression was not as precise as it might be, that he was beginning to let language run away with him.”[158] Some thirty years after reading that typescript, O’Donovan asked:

Was I then witnessing in McShane the emergence of a deliberate, self-consciously new approach to language and meaning? Was he perhaps deciding to allow language to run away with him, but somehow under his control, and not to allow himself to be controlled by already controlled meaning? Was this a key moment in the development of his own special kind of creative scholarly writing?[159]

In Memoriam: Philip McShane (1932-2020)
Another colleague wrote in his tribute to McShane that while he “could be very orderly and disciplined in his writings and lectures, not infrequently in later years both types of his presentations were sprinkled with verbal novelties, asides, puns, jokes, and other unusual elements. Some colleagues find that this style facilitates their understanding, but others find that it impedes it.”[160] A younger colleague wrote in his contribution to the same Festschrift that “soon after Method was published [1972], Phil seized on Lonergan’s notion of ‘linguistic feedback’ and its essential role in advancing self-appropriation, both phylogenetically and ontogenetically. For years, he practically flogged the theme of linguistic feedback.”[161] An example of such feedback is replacing the letter “c” with the letter “k” in the word heuristic or pocket.[162]

One of the most extensive published criticisms of McShane's language, style, and clarity occurred in 2001 before the publication of Lonergan's Phenomenology and Logic, which McShane edited and introduced. One of the readers invited by the University of Toronto Press to review McShane's editor's introduction and appendix had significant reservations and asked him to rewrite the appendix or eliminate it altogether.[163] The reader questioned his “intent on mystifying” what is “already familiar to every competent phenomenologist,” and added that “Lonergan himself, in this reader’s opinion, was not in the least inclined towards esotericism or mystification.”[164]

In his reply to the reader, McShane wrote that his efforts to contextualize the volume were aimed at “saving it from haute vulgarization,”[165] or what he would sometimes call negative haute vulgarization—the clear, direct expression that “Joey” had hoped to find in the editor's introduction. He also recalled a favorite quote from Samuel Beckett, about direct expression:

Here is direct expression−pages and pages of it. And if you don't understand it, Ladies and Gentlemen, it is because you are too decadent to receive it. You are not satisfied unless form is so strictly divorced from content that you can comprehend the one almost without bothering to read the other. This rapid skimming and absorption of the scant cream of sense is made possible by what I may call a continuous process of salivation. The form that is an arbitrary and independent phenomenon can fulfill no higher function than that of a stimulus for a tertiary or quartary conditioned reflex of dribbling comprehension.[166]

Had McShane gone too far or, perhaps, not far enough? While writing about the short-term challenge of implementing a child-friendly pedagogy pivoting on the "Childout Principle,"[167] he acknowledged that a key challenge was to do something requiring a cultural shift and a new language: “You might begin to write yourself and the world with a new alphabet, in a new language. ‘The alphabet writes the world, and the world comes to pass through the alphabet: writing and world coexist in a state of feverish rapture that defies language.'"[168]

Idiosyncratic economics
In 1977 McShane applied to the Canada Council for a grant to work on economics. One of the assessors of his application wrote: “What we have here is a case of two idiosyncratic theologians trying to do idiosyncratic economics. The probability of this being fruitful is not zero, but it is not much higher.”[169] Thirty years later, when McShane addressed an audience at University Seoul, a professor in the audience denied anything idiosyncratic or original in what McShane was presenting and remarked “it is all in Mankiw,”[170] referring to Gregory Mankiw’s introductory economics textbook and blockbuster bestseller Principles of Economics.[171] More recently, the Australian economist Paul Oslington has written a critique of Lonergan’s economics that includes a critique of McShane for “overselling” Lonergan's economics in the editor's introduction to For a New Political Economy.[172]

McShane considered the basic insights of two-flow economic analysis empirically verifiable and accessible to high school students.[173] He did, however, recognize that it would not be easy "to change a recipe that is 200 years old."[174] In addition, he identified a needed correction to a mistake he had made in the area of the pedagogy. In his 2019 essay “Finding an Effective Economist: A Central Theological Challenge,” McShane described his mistake in these words:

Looking back now with wonderful hindsight, we [Lonergan and he] were making the wrong moves. We should have put his request of 1968 in the context of the eighth functional specialty’s follow-through that I call C9. The mood of statistically-effective outreach should have dominated both my two 1977 presentations and his six years of teaching.[175]

What McShane described as "the mood of statistically-effective outreach" refers to teaching as communications, a type of direct discourse that is related to but distinct from the indirect discourse of research, interpretation, and history. Direct communications − which invites, persuades, and cajoles students, colleagues, friends, and neighbors to makes sense out of distinct flows of basic and non-basic (surplus) goods and services − might generate "backfires,"[176] for example when a bright students asks what an IS/LM curve (also known as the IS/LM model) is and why it is not viable for real economic analysis.[177] While McShane wrote introductory texts, including the preface to the 2017 edition of Economics for Everyone inviting the serious reader to imagine "the concrete reality of, say, a small bakery in its dependence on firms that supply its needs,"[178] he also recognized the need for "massively innovative primers that would meet millennial needs, 500-page texts of empirically rich, locally oriented, normatively focused non-truncated writing."[179]

Breaking with tradition
An implicit criticism of McShane breaking with tradition occurred during the planning stages of the conference “Revisiting Lonergan’s Anthropology” that took place in Rome in November 2013.[180] The organizers of the event did not invite him to take part in the event, either by giving a talk or by participating in one of the various panels. McShane, who was never interested in founding a “a little school of Lonergan at the Gregorian”[181] or at some other Jesuit university in North America, published a critique of the conference in Rome, which for him symbolized what he called Lonerganism.[182]

I have, in recent years, made quite clear my disagreement with that tradition that now prevails in Lonergan studies, of avoiding the challenge of functional collaboration. Indeed, of not noticing, ignoring, avoiding—whatever—that the question, “What does Lonergan mean by functional collaboration?” has not been taken seriously by the group. I thus give a definite meaning to the boldfaced word whatever by my title: the group seems—indeed quite evidently is—intent on muzzling the scientific Lonergan.[183]

