Brother Michael Naughtin - Eulogy

The following eulogy was delivered by Brother Michael Green at the Mass of Thanksgiving to celebrate the life of Brother Michael Naughtin on Thursday 26 March 2009.

It was sometimes pointed out by Brother Michael that the motto of St Joseph’s College could be translated in two ways.  Because Latin does not have the definite article, In meliora contende could be rendered as Strive for better things – its customary translation in the College – or as Strive for the better things.  He professed to be comfortable with both.  In either case, however, he would have been insistent that the verb – contende – is in its imperative form, not its infinitive.  It is an injunction, calling the listener to present and concrete action rather than simply proposing some kind of theoretical principle.  In choosing the name for his centennial history of St Joseph’s, it was this word on which he turned the title – striving.  It was a principle that also marked his own life, as a Marist Brother, as a teacher, as a scholar, and as a man: he was someone who had no truck with empty rhetoric or pretentious spin, but was concerned with genuine endeavour for both better things and the better things.  We come to farewell a man of not only of rare ability but of uncommon authenticity and integrity. 

Most gathered in this Chapel today would know well enough the inspirational story that is Brother Michael’s life.  I imagine that today’s students would be little different from those of my generation who sat in these same pews forty years ago, in the respect and the affection they have for this remarkable Brother.  Stories of his prodigious intellect and achievements were traded among us, sometimes with incredulity and wonder, but always with a certain level of vicarious pride.  “Did you know he won the Cooper Scholarship?” one boy might boast to another. “Yes, and studying part-time at night when he was headmaster of a school,” the other would respond.  “But he seems so ... so, simple,” might remark a third, new to the College, “Are you sure?”  “Yes, he won first class honours and went to King’s College.” And another, “He’s been on the Board of Studies for sixteen years, can you believe?”  Even his colleagues on staff would delight in the stories of his breadth of his knowledge.  Known during his time here for his love and scholarship of the classics and his teaching of them, it was sometimes with surprise that a teacher of 4-Unit Mathematics or senior Physics might have a particularly complex problem solved by Michael in a matter of moments. 

It was all a long way from a grazing property and a small public school in Yarrawonga for Vincent Patrick Naughtin, but in another sense there was about this man a perennial and characteristic country simplicity that marked him from his earliest years.

The seventeen year-old who presented himself at the Marist Brothers’ Juniorate at Mittagong in 1936 from Assumption College Kilmore was, though, already revealing himself as someone cast of a special mould.  With a brilliant senior year pass under his belt, one that he could have used to matriculate into the degree and career of his choice at the University of Melbourne, or be heartily welcomed at Weribee seminary with eight of his classmates, young Vincent opted for a humbler but no less noble path – that of the religious teaching brother.  Both the nobility and the humility of that choice were to grow to define the kind of Marist Brother that he would become, and that today you and I gather to remember, to honour, and to mourn.

Taking the habit of the Marist Brothers in 1937, and receiving the religious name of Michael, he began a journey of scholarship and teaching that would bring him to affect the lives of thousands of young men, confreres and colleagues. 

Early appointments at Forbes, Mittagong and Eastwood were followed by eleven memorable years at the Marist Brothers’ High School, Darlinghurst, a school by then well known in Sydney not only for the consistent quality of its Leaving Certificate results, but more generally for the calibre and spirit of its students.  The School drew university-bound students from all over the city for their final two years of secondary, at a time when most high schools finished at Intermediate.  They were a formidable band, the Darlo boys, and from 1946 they were fortunate to be put largely in the care of Brother Michael who taught them Religion, Mathematics and Physics, and coached them in cricket.  A man in his late twenties and early thirties, Brother Michael was at the height of his energies. His students held him in the highest regard, and do so to this day.  Within six years, Brother Michael found himself appointed as Headmaster of the School, and Superior of the Brothers’ community there.  At the same time, he had been given permission to enrol in the University of Sydney to read for a degree in his principal teaching subjects, Mathematics and Science.  No evening courses being available in those areas, he took what was on offer – Latin and Greek literature.  Whether or not we be inclined agree with the Roman poet Ovid who posited that it is “by faithful study of the nobler arts, [that] our nature's softened, and more gentle grows” we do know that Brother Michael relished this opportunity to study the Classics, and that they had they their own effect on him.  And of course he became a master of them, as we also know.

The opportunity to take up his scholarship at King’s College was delayed until he had completed first his headmastership at Darlinghurst, and another more briefly at Kogarah. Perhaps his Superiors in that more sectarian age felt that he then needed to be steeled against the risks and dangers of stepping outside the monastic enclosure and the bosom of the Catholic Church, so before they allowed him to become a scholar at Cambridge he was required to follow the nine-month long exercises of the Marist Brothers Second Novitiate, then offered, in French it might be added, at St Quentin-Fallavier. 

