A tribute to wisdom and friendship: Reflections on the life of Fr Gerald O’Collins SJ

Catholic Voice 5 September 2024 1

Father Gerald O’Collins SJ

Father Gerald O’Collins SJ was an outstanding Australian.

He died at age 93, not before writing 80 books, mostly on the mystery of Christ. From age 15, he wrote a book a year. They were all top-class.

A very affable and engaging man and priest, he had time for friendship and anyone in need.

I first met him as a young seminarian in the 1980’s. I had read a book of his helping me work through a particular question dealing with the mystery of Christ’s resurrection. The lecture he gave on Christ enthused and enlightened me.

He was generous with his time, helping seminarians on retreat when I was rector of the seminary, and he attended our clergy gatherings.

I attended his funeral at St. Patrick’s on Wednesday. What you have in your hands is a superb homily by Father Brendan Byrne SJ and a reflection Archbishop Mark Coleridge.

Enjoy!

Fr Tony Percy

Gerald O’Collins, SJ
Requiem Homily

St Patrick’s Cathedral, Melbourne
Wednesday 4 September

Ninety three years of life, seventy four a Jesuit, sixty one a priest, over thirty years teaching at the Gregorian University, Rome; prolific writer, mentor to hundreds, widely loved friend and companion. Where can one begin and end in regard to the one known to us all as “Gerry”?

This will not be an obituary—rather an attempt to view his life in the light of the readings from Scripture that we have heard. It is very much drawn from the privilege of living with Gerry in the last decade of his life.

In one of the many homilies he preached in our domestic chapel at Parkville—all carefully scripted, none exceeding four minutes—Gerry remarked that it had long been his aim to “live biblically”. What he meant by “living biblically” was not immediately clear. Surely, of all people, he knew that the Bible stems from ancient times and cultures, to which we cannot return and inhabit.

So what did Gerry mean by “living biblically”? He had the good fortune that his time of theological formation preparatory to priesthood coincided with the early years of the Second Vatican Council. This meant that one thing that shaped his thought profoundly was the Council’s reappropriation of Scripture in the life of Catholic Church. To embrace this rediscovered biblical revelation and commit one’s life to its propagation was “to live biblically”.

Gerry’s early years were spent at the family’s large home Rock Lodge at Frankston. His parents, Frank and Joan, kept a hospitable table. Guests, including not a few of the great and good of the time, were many. Gerry told me that his father instructed the children, “Don’t just go up and greet the visitors. Engage them in conversation”. There was laid, perhaps, the foundation of Gerry’s lifelong openness to people and ideas: his hospitality of mind and heart, his eagerness to converse and discover what people were doing and what they found interesting. In the documents of Vatican II he found a similarly hospitable vision of the Church, inspired by the Bible. He devoted the long decades of his academic career to promoting and developing this vision, resisting attempts to wind it back, exploring new ways to validate it in Scripture and the theological tradition.

Gerry’s first and abiding love was for Scripture, especially the New Testament, for the study of which his classical studies at Melbourne University had so well prepared him. His move to Systematic Theology had its origins—appropriately for an O’Collins—on a golf course. Around the time he was due to be sent overseas for studies, his uncle James O’Collins, Bishop of Ballarat, was having a round of golf with the Jesuit provincial Jeremiah Hogan. At one point, waiting for the group ahead to clear the green, the good bishop asked the provincial, “What is young Gerry going to study overseas?” On receiving the reply, “Scripture”, he retorted in characteristic bluff manner, “No, we don’t need Scripture scholars; send him to do theology”. And so Gerry moved to fundamental theology and the rest is history. But Gerry’s work in theology always rested on a firm Scriptural base. As Archbishop Mark Coleridge has remarked in a superb tribute:

He had the training of a systematic theologian but the instincts of a New Testament scholar; with the journalist’s ability to write accessibly and attractively, that was an unusual and potent combination.

You will have noted in the Scripture we have heard this morning the prominence of resurrection. Gerry was in every way a Resurrection person. In books and countless articles he mustered all his linguistic, exegetical, and indeed philosophical skill to defend and promote this central teaching of our faith.