A Cij matrix of possible conversations, face to face, or through journals or electronic exchanges.
Like Lonergan, McShane took seriously what Butterfield wrote about the scientific revolution "outshining everything since the rise of Christianity and reducing the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes, mere internal displacements, within the system of medieval Christendom."[184] Both men advocated the development and implementation of apt symbolism and heuristic structures.[185] This had and continues to have what might be called an "electrifying" effect upon those in academic disciplines that seem to thrive without implementing symbolism and heuristics. “Whether it is Cij or W3, the symbolism reminds, cajoles, and forces the authors not to sit comfortably on the fence between commonsense eclecticism and scientific collaboration.† The symbols, you might even say, are a way of electrifying that fence.”[186]

With respect to his and others’ efforts to shift towards the idea and the reality of functional collaboration, which requires some form of communal implementation, McShane knew it would be a form of learning by doing. Since the needed division of labor is not continuous with much of current academic practice, he expected that the adventure[187] in the decades to come would be so-so at best. It was for this reason that McShane would quip: “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.”[188] He had a leading role in organizing various “doings,” one of them an international conference in 2014 that resulted in the publication of a volume of essays[189] in which each of the twelve authors implemented the same four-part structure: Context, Content, Hand-On, and Final Reflections. He wrote the following evaluation of the volume of essays published in 2016:

We stumbled away, as best we could, from the ethos of academic disciplines. We pretended to be “at the level of the times,”† as any wise doctorate student does in a doctorate thesis. But none of us were. Further, part of the paradox of luminosity and adult growth is that elder members of our group were regularly better tuned to “all that is lacking”†† than younger members. I, then, more than others, knew what a shabby shot we were having at getting the show on the road.[190]

Two years later, McShane participated in a round table discussion of Method in Theology at the West Coast Methods Institute at Loyola Marymount University. In preparation for the conference, McShane had written an essay proposing a paradigm for panel discussions, what he called “a full heuristic paradigm.”[191] He submitted his essay to Method: Journal of Lonergan Studies, which had previously published five of his essays.[192] The referee's report sent to him was succinct and did not recommend publishing the essay, as those "involved in 'Lonergan studies' need insights as much if not more than prophetic exhortations."[193] In his reply to the co-editor of the journal, McShane did not take issue with the use of the word prophetic to describe his essay, but he underscored that prior to Lonergan's discovery of the dynamics of functional collaboration in 1965, he had “clearly shifted the norms of the usual trivial comparison-work to the control of a genetic sequence of prior efforts to understanding whatever.”[194] The rejection of McShane's essay for publication inspired him to write the series of essays Public Challenging the Method Board.[195]

From time to time, McShane described his own efforts as “random dialectics,” so not the structured encounter that he wrote about at length and only experienced in the “proto-dialectic”[196] exercises in the last year of his life. Over the years, he invited colleagues to step forth and indicate publicly where and how he had gone astray reading Insight and Method in Theology. The response was what he called “disgusting non-scientific silence.”[197]

While McShane admitted having benefitted from a certain kind of luck in his education, he also realized that some of his works were simply “too far out” and did not expect to see much success in his lifetime.[198] Most contemporaries in philosophy and theology had not worked with Markov tensors or thought to use Greek symbols to imagine the longitude and latitude of Luther or Descartes on an expanding globe of meaning.

"Toynbee's A Study of History can be regarded as an attempt at a great Markovian reduction of the historical process to a very few variables and very large subdivisions and the consequent description of the process by a multiple Markov tensor of manageable rank.”† My own imaging shifts this tensor into an earth-sphere expanding out along a radial axis t—this helps to glimpse—think longitude and latitude for θ and Φ—my meaning of θΦT. Think of the θΦT weave of pairs like Antioch and Alexandria, Luther and Lainez, Descartes and Dilthey, whatever.[199]

McShane's long-term optimism regarding the emergence of a creative minority caring for the globe was and is consistent with the worldview "emergent probability," which was the focus of his doctoral thesis. In the Preface to the 2nd edition of the book version of his thesis, which McShane wrote in the fall of 2012, he cited a long passage from Insight where Lonergan wrote that the possibility of a recurrence scheme beginning to function shifts from a product of fractions to their sum when any one of the events (A or B or C or ...) of the scheme occurs.[200] He concluded the Preface with these words: "The cyclically-summed actualities can, over millennia, shift from Poisson distribution to a Normal and normative law, giving supreme plausibility to a Tower of Able of serious intimate† understanding grounding, literally, a plain plane of radiant life in the next million years."[201]

Born: 28 November 1908, Australia
Entered: 02 March 1928, Loyola Greenwich, Australia (HIB)

Left Society of Jesus: 29 January 1931

Born: 14 February 1866, Enniskillen, County Fermanagh
Entered: 22 October 1893, Milltown Park, Dublin/Loyola House, Dromore, County Down

Left Society of Jesus: 1884

Born: 01 May 1910, Omagh, County Tyrone
Entered: 02 September 1929, St Stanislaus College, Tullabeg, County Offaly

Left Society of Jesus: 24 October 1943

Early education at Christian Brothers Grammar School Omagh, County Tyrone and Mungret College SJ

by 1938 at Loyola, Hong Kong - studying
by 1941 at Canisius College, Pymble NSW, Australia - studying

Born: 23 January 1910, Sandymount, Dublin, County Dublin
Entered: 02 September 1929, St Stanislaus College, Tullabeg, County Offaly
Ordained: 13 May 1942, Milltown Park, Dublin
Final Vows: 23 March 1945,
Died: 24 April 1982, New Jersey, NJ, USA

Left Society of Jesus: 1957/8

Transcribed: HIB to ASL 05 April 1931

by 1950 at Ricci Hall Hong Kong (HIB) working

Born: 31 August 1874, Belfast, County Antrim
Entered: 06 October 1892, St Stanislaus College, Tullabeg, County Offaly

