Jesuit old boys now our leaders

• by: GERARD WINDSOR
• From: The Australian
• September 14, 2013 12:00AM

The next treasurer, Joe Hockey, is an old Aloysian, and the future leader of government business and education minister, Christopher Pyne, is an old boy of Athelstone. The new Nationals member for Lyne, David Gillespie, is also an old Riverview boy, a classmate of Abbott.

The prominence of Jesuit ex-pupils is often enough remarked on but usually with the implication that the label “Jesuit” has an identifiable, well-known and stable meaning. It doesn’t.

There is a simplistic and inaccurate assumption, for example, that Jesuit products, like Jesuits themselves, will be sophisticated, urbane, cultured, learned, cunning; more or less like those other Jesuit old boys: Descartes, Rousseau, Voltaire, Alfred Hitchcock, Fidel Castro and Robert Mugabe. This is absurd, of course, but a belief lingers that there must be something in it.

What about their sociopolitical outlook? Midway through the election campaign, a group of Year 12 Riverview boys wrote to all the politicians who had gone to Jesuit schools, claiming their attitudes to asylum-seekers were a betrayal of the ideals they had been presented with by their educators. This was a brave and admirable move (and of the 100 letters the school received on the matter only six were negative), but the basis of the claim was historically only half-right because Jesuits have not always been singling out compassion and social justice as central ideals for their pupils.

Radical humps have always popped up on the plain of the school’s life. The most memorable was a hope expressed by a Riverview rector Noel Hehir, during World War II, that one day the school annual might feature a picture of Job in his rags, sitting on his dunghill, and captioned, “Our most successful old boy”.

Unsurprisingly, the Society of Jesus has never been a political monolith. After World War II, however, the belief that the main enemy of Christianity was atheistic communism led the Jesuits into semi-formal ties with BA Santamaria’s National Civic Council. Furthermore, their older schools were part of the establishment, Greater Public Schools or associated schools where Catholics who had made it financially and socially sent their sons.

The religious values the Jesuits tried to impart were straightforward: obedience to the Ten Commandments, loyalty to the faith and the church, and a concern for your neighbour. The last-named was exemplified by the presence in the schools of the St Vincent de Paul Society; boys visited patients in hospital and funded and served a Christmas meal at a shelter for the homeless. It was charitable work, and by no means common in other schools of the time. It was palliative, not society-changing. Particularly in the NSW schools, politics barely registered.

It was not until the late 1960s that overt political activity came to one of them. From 1968 to 1973, during Abbott’s years at Riverview, the rector there was Greg Jordan. A marital connection of Tom Hughes, who was an old boy and one-time Coalition attorney-general, Jordan aligned himself quite openly with the conservative parties and had a high public profile in fighting against Gough Whitlam’s contemplated cuts to funding for independent schools.

One other Jesuit from the school brandished his politics. His breezy Toryism, his flamboyantly affluent lifestyle, his shameless cultivation of the rich and powerful – “I rang Peter Abeles to commiserate with him on the behaviour of the pilots” – gave him entertainment value, but few boys took him seriously. He was known to warn boys tossing up career options that: “You wouldn’t make enough money doing that.”

The period was one of confusion. The Vatican Council had left the Jesuits unsure about their educational and religious missions, and many younger ones felt they shouldn’t run schools at all.

Perhaps predictably, out of this environment came a procession of conservative politicians at state and federal level; from Riverview alone: Stephen Lusher, Nick Greiner, Chris Hartcher, Abbott and Gillespie. Since the 40s, with one celebrated exception, every old boy of the Jesuits who has gone into politics has done so on the conservative side: 12 from Riverview, at least four from Xavier, two from Athelstone and one from St Aloysius. It was seen as their natural habitat. Old boys presumed it would be the case. For years now, a group of Jesuit old boys, led by men in their 70s, has travelled to Canberra for the budget speech in reply and to meet their politician fellows. But only those on the conservative side.

In the 70s, a seismic shift occurred in Jesuit thinking about what the core of their educational enterprise should be. In 1973 their superior general, Pedro Arrupe, a Basque, told a gathering of old boys in Spain that their ideal now was “a preferential option for the poor”. The Spanish old boys, heirs to bitterness between the church and the Republicans during the civil war, were horrified. This was Marxism, barely disguised.

But the Jesuits radicalised themselves overnight. By the late 80s, the mantra on the lips of every Jesuit pupil was “a man for others”. So much so that Abbott could tell Annabel Crabb on ABC1’s Kitchen Cabinet that he had entered the seminary because the Jesuits had drilled him to be “a man for others”. But he had never heard the term at school: it didn’t enter the Jesuit lingua franca until at least five years after he had left.

In 1980 the then headmaster, Peter Quin, wrote: “Jesuit education has failed if our students are not imbued with a sense of justice and faith. Riverview has a fresh vision for the future … men for others.” Thereafter, the practical expression of that vision snowballed: bursary programs based solely on financial need, especially for indigenous and refugee families; an annual spell of community service made a compulsory activity for every boy in every year, and for staff too.

Although Abbott was no longer at school for this fresh vision, Joyce, Hockey and Pyne, all a decade younger than he, should have caught its first glimmers.

There was a curious disjunct in Abbott’s exchange with Crabb. He went into the seminary to be a man for others, yet the catalyst to his coming out was being told by an old friend that he couldn’t meet him because he had to fly to London to finalise a $1.5 billion contract. He, Abbott, was just working on an essay about the Desert Fathers. What am I doing, he asked, and returned to the world.

Ironically, a great Jesuit teacher in Abbott’s time at Riverview, Charlie Fraser, used to love a sentence from Bruce Marshall’s spoof novel, George Brown’s Schooldays: “Oh that I had the wings of a dove, says the Psalmist, that I might fly away and be at rest. Not, so that I might bugger off to New York for a directors’ meeting with J. Pierpont Morgan.”

For an economic rationalist, there’s barely more growth potential in the Desert Fathers than there is in being at rest. That man for others, however, is still there, wonderfully assiduous in his volunteer work: lifesaving, firefighting and in indigenous communities. But what the Jesuits want to know is whether his policies make for “a more humane, just and sustainable world”.

The undeniable fact seems to be that pupils pick up their politics much more from their home than from their school. Jesuit schools are cramped drastically by two factors, two of them by their GPS affiliations.

It was Athelstone, a newish school without any such baggage, that had itself registered as an offsite campus for the Baxter detention centre by headmaster Greg O’Kelly. And in Perth in the late 70s, John XXIII College, briefly headed by a Jesuit, Daven Day, opened, against some strong parental opposition, to young East Timorese displaced by the Indonesian invasion.

Second, Jesuit schools lie in heartlands of blue-ribbon conservatism. Of the 1200 day boys at Riverview, 25 per cent live in Lane Cove, in the same postcode. Another 20 per cent are from Mosman, Northbridge and Middle Cove, on Sydney’s north shore. A tension between the demography and the school’s ideals are obvious.

The man who broke the mould of the Jesuit politician was Bill Shorten, another product of the mid-80s, and now set to become leader of the Labor Party. He still seems an anomaly, the son of a wharf labourer and union official who nevertheless went to Xavier. As with all his Jesuit opponents, his politics seem much likelier to have come from home than school. But his imagining and crafting and shepherding of the national disability insurance scheme easily wins him the Ignatian Medal for this year’s Man for Others. Any more contenders?

Gerard Windsor is an old boy of Riverview. His most recent book is an account of an Australian infantry company in Vietnam, All Day Long the Noise of Battle