The Messenger - February 2009 - Editorial February 2009
By John Looby, S.J. - 01 February 2009
Give and Not to Count the Cost : If there is one thing we Irish do not like, it is to be thought mean. Generosity is basic to our social life. We quite comfortably exaggerate our hundred thousand welcomes, and quite unselfconsciously believe we live up to it. We will go without to ensure that we would never be thought mean.
Not only is our social life marked by generosity; so too, is our spirituality. The faith and confidence in the generosity of a good God have gone hand in hand. God is good has been the prayer of the Irish in all kinds of difficult times. And our response in faith to a loving God has been radically witnessed by generosity. We would not want to be thought mean by God. Maybe it was once most evident in the number of young Irishmen and women who heard his call to follow him. We can be proud of the generosity with which they gave their lives.
St. Paul, who paid his way in all his apostolic journeys, dared to say that his converts should be imitators of him as he was of Christ. Memorably he said of Christ that he 'emptied' himself. He wanted to imitate that generosity.
The death last October of Fr. Jack Donovan, S.J. in London reminded me that I have never known anyone else who so effectively 'emptied' himself. He was described at his funeral Mass as a 'low-maintenance priest, a humble servant'. All his life he opted for obscurity. After his ordination he worked in London for forty years, and on one occasion volunteered for a parish that no other priest could handle. A parish priest had been convicted of child abuse, provoking understandable fury in the parishioners. In a spirit of humility Jack lived with the hatred, anger and resistance of the parish. In the end the people learned to accept this quiet, inarticulate, intensely private Corkman. He seldom appeared in Ireland and eventually retired to be first a chaplain, then a resident in sheltered accommodation in London.
We may have thought of him as largely a forgotten man. But his death brought out the crowds. London traffic was held up as the funeral procession walked for half an hour from St. Anne's church where he had been P.P., to St. Margaret's where he died. His beloved Filipinos held an all-night vigil for him before the funeral, and escorted him to St.
Patrick's Cemetery. May he rest in peace.
John Looby, S.J.
Editor