Left Society of Jesus: 1908

Younger Brother of John C MacErlean - RIP 1950

by 1896 at Enghien Belgium (CAMP) studying

Born: 01 December 1882, Bray, County Wicklow
Entered: 07 September 1903, St Stanislaus College, Tullabeg, County Offaly
Final Vows: 02 February 1914, St Stanislaus College, Tullabeg, County Offaly

Left Society of Jesus: 01 April 1919

Born: 03 April 1849, Alsace, Germany
Entered: 30 May 1878, Manresa, Roehampton, England - Angliae Province (ANG)
Ordained: 1883
Died: 1934

Left Society of Jesus: 1887

Came to UCD (HIB) to lecture in Science and Biology 1885-1887

Born: 15 January 1841, Dublin, County Dublin
Entered: 04 August 1863, Milltown Park, Dublin
Ordained: 1873
Final Vows: 22 April 1878
Died: 1918

Left Society of Jesus: 1898; remained a priest

by 1870 at Roehampton, England (ANG)) studying
by 1871 at home for health
by 1872 at Leuven Belgium (BELG) studying
by 1874 at St Beuno’s Wales (ANG) studying
by 1875 at St Wilfred’s Preston (ANG) working
by 1877 at Castres France (TOLO) making Tertianship
Early Australian Missioner 1877 (St Ignatius College, Roverciew, Sydney, NSW, Australia.

Born: 15 April 1906, Newbridge, County Kildare / Dublin City, County Dublin
Entered: 31 August 1923, St Stanislaus College, Tullabeg, County Offaly
Ordained: 24 June 1937, Milltown Park, Dublin
Final Vows: 02 February 1940, Mungret College SJ, Limerick

Left Society of Jesus: 25 September 1956 : Incardinated into Sault Ste Marie Diocese, Canada 1956

by 1929 at Berchmanskolleg, Pullach, Germany (GER S) studying
1931 Regency at Belvedere
by 1939 at St Beuno’s Wales (ANG) making Tertianship

Born: 02 January 1843, Australia
Entered: 14 August 1880, Sevenhill, Australia - Austriaco-Hungaricae Province for HIB (ASR-HUN)
Ordained: pre Entry

Left Society of Jesus: 1881

Entered early Irish Mission to to Australia 1880

Born: 01 January 1887,
Entered: 24 March 1908, St Stanislaus College, Tullabeg, County Offaly

Left Society of Jesus: 21 July 1920

Born: 21 September 1900, Manchester, Lancashire, England
Entered: 09 January 1918, St Stanislaus College, Tullabeg, County Offaly

Left Society of Jesus: 31 July 1928 (from Clongowes - Regency)

Early education at Clongowes Wood College SJ

Born: 15 September 1842, Millstreet, County Cork
Entered: 03 November 1875, Milltown Park, Dublin

Left Society of Jesus: 28 June 1890

Born: 08 May 1919, Drumcondra, Dublin, County Dublin
Entered: 125 September 1937, St Mary's, Emo, County Laois

Left Society of Jesus: 10 February 1945

Born: 15 July 1922, Portlaoise, County Laois
Entered: 07 September 1939, St Stanislaus College, Tullabeg, County Offaly
Ordained: 31 July 1953, Milltown Park, Dublin
Final Vows: 02 February 1956, Loyola, Tai Lam Chung, Hong Kong

Left Society of Jesus: 1970

Transcribed: HIB to HK - 03 December 1966

by 1948 at Yim Yuan, Paak Chue Lo, Tungshan, Canton, China (Hong Kong) - Regency, learning language
by 1964 at Fordham NY, USA (NEB) studying

Born: 07 October 1891, Glasgow, Lanarkshire,Scotland
Entered: 17 January 1916, St Stanislaus College, Tullabeg, County Offaly

Left Society of Jesus: February 1916

Born: 11 August 1868, Dublin City, County Dublin
Entered: 08 October 1890, St Stanislaus College, Tullabeg, County Offaly
Ordained: 01 August 1897, St Francis Xavier's, Upper Gardiner Street, Dublin

Left Society of Jesus: 19 February 1928

Older brother of Henry Gill - RIP 1945

by 1895 at Enghien Belgium (CAMP) studying

Born: 01 October 1872, Galway City, County Galway
Entered: 07 September 1892, St Stanislaus College, Tullabeg, County Offaly

Left Society of Jesus: 1907 - health reasons

Educated at Mungret College SJ

by 1896 at Valkenburg Netherlands (GER) studying

Came to St Francis Xavier College, Melbourne, Australia for Regency, 1898

Born: 28 June 1924, Omagh, County Tyrone
Entered: 24 September 1947, St Mary's, Emo, County Laois

Left Society of Jesus: 11 September 1956

by 1950 at Laval France (FRA) studying

Born: 17 August 1889
Entered: 27 June 1914, St Stanislaus College, Tullabeg, County Offaly
Died: 09 March 1976, The Oratory of Saint Philip Neri, Hagley Road, Birmingham, England

Left Society of Jesus: 03 April 1917

Born: 26 February 1789, Scotland
Entered: 07 September 1810, Hodder, Stonyhurst, England - Angliae Province (ANG)
Ordained: 1820
Died: 12 March 1835, Aberdeen, Scotland

Left Society of Jesus: 1830

J 707 - change to ADMN/7/307

in Clongowes 1817;
in Friburg Switzerland 1826

Fr Edmund Hogan SJ “Catalogica Chronologica” :
Father Murphy says that at the age of 10, he entered the Scotch College at Ratisbonne, at 16 he went to Stonyhurst. His inscription is “Carolus Fraser, Miss : Ap : in Planis Scotiae ob : Aberd. xii Mar 1835, aet xlvii”. (cf FD Murphy’s “Collections”

He belonged to HIB and was very much esteemed by all his brethren in Ireland.
He was a Professor and Prefect at Clongowes and a most distinguished Preacher, as well as the author of a History of the Suppression, which is in the Milltown Park Archives.