He certainly would have resonated with what is possibly the earliest biblical statement of resurrection that we heard from the prophet Isaiah in the First Reading—not excluding the opening sentence about the Lord preparing “on this mountain a banquet of fine wines, of food rich and juicy, of fine strained wines”. Gerry liked his food and in particular a good drop of red. Above all, he would have endorsed the sense emerging from the passage that the Lord’s whole intention in our regard is to have us as honoured guests at the banquet of the Kingdom. His first strictly theological book was entitled—in the non-inclusive language of the time—Man and His New Hopes (1969). For him, as at the end of the Reading, “the Lord is the one in whom we have placed our hope”.

In books and articles Gerry returned again and again to the Easter stories in the gospels. If one of them, the appearance of the risen Lord to Mary Magdalene, features as our Gospel today, it does so for two reasons. First, it is an appearance to a woman. Gerry loved women and women loved Gerry. It didn’t matter whether it was the Princess Doria Pamphilj, his nieces, or the Vietnamese lady, Van, who cleaned his room; he was completely at ease with women and delighted in their company.

The second reason for choosing this story is that the woman in question is Mary Magdalene. Gerry devoted a number of studies to the possibility that Mary Magdalene—so prominent in the Passion and Resurrection episodes of the gospels—may have in fact been the first person to whom the risen Lord appeared and therefore the first witness to the resurrection, her fidelity, courage, and loving devotion rewarded in this way. The tradition of a first appearance to her may have suffered some eclipse because women’s witness enjoyed little credibility at the time.

Whatever about that, what Gerry would love about this scene is the delicacy and tenderness with which the risen Lord addresses Mary’s distraught love, rekindling her faith and hope at the calling of her name. If Jesus tells her not to keep clinging to him, it’s presumably because she has grasped him in a physical embrace, as of old. But now their relationship has to move to a new level. She has to let him go to the Father—as we have to let our loved ones, including now Gerry, go to the Father, to a new way of being, where we hope to join them.

Meanwhile, Jesus sends Mary on mission: to bring his message to “my brothers”, to be “apostle to the apostles”, as Gerry loved to note. Here he would have seen Mary Magdalene as the model of women’s leadership in the church, bringing, especially in our time, messages that the male leadership urgently needs to hear.

Finally, or, to be correct, in the middle, we have the Reading from St Paul. Paul’s letter to the Philippians was a favourite of Gerry’s. Principally perhaps because the Christ-hymn Paul quotes in chapter 2 (vv. 6–11) is so significant for early New Testament christology. But also, I suspect, because of the intimacy with which Paul addresses this beloved community, who, as far as we know, never gave him any trouble but simply surrounded him with affection and support.

Paul writes from a Roman prison, very likely facing sentence of death. The Philippians too have been suffering persecution. Yet his overall message is one of hope and joy:

Fill your minds with everything that is noble, pure, thought virtuous, worthy of love, honour, and praise.

This is not specifically Christian language. This is language from the best of the popular Stoic philosophy of the surrounding Greco-Roman world. It reflects conversation and dialogue with that world: the conversation that Gerry sought to initiate all his life.

The language also reflects the positive, welcoming disposition that all who met him found. I quote in this connection some words from one of our youngest Jesuits, Julian Butler, just now gone off to do theology in Boston:

Gerry wanted to see people at their best and his company allowed others to be so. He put us at ease and deftly averted any unpleasantness in conversation. He showed me a way of living with fidelity to God, generosity to others, and a sense of seeking ever what is good, true and beautiful.

Gerry was in every way a “resurrection” person. But resurrection presupposes death. Gerry did not turn away from the darker aspects of life. He counselled and accompanied with compassion many afflicted by suffering and failure. Prayers for sick or bereaved friends were constantly on his lips at our community Masses.

In these last months and weeks, we have seen him gradually stripped through frailty of so many things that gave him comfort, joy, and consolation: cinema, meals with friends, theological discourse. On the day before he died, those at his bedside heard just a grateful Nunc dimittis, and in the end there was an emptiness that only God could fill.

One of his latest books bears the title, The Beauty of Jesus Christ. Drawn from St Augustine, it states the love from which his many other loves were nourished.

