http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/jesuit-old-boys-now-our-leaders...Jesuit old boys now our leaders
GERARD WINDSOR THE AUSTRALIAN SEPTEMBER 14, 2013 12:00AM
Tony Abbott, left, Christopher Pyne and Joe Hockey all received a Jesuit education. Picture: Kym Smith Source: TheAustralian
AUSTRALIA has just four schools under the care of the Jesuits: St Ignatius, Riverview, and St Aloysius in Sydney; Xavier in Melbourne; and St Ignatius, Athelstone, in Adelaide. Yet in the present parliament, the prime minister-elect, Tony Abbott, and the leader-in-waiting of the Nationals and hence the deputy prime minister-in-waiting, Barnaby Joyce, are Riverview old boys.
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.
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