Although he left the Society, he kept up a correspondence with the Irish Jesuits.
Loose leaf note in CatChrn : Entitled “Left Stonyhurst for Castle Brown” :

Born: 24 January 1901, County Kerry
Entered: 31 August 1917, St Stanislaus College, Tullabeg, County Offaly

Left Society of Jesus: 15 December 1922

Born: 08 September 1923, Carrigparson, Caherconlish, County Limerick
Entered: 16 September 1941, St Mary's, Emo, County Laois

Left Society of Jesus: 01 July 1949

Educated at Crescent College SJ

Born: 02 November 1904, Glasgow, Lanarkshire, Scotland
Entered: 31 August 1922, St Stanislaus College, Tullabeg, County Offaly

Left Society of Jesus: 03 August 1928

LEFT from Berchmanskolleg, Pullach, Germany

Born: 21 May 1906, Rahan, County Offaly
Entered: 22 July 1924, Loyola Greenwich, Australia (HIB)

Left Society of Jesus: 04 August 1932

Born: 12 March 1914, Cabra, Dublin, County Dublin
Entered: 14 August 1934, St Mary's, Emo, County Laois
Final Vows: 02 February 1945, Clongowes Wood College SJ

Left Society of Jesus: 12 August 1949

Born: 04 July 1847, Dublin City, County Dublin
Entered: 30 December 1881, Manresa, Roehampton, London, England - Angliae Province (ANG)
Ordained: 1888
Final Vows: 22 August 1892,
Died: 11 March 1925, Manresa, Roehampton, London, England - Angliae Province (ANG)

Born: 28 February 1898
Entered: 12 October 1917, St Stanislaus College, Tullabeg, County Offaly

Left Society of Jesus: 23 May 1921

Born: 21 October 1909, Phibsboro, Dublin, County Dublin
Entered: 01 September 1927, St Stanislaus College, Tullabeg, County Offaly

Left Society of Jesus: 12 July 1934 (from St Stanislaus College, Tullabeg)

Early education at Belvedere College SJ

Born: 11 August 1862, Dublin City, County Dublin
Entered: 23 September 1890, St Stanislaus College, Tullabeg, County Offaly

Left Society of Jesus: 1897

by 1896 at Leuven Belgium (BELG) studying

Born: 11 March 1910, County Kildare
Entered: 19 September 1927, St Stanislaus College, Tullabeg, County Offaly

Left Society of Jesus: 11 March 1930

Born: 04 March 1925, Cabra, Dublin, County Dublin
Entered: 02 July 1943, St Mary's, Emo, County Laois
Final Vows: 05 November 1977, Clongowes Wood College SJ

Left Society of Jesus: 20 June 1960

Born: 03 May 1888, Dublin City, County Dublin
Entered: 07 September 1904, St Stanislaus College, Tullabeg, County Offaly

Left Society of Jesus: 1917

by 1909 at Leuven Belgium (BELG) studying
by 1911 at Stonyhurst England (ANG) studying
by 1916 at Hastings, Sussex, England (LUGD) studying

Born: 07 March 1899, Australia
Entered: 10 September 1924, Loyola Greenwich, Australia (HIB)

Left Society of Jesus: 1927

no date of leaving as no official notice from Australia, therefore not included in Roman letter

Leaving has something to do with monies

Born: 29 November 1880, Headford, County Galway
Entered: 07 September 1897, St Stanislaus College, Tullabeg, County Offaly

Left Society of Jesus: 1912

Educated Mungret College SJ 1893-1897

by 1904 at Valkenburg Netherlands (GER) studying
Came to Australia for Regency 1907

Born: 07 February 1907, Bray, County Wicklow
Entered: 02 July 1938, St Stanislaus College, Tullabeg, County Offaly

Left Society of Jesus: 06 April 1943

Born: 24 January 1894, County Galway
Entered: 01 September 1918, St Stanislaus College, Tullabeg, County Offaly

Left Society of Jesus: 31 May 1927

Born: 22 July 1917, Carrick-on-Suir, County Tipperary
Entered: 07 September 1935, St Mary's, Emo, County Laois

Left Society of Jesus: 08 May 1943

Educated at Mungret College SJ

Born: 11 February 1837, County Cork
Entered: 13 September 1856, Beaumont, Berkshire, England - Angliae Province for HIB (ANG)
Ordained: 1868
Final Vows: 02 Fenruary 1872

Left Society of Jesus: 1883

by 1858 at Stonyhurst England (ANG) Studying Philosophy
by 1866 at St Beuno’s Wales (ANG) studying Theology
by 1871 at Drongen Belgium (BELG) making Tertianship
Early Irish Mission to to Australia 1880

1857 FRA CAT has St Acheul, Amiens entry

Born: 04 June 1911, Dublin City, County Dublin
Entered: 16 September 1929, St Stanislaus College, Tullabeg, County Offaly

Left Society of Jesus: 05 August 1932 (due to ill health)

Born: 02 March 1918, Rathmines, Dublin, County Dublin
Entered: 07 September 1936, St Mary's, Emo, County Laois

Left Society of Jesus: 20 August 1947

Born: 11 December 1903, Mullinahone, County Tipperary
Entered: 26 September 1923, St Stanislaus College, Tullabeg, County Offaly

Left Society of Jesus: 19 June 1928 (from Rathfarnham Castle)

Born: 01 March 1911, Dublin City, County Dublin
Entered: 01 September 1928, St Stanislaus College, Tullabeg, County Offaly

Left Society of Jesus: 19 June 1931 (from Rathfarnham Castle)

Early education at CBS Synge Street

Born: 04 November, 1911, Drumcondra, Dublin, County Dublin
Entered: 03 September 1930, St Mary's, Emo, County Laois

Left Society of Jesus: 23 November 1933 (from Rathfarnham Castle)

Early education at O’Connell’s Schools

Born: 18 April 1939, Dublin City, County Dublin
Entered: 07 September 1956, St Mary's, Emo, County Laois
Ordained: 25 June 1970, Milltown Park, Dublin
Final Vows: 25 March 1976, Gonzaga College SJ, Dublin
Died: 27 March 2019, St Vincent’s Hospital, Dublin (Killiney, County Dublin)

Left Society of Jesus: 23 April 1986

by 1963 at Saint-Albert, Louvain, Belgium (BEL M) studying
by 1972 at Rice High School NY, USA (NEB) studying

Born: 26 July 1891, Kingsland, County Galway
Entered: 01 February 1910 - Angliae Province (ANG)
Ordained: 23 September 1923
Final vows: 02 February 1929
Died: 26 August 1973, Wokingham, Surrey, England - Angliae Province (ANG)

https://www.jesuit.org.uk/profile/james-brodrick-sj

James Brodrick SJ 1891-1973

James Brodrick was one of the Society’s great historians.