All Gerry’s books are readable. Perhaps the most readable of all is this: Letters to Nevie. In it he writes, with respect to our Gospel today:

Nevie, let Jesus call you by your name. No one will ever say our name as beautifully as he does. When we hear him calling us by name, our lives can be changed forever.

Gerry, we trust that you have heard the risen Lord calling you by name, to take you to the house of the Father, into the fullness of the Truth you so effectively served.

Brendan Byrne, SJ
St Patrick’s Cathedral, Melbourne, 4 September, 2024

Reflection by The Most Reverend Mark Coleridge
Archbishop of Brisbane

I first met Gerald O’Collins in 1971 when I was a seminarian at Corpus Christi College Glen Waverley in what was then called first year Theology and he was a young and rather glamorous teacher of theology who seemed to know everything and everyone. Those were the days when he was teaching half the year in Boston and half the year in Melbourne; and that added to the sense of glamour and excitement.

Fr O’Collins taught one of the three most influential courses in my seminary training, Fundamental Theology or, as it became under Gerry, the Foundations of Theology, which was really the theology of revelation. He opened to us the great vision of the Second Vatican Council’s teaching on Revelation. He taught us that Jesus was the revelation; and that for me was…well, revelatory. Gerry made theology seem not only relevant but exciting; and he also gave us a sense of the Church universal which was itself exciting and even liberating.

Gerry was a great encourager. It was he who suggested that I submit an essay I’d done for him for publication in Compass. This seemed a bridge too far for me, but I followed his advice. The piece was published, and thus began my modest publishing career. Through the years Gerry not only taught his students: he befriended them. That’s why many of those he taught and mentored became his lifelong friends. Beyond the academic setting, his gift for friendship was one of the reasons why he was such a remarkable networker. That was why Rome, still one of the great global crossroads, suited him so well.

I crossed paths with Gerry again when I went to study in Rome at the Biblicum in 1980. He had already been teaching for some years at the Gregorian University, just across the piazza from the Biblical Institute. I met him often enough in the piazza or at various celebrations, and he was an unfailing source of encouragement in those early years when adjustment to Roman life wasn’t always easy.

At the Gregorian, Gerry was known for various things, apart from his teaching of theology and the flow of his publications. He was known for his celebrated Australian accent when he spoke Italian. He knew the language as well as anyone; it’s just that the sound was pure Chips Rafferty. But more importantly he was known as a teacher who had a genuinely pastoral concern for his students, which was unusual in the Roman universities at that time. This was another aspect of Gerry’s gift of friendship.

Later in life, when I was asked to work in the Holy See’s Secretariat of State, I crossed paths with Gerry once again. He was as much a man of the Church as he had always been, but his dealings with the Holy See had grown more complex, especially after the sanctioning of Fr Jacques Dupuis SJ to whom Gerry was close. It was always puzzling to me that Gerry was never appointed to the International Theological Commission, where he would have contributed so well.

In those years I met him mainly at the table of Desmond O’Grady, the Australian writer and journalist who had long lived in Rome. Des was a friend to us both who was deeply interested in the Church but very much a man of the wider world. That was also true of Gerry, who was always a Church man but never an ecclesiastical apparatchik. He was given to theology but not to ideology. A son of St Ignatius, he believed in the dialogue with culture and was at home in any company.

Gerry’s ceaseless writing, like his teaching, rose from a lifelong encounter with Jesus Christ crucified and risen. He seemed almost haunted not just by the question of Jesus but by the presence of Jesus. He also seemed one who needed a manuscript underway in order to give shape and direction to his life, both intellectually and spiritually. He had the training of a systematic theologian but the instincts of a New Testament scholar; and he also had the journalist’s ability to write accessibly and attractively. That unusual and potent combination gave Gerry a voice that will be heard beyond his death.

Above all, however, Gerald O’Collins was a Jesuit priest who understood what it was to give his life “for the greater glory of God”. Pope St Paul VI said that people these days “listen more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if they listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses” (Evangelii Nuntiandi, 41). In bidding farewell to Fr Gerald O’Collins SJ, we give thanks for one to whom people listened because he was both teacher and witness, priest and friend. May he rest in peace and rise in glory.