Born in Galway in 1891, he was brought up in Dublin and moved to London on leaving school to become a journalist. This plan was soon superseded by an ambition to join a religious order, which he researched in the library before opting for the Jesuits. He joined the noviciate in 1910 and was studying Philosophy at St Mary’s Hall, Stonyhurst, during the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, along with a number of Irish Province scholastics.

He taught at Stonyhurst for five years while simultaneously studying for a London degree. He was awarded his MA in 1921 and then spent four years at the St Beuno’s theologate, being ordained in 1923.

During this time he wrote his first major work – a biography and study of St Robert Bellarmine SJ (whose beatification had just been instigated by Pope Pius XI).n 1925 he moved to Farm Street, then a house of writers, and joined the team on the Jesuit magazine The Month – though he did not take to writing reviews and “ephemeral pieces” on demand. Preferring in depth research and academic analysis, he began work on his Life of St Peter Canisius SJ, published in 1935. This and his work on Bellarmine, the two great Jesuit Doctors, became hugely important to the whole Society, not just to the English Province.

His obituary in the Times observed that his greatest contribution to Roman Catholic tradition was “rescuing the early Jesuit saints from the hagiographers and apologists and subjecting them to historical criticism. In the process he brought them to life and brought new insights to bear on the Counter Reformation period.”

Fr Brodrick wrote The Origin of the Jesuits (1940) and The Progress of the Jesuits (1946), before embarking on lives of St Francis Xavier (1952), and St Ignatius himself (1956).

He was a regular broadcaster on the BBC and undertook two speaking tours of the United States.

He suffered from poor health for most of his life, but lived to the age of 82.

One of his ex-pupils reflected on his death “he was the first exponent of the art of conversation I ever met. Into one discussion he could pack London literary gossip, political history, and a wide range of general knowledge, all of which he managed to make sound relevant to the point at issue.”

Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Patrick_Brodrick
James Patrick Brodrick s.j. (26 July 1891 in Kingsland, Athenry – 26 August 1973) was an Irish Jesuit and writer.

Brodrick was educated in Dublin and Stonyhurst. He joined the Jesuits in February 1910 at Manresa, London, and was ordained in 1923. Most of his working life was spent at Farm Street in London. He graduated MA from the University of London and was a contributor to periodicals such as The Tablet and The Month.[1]

Brodrick published several books. Most of his career as a writer was almost exclusively dedicated to writing Jesuit History. His primary interest was the early history of the Society of Jesus. The first work to come from his pen was his two-volume biography of the Jesuit Cardinal Robert Bellarmine. In 1935 there followed his biography of St. Peter Canisius. Both works were considered major achievements and his success resides in that his work is not one of adulation and hero worship

Bibliography
The life and work of Robert Cardinal Bellarmine, i, ii, Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1928.
St. Peter Canisius:a study of the Catholic reformation, Sheed & Ward, 1935.
Brodrick, Rev. James Patrick (1940). The Origin of the Jesuits. Originally Published Longmans Green. ISBN 0829409300.
The progress of the Jesuits, 1556-79, Longmans Green, 1946
St. Francis Xavier, Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1956
St. Ignatius of Loyola. The Pilgrim Years 1491-1538, Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1956
Robert Bellarmine, Saint and Scholar, Burns & Oates, 1961

https://www.thinkingfaith.org/articles/james-brodrick-jesuit-storyteller

James Brodrick: Jesuit storyteller

If the Society of Jesus was founded to help souls, the souls of those outside the Society, why have Jesuits always been so determined to tell their own story? As Thomas Flowers SJ celebrates the work of Jesuit historian James Brodrick, he discovers that ‘Jesuit history is not about glorying in the past triumphs of the Society. Rather, Jesuit history is about teaching Jesuits to be better Jesuits, and all Christians to be better followers of Christ.’

In 1960, looking back over fifty years of Jesuit life, James Brodrick composed a rather melancholic poem reflecting on how little fruit he had produced in all those years. He wondered,

And my kind saints, Ignatius, Francis, Peter,on whom I spent in floods my sweat and ink and found down even in the depths the sweeter,What must you now and dear Roberto think?[i]

To the several generations of Jesuits all over the world who learned the early history of the Society in the wry, but somehow still reverent, tones of Brodrick’s prose, such self-recrimination seems sadly misplaced. What so many of us remember of the lives of Robert Bellarmine and Peter Canisius (the ‘Roberto’ and ‘Peter’ of the poem) came to us through Brodrick’s monumental biographies of them written in 1928 and 1935, respectively, biographies that remain unmatched, despite so many intervening decades of historical scholarship. Brodrick’s 1940 The Origin of the Jesuits and 1946 The Progress of the Jesuits can seem, in the light of the more recent scholarship of books like John O’Malley’s The First Jesuits, overly hagiographic, but they tell a compelling story, and one that nurtured the vocation of many a novice for many a year. Yet as we approach the fifty-year mark since Brodrick’s death in 1973, the progress of historical scholarship and changing sensibilities mean that fewer Jesuits and lay people read Brodrick’s books, and so fewer and fewer know his name. This is only natural, but his name is one worth remembering, not just because he was a good and faithful servant of the Lord and the Society, but because of what his work still represents for us today: a loving look into what the early Jesuits can teach us about how to be faithful to Christ’s mission.

Born on 26 July 1891 in Galway in Ireland, Brodrick entered the English Province of the Society in 1910. Ordained a priest in 1923, he was missioned to London in 1924 to work as a writer for the then-thriving periodical of the Jesuits in Britain, The Month. It must have been about this time that he made his first forays into writing the history of the Society, since his two-volume, prodigiously researched and footnoted biography of Robert Bellarmine appeared a mere four years later. In addition to the books mentioned above, Brodrick also wrote The Economic Morals of the Jesuits (1934), Saint Francis Xavier (1952), Saint Ignatius Loyola: The Pilgrim Years (1956) and Galileo: the Man, His Work, His Misfortunes (1964). A debilitating heart attack in 1967 ended his literary career some six years before his death.

His obituarist noted in The Times that he ‘made his great contribution to Roman Catholic tradition in Britain by rescuing the early Jesuit saints from the apologists and hagiographers and subjecting them to historical criticism. In the process he also brought them to life’.[ii] To one who opens the pages, for example, of Saint Peter Canisius today, such laud for Brodrick’s scholarly approach may seem overly generous. Not only does Brodrick refer to Canisius throughout, in what seems today quite unscholarly fashion, as ‘the Saint’, but he frankly recounts such pious stories as that of the holy woman who prophesied to the boy Peter that he would one day join a ‘new order of priests about to come into existence’ with nary a critical remark.[iii] Yet Brodrick’s own very real piety and devotion to the saints about whom he wrote should not diminish the significance of his contribution to scholarship and to the Society with these books. Indeed, if anything, they might remind us of the endeavour in which he was truly engaged.

In 1598, Superior General Claude Acquaviva sent a letter to all the Jesuit provinces in the world giving instructions for the preparation of historical materials that he hoped would enable the production of a general history of the Society of Jesus. Acquaviva requested that each province appoint an official historian who could begin gathering the necessary materials for a formal history of the province. The result of this effort was not only such works as the 1640 monumental Imago Primi Saeculi Societatis Iesu, celebrating the first hundred years of the Society, but the gathering and organising of historical materials that continue to make the history of the Society an attractively well-documented field for historians today. Even before this, the Society had long been interested in preserving the story of its origins and progress: several of the early Jesuits – among them the first companion Simão Rodrigues and Ignatius’s long-time secretary, Juan Polanco – wrote histories, of one sort or another, of the founding and early years of the Society. We might ask ourselves, looking back both on the multiplicity of first-hand accounts of the Society’s origins and on Acquaviva’s directives for writing an ‘official’ history of the Society, why Jesuits seem to have always been so interested in telling their own story. After all, the Formula of the Institute assures us that the Society was ‘founded chiefly for this purpose: to strive especially for the progress of souls in Christian life.’[iv] In other words, the purpose of the Society is to help other people – to help non-Jesuits – and so the persistent interest of Jesuits in themselves can almost seem a contradiction of the very purpose of the Society; surely the men tasked with writing Jesuit history could have spent their lives more fruitfully helping souls through preaching, teaching, spiritual conversation, or caring for the poor and sick? th

Perhaps this is exactly what occurred to James Brodrick fifty years into his Jesuit life when he spoke in verse to his guardian angel and beloved saints, declaring that ‘the harvest that you hoped to reap / by all your tears upon this barren field’ had amounted to no more than a ‘mocking yield’. He had spent the better part of his life and ministerial energy relating what one might easily compare to family history – a story that might serve as a curiosity for those outside of the family, but that could be easily dismissed as lacking any practical, ministerial usefulness.

Yet Brodrick’s ministry, and Jesuit history in general, are, at their best, profoundly apostolic.

The key to understanding why the early Jesuits worked so hard to preserve the memory of the founding of the Society, why Fr Acquaviva desired the construction of a general history of the order, and why Brodrick’s work has mattered to so many over the years – and still matters to those of us who know it – lies in recognising what the history of the Society still has to offer us today. Jesuit history is not about glorying in the past triumphs of the Society or praising our forebearers for their magnificence, and Brodrick understood that well. Rather, Jesuit history is about teaching Jesuits to be better Jesuits, and all Christians to be better followers of Christ, not through painting the past in rosy colours, but through telling the truth about the love and the labours, the faith and the doubts, the hope and the failures of the members of the Society of Jesus as they struggled to follow where the Spirit of the Lord led them. In the end, by painting a picture of the reality of our past, Jesuit history serves as a source of consolation and formation for our future.

When Brodrick wrote Saint Ignatius Loyola: The Pilgrim Years, he intended it to be the first in a series on the life of Ignatius. That book concluded with Ignatius’s journey to Rome in 1537 and a brief mention of him celebrating his first Mass in Rome in 1538 – and thus, before the actual founding of the Society in 1540. And although Brodrick never did manage to publish a follow-up to that work, in the archives of the Jesuits in Britain, in a worn notebook, the opening chapters of a second volume on Ignatius exist, written out in Brodrick’s clear hand. The first chapter was to be called ‘A Cottage in a Vineyard’, and began with the following words: ‘At the turn of Nov[ember] in the year 1537, three tired and timid men, priests in poor black robes carrying on their backs their entire worldly possessions, passed unnoticed through the half-ruined Porto del Popolo into the City of Rome.’[v] By the close of that first paragraph, the identities of these three have been revealed: Ignatius, Diego Lainez and Pierre Favre. In that one line, Brodrick reveals much about what fruit his labours bore. With an easy, welcoming style, Brodrick intended to invite the readers of that book to accompany three entirely human, ‘tired and timid men’ as they doggedly sought to pursue the greater glory of God. Figures like Ignatius and Favre seem larger than life to most Jesuits, and the witness of their lives easily intimidates us: how could we possibly measure up? And so Brodrick, with the deft knack of a consummate storyteller, invited us to share their journeys and tables and prayers, so that we could come to see that these ones through whom God had done great things were, in fact, quite as human as we are.

This humanising effort of Brodrick’s perhaps appears in his writing no more starkly than in his final evaluation of Peter Canisius, in which he declares that, ‘in spite of’ Canisius’s manifold limitations as a writer and a scholar, in spite of the fact that whatever cross-section of him we take we come upon nothing but what might be called sublime mediocrity, he was unquestionably a very great man. It was the integrity of his character that made him such, marshalling his average powers and giving them a glow and forcefulness utterly beyond their inherent worth.’[vi] I, myself, think that Canisius was much more than a mediocre scholar and writer, but I nonetheless appreciate what Brodrick accomplishes by these conclusions: he summons the stern provincial, catechist and preacher down from the pedestal to which our admiration had elevated him so that he might sit beside us and share his faith and his wisdom not as our hero, but as our brother. Having been consoled by Peter’s limitations that remind us of our own, it is easier to allow his witness to come alive for us, to inspire us in an entirely companionable way.

I remember well when I first read Saint Peter Canisius as a novice, and the impact it had on me. During my first year as a Jesuit, I felt continually out of place, as if I had perhaps misunderstood the Society I thought I was joining. But Peter Canisius helped convince me to stay. Brodrick introduced us, and then I heard, a few months later, a moving talk on Jesuit mission by Tom Lucas SJ that used Peter Canisius as one of the models. And so slowly, Peter showed me a way to be a Jesuit that made sense to me: from his prayer to his teaching, from his preaching to the tender care he showed to his brother Jesuits, I saw in Peter the life for which I was looking. And, with the help of James Brodrick and Tom Lucas to tell me the story and bring it to life, I saw that Peter’s Society of Jesus was alive and well around me. So I stayed, and still look to Brodrick’s ‘kind saints’ when I need help to go forward. The fields he sowed by his storytelling continue to bear fruit.

Thomas Flowers SJ is a member of the USA West Jesuit Province and is studying for a PhD in Jesuit History at the University of York.

[i] The original hand-written text of this poem can be found in the Archives of the British Province of the Society of Jesus in the collection of the papers of James Brodrick, carton 30/5/2.

[ii] The Times (28 August 1973).

[iii] See Brodrick, Saint Peter Canisius (London, 1935), p. 10.

[iv] This translation of the 1540 Formula can be found in The Constitutions of the Society and their Complementary Norms: A Complete English Translation of the Official Latin Texts, ed. John Padberg SJ (Saint Louis, 1996), p.3.

[v] Archives of the British Province of the Society of Jesus, the papers of James Brodrick, carton 30/5/2.

[vi] See Brodrick, Saint Peter Canisius, p.819.

Born: 06 June 1927, Dalkey, County Dublin
Entered: 07 September 1945, St Mary's, Emo, County Laois
Died: 24 April 2016, Clonskeagh, Dublin, County Dublin

Left Society of Jesus: 18 December 1945

Younger brother of Jack Brennan - RIP 2002; Older brother of Joe Brennan - RIP 2018; Harry Brennan - Left 1950

Born: 13 November 1929, Dalkey, County Dublin
Entered: 15 September 1948, St Mary's, Emo, County Laois
Ordained: 31 July 1962, Milltown Park, Dublin
Final vows: 02 February 1981, Gonzaga College SJ, Dublin
Died: 08 January 2018, St Vincent’s Hospital, Dublin

Part of the Gonzaga College SJ, Dublin community at the time of death.

by 1966 at Brussels Belgium (BEL M) studying

◆ Irish Jesuit Missions : https://www.jesuit.ie/news/he-was-a-good-man/

‘He was a good man’
Jesuits, family, friends and colleagues of Joe Brennan SJ, packed the Church of the Holy Name in Beechwood Avenue to bid him a fond farewell at his funeral Mass, on Friday 12 January, 11am. They were joined by the staff and students of Gonzaga College. John O’Keeffe SJ presided at the Mass, and Myles O’Reilly SJ, a former superior of the Gonzaga Community that Joe was a member of for 43 years, gave the homily. Joe had taken ill in late December and was moved to St Vincent’s Hospital where he was diagnosed with a respiratory illness. He died peacefully on the morning of January 8th 2018, aged 88.
Fr Joe was born and raised in Dublin, and he joined the Jesuits in 1948 at the age of 18. He was a keen sportsman, playing inter-provincial rugby for Leinster. He was also an accomplished musician, particularly on the piano, so he would have appreciated the singing of the Gonzaga student choir at his funeral Mass.
Most of his Jesuit life was spent as a teacher of religion and philosophy. He taught in Mungret, Clongowes, Belvedere, and finally Gonzaga. Brian Flannery, Education Delegate, said Joe had been fully engaged with Gonzaga in one way or another right up to the time of his illness in late December. “He was known for always encouraging students to think for themselves,” said Brian; “Also for instilling values. ‘If you don’t stand for something,’ he loved to say, ‘you will fall for anything.'”
Fr Joe had a few such sayings that he was famous for repeating, and the school had them printed on the back of his funeral Mass booklet. “Life is a mystery to be lived, not a problem to be solved”, he would say. Or, “Good judgement comes from experience, experience comes from bad judgement.” And he would remind the students, “Faith is not against reason, it’s beyond it.”
In his homily, Fr Myles O’Reilly referred to the first reading from Isaiah and the banquet the Lord prepares for His trusted servants. He spoke of the many years of faithful service Joe had given as a follower of Jesus. He had served his fellow Jesuits, his students and his family, all with great generosity and wisdom. It was his turn now to be served and take part in the banquet prepared for him, as promised by the prophet Isaiah, said Myles.
Joe’s many nieces and nephews also attended the Mass. One of them, Ross Brennan, paid a warm tribute to their uncle at the end of the service. He spoke of how loved Joe was by his extended family, of the kindness he always showed, and of the help he always gave to them.
The funeral Mass preceded that of his fellow-Jesuit Kennedy O’Brien, also a teacher in Gonzaga, who had died suddenly, earlier that week. The principal of Gonzaga, Damon McCaul said that it had been a very difficult week for the staff and students in the school. He said that Fr Joe had made such an impact on his students that older past pupils still remembered him with deep regard and gratitude. “And it’s the same with Kennedy for a new generation of pupils and past pupils. Both men were outstanding teachers and educators.”
The final word on Fr Joe was a simple line in the funeral Mass booklet, underneath a photo of him saying Mass in Gonzaga: ‘He was a good man’.

Early Education at Sacred Heart, Leeson St, Dublin, Ring College, Waterford & Belvedere College SJ, Dublin
1950-1953 Rathfarnham - Studying Arts at UCD
1953-1956 Tullabeg - Studying Philosophy
1956-1959 Mungret College SJ - Regency : Teacher
1959-1963 Milltown Park - Studying Theology
1963-1964 Rathfarnham - Tertianship
1964-1965 Trier, Germany - Liturgy Studies at Benediktiner Abtei St Mathias
1965-1966 Brussels, Belgium - Catechetics Studies at Lumen Vitae
1966-1968 Clongowes Wood College SJ - Teacher; Prefect; Lecturer in Catechetics at Milltown Park
1968-1969 Belvedere College SJ - Teacher; Musical Director; Lecturer in Catechetics at Milltown Park
1969-1974 Mungret College SJ - Teacher; Gamesmaster
1974-2018 Gonzaga College SJ - Teacher; Lecturer in Catechetics at Milltown Park
1983 Rector; Director of Pastoral Care
2010 Chaplain at Marlay Nursing Home, Dublin; Assistant Treasurer; Teacher of Religion
2014 Ceased Teaching

Born: 23 September 1920, Dublin City, County Dublin
Entered: 07 September 1946, St Mary's, Emo, County Laois
Ordained: 31 July 1957, Kaiserdom Sankt Bartholomäus (Frankfurter Dom), Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Final Vows: 15 August 1964, Mungret College SJ, Limerick
Died: 03 July 2002, Cherryfield Lodge, Dublin

Part of the Milltown Park, Dublin community at the time of death.

by 1949 at Laval, France (FRA) studying
by 1955 at Sankt Georgen, Frankfurt (GER I) studying
by 1978 at Toroto ONT, Canada (CAN S) sabbatical

◆ The Belvederian, Dublin, 2002

Obituary

Father Jack Brennan SJ (OB 1937)

My brother, Jack, was born on 23rd September, 1920, at 7 North Frederick Street, Dublin, our mother's home town. He was christened John Francis Joseph Brennan - sometimes, particularly with and to me, he was Seán Ó Braonáin. At that time, the family, of which he was the fourth child, was living in Caherciveen, Co. Kerry, our father's home town. He was about six months old in May 1921 when our father's house and others in Caherciveen were blown up by the English Army towards the end of the War of Independence in what were called “official reprisals”. The family then moved to Dublin, which is how Jack came to be educated at Belvedere College. He also spent a brief period at St Vincent's College, Castleknock.

Following school, Jack worked for a time with the Hibernian Insurance Company. After the outbreak of the Second World War, during the Emergency as it was called here, Jack joined the Irish Army, rising to the rank of Captain. The family lore tells, somewhat humorously, that initially when he was a Private, the Hibernian paid him the difference between his army pay and what he had been paid by the company. This did not happen in the case of our eldest brother, Charlie, our first Belvederian, who also joined the army, having been working in our father's insurance brokerage! Jack joined the latter in 1945 after leaving the army.

On 7th September 1946, about a fortnight before his 26th birthday, Jack entered the Jesuit Novitiate at Emo where he took his first vows two years later. He then spent a year in the Jesuit Juniorate, College St Michel, in Laval, France, after which he went to St Stanislaus College, Tullabeg, Co Offaly, to study philosophy. He was a scholastic in Belvedere College from 1952-'54, following which he went to the Jesuit college, Sankt Georgen, in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, to study theology and was ordained there on 31st July 1957. He returned in 1958 to Dublin, for his year's Tertianship in Rathfarnham Castle, then went to Mungret College, Limerick (1959-'64) where he took his final vows on 2nd February 1964. I believe, and heard from some of his fellow Jesuits, that, in his period as Minister there and subsequently as Principal in University Hall, Hatch Street, Dublin (1964-68 and 1978-'95); as Rector in Milltown Park (1968-'71); and as Rector in Clongowes Wood College (1972-'77), his talents for organisation, administration, and dealing with others were helped by his experience in the Irish Army. With regard to the latter, he celebrated the annual Mass for many years in commemoration of the tragic accident in the Glen of Imaal which happened at the time he was in the army.

Jack had a very fruitful and varied life. It was a life of true spirituality, generous helpfulness and unfailing good humour, a life which touched the lives of so many others. He was involved in the Samaritans, of which he was Director in Ireland (1970-'72). He had a particular interest in the second Vatican Council and was noted for his sympathy and understanding on the one hand and his encouragement on the other, in relation to those considering or dealing with its varied aspects. He was also noted for his commitment to ecumenism. He spent a sabbatical studying at Regis College, Toronto (1977-'78) where he obtained an MA in Theology. He enjoyed his spells of summer parish work in the state of New York, where he brought the word of God to many in his quiet, humorous and spiritually effective way. Messages of sympathy and great affection came to us from the friends he made there.

Jack is remembered with affection by our family and by his Jesuit family, to whom we are so closely tied; by those who looked after him so well and so lovingly during his year of reasonably good health at first and eventual last illness in the Jesuits' nursing home, Cherryfield Lodge; and by all who knew him at home and abroad. I was privileged to be among those of the family and of the Jesuit community who were with him when he died peacefully on 3rd July 2002. My other Jesuit brother, Joe, now of Gonzaga College, asked me to compose the prayers of the faithful to be recited by three of Jack's nieces and by one of his nephews (my son Cormac) at the funeral Mass. Cormac, who had frequently visited Jack with me, added his own composition which I include here as it reminded us of that good humour which Jack showed so often:

“Some of you may know that in his room, Jack had a plaque which said, ‘Working for the Lord doesn't pay much, but the retirement benefits are out of this world’! Let us pray that he is now enjoying those benefits”.

l and many fellow-Belvederians and others join in that prayer with certain hope and in gratitude to God for bringing Jack among us. Guim Solas na bhFlaitheas ar a anam uasal, dilis.

Anraí Ó Braonáin (O.B. 1949)