The Australia to which Brother Michael returned at the beginning of the 1960s was on the eve of a social, educational, and ecclesiastical revolution, the profundity and breadth of which has helped to define the lives of all of us in this chapel today.  As he took up his appointment as Prefect of Studies at St Joseph’s, it was into a pre-Wyndham, pre-Vatican II, even pre-Beatles scene that he stepped.  Young men were still wearing ties and white shirts on campus at Sydney University. Nuns wore veils, and catechism could be taught and learnt from little green books. There is arguably no more telling measure of Brother Michael than the way in which he engaged the vicissitudes of change that marked schools, religious life and society at large, during the remaining decades of his life.  Never confusing style with substance, never allowing the peripheral or the fashionable to seduce his intellectual grasp of the simple fundamentals of either faith or life, not one to leave unchallenged an initiative that compromised either quality or decency, Brother Michael was to be a rock on which this College stood, one that was more solid and more sure than even the massive Hawkesbury sandstone of its edifice. To suggest, however, that he was – if he might forgive my mixing of metaphors – only a still-point, or just a reference-marker, during the sometimes confusing whirlpools of change, would be to misrepresent him.  No, in his gentle and respectful way, he led.  Within the College, more broadly as a Provincial Councillor for the Marist Brothers, and a Member of the Board of Studies, he helped to shape and to guide change.  He also gave the highest priority to supporting his confreres and his colleagues in the challenges they faced personally and professionally during these years.  When on one occasion the Province established a committee of experts to train and guide the Brothers as they struggled to teach what was then called the “new catechetics”, the Brothers were consulted on how the committee may be of greatest assistance to them.  When they asked Brother Michael, he said simply, “By encouraging them.”

There may have been things that raised his heckles from time to time, such as undisciplined young men running barefoot across the black-and-white tiles – and that was just the Brothers – or any time that someone who should have known better misused a Latin word or made a clumsy syntactical error.  Once at an education conference, people were surprised to see him spring to his feet in the middle of a keynote address to challenge the speaker on her misuse of the verb “educere” rather than “educare” as the etymological source of the English word “education”.  The meanings of the two Latin words are quite different, as he explained politely but unambiguously to the stunned audience.  At a deeper level, however, he was a man unshaken, someone with his eyes on the big things.  Nowhere is that more beautifully captured than in the small prayer he composed for the students back in 1962.  Today it is known as the College Prayer, and is recited by students and Old Boys alike. It has even found itself borrowed and rebadged in other schools.  It says a great deal about its author that the words and sentiments of that prayer speak as relevantly and as validly to today’s youth as they did to boys of half a century ago.  It is emblematic of Brother Michael himself.

Teach Me, O Lord
to aim high
and not to be content with mediocrity;
to set my sights on noble goals;
to have a brave heart, a clear vision;
to prize the things that are worthwhile;
to always have courage
to choose what is right,
to despise what is petty,
to shun all selfishness,
to have a heart that is strong and brave,
pure and happy,
docile yet courageous,
so that under your guidance
and with your grace
I may at all times and in all things have as my motto:

In meliora contende

 

From one perspective this College and its activities became his life.  Through the terms of eight Headmasters, he was found guiding the studies of senior students, teaching classes in senior English, Latin and Greek, acting in the role of Headmaster himself for several significant periods, editing the College magazine each year, taking the role of custodian of the College’s heritage and even author of its official history, shaping the role and place of the Library which was to grow into the Resources Centre, editing the Old Boys journal, the Cerise and Blue, producing the College teaching timetable each year with the deftness of magician – and doing all these things so effectively, so reliably and for so long – there would be no argument from anyone here this morning that Brother Michael stands worthily and easily among other great Marists whose legacy is part of the fabric of this place and whom many of us were privileged to have known here, men such as Liguori, Louis, Gerard, Angelus, Henry, Maurus.  For each of them, as for Brother Michael, it was not essentially about St Joseph’s College itself or even his occupations within it.  Unlike Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, his “library [was never a] dukedom large enough” because for him it was not about books or institutions or even principles, but about people.

For forty-five years, this scholar, this classicist, and this gentle man of culture had his rooms at the entrance to the Year 12 residential complex – down there in D-Block.  In the middle of it all – the rough and tumble of the sometimes loud, sometimes crass, and always unpredictable lives of 17 and 18 year-old boys.  It was everything he was not, but he wouldn’t have it had any other way.  Like St Marcellin, he knew the value of presence in the midst of the young, and he loved them.  When several years ago his health meant that he needed to move back into the Brothers’ community residence, he agreed with his customary graciousness and deference, but it was certainly a wrench for him.  It had been there that his office door was always open, the tasks on his desk never as important as the student or Old Boy at the door, seeking his counsel, or just an opportunity to catch up and pass the time.   The simplicity of his tutorial advice to a student, the richness of his wisdom, the readiness of his encouragement, his understated humour, his encyclopaedic knowledge of Old Boys and their progress in life – how many of us have a memory of a conversation that was took place in that office.  In his latter years, with his more active days of administration and teaching behind him, Brother Michael was never more comfortable than when he was with the students – never missing a College Assembly, a rugby game, a Mass, whatever was on.  At Saturday night Mass in recent years it was particularly moving to see him take his place in the front pew of this Chapel, and to witness the students of Year 7 – some of them the grandsons of boys whom he had taught years before – come to sit next to him and around him, they and he so much at ease in each other’s presence.

Those closest to Brother Michael, especially we his confreres, knew someone beyond the brilliant mind and unaffected dignity.  We knew and loved the Marist Brother.  We were edified by his faithful and fervent prayer life, and heartened by his fraternal bonhomie.  It was never a surprise to come upon him, on his own, in the Brothers’ Chapel, rosary beads around his fingers, or breviary in his hand.  As the years went on, the words became fewer: as a genuine mystic he had learned to sit in the loving presence of the Lord without much need for words.  When he received the Sacrament of the Sick the last week, the priest said to him that surely God had reserved a special place for him.  Having never presumed to impose his will on anyone, Michael was not going to do it with his God.  He replied to the priest with his customary humility and modesty that he wasn’t so sure.  For once, maybe he didn’t get it quite right, and we may prefer to side, rather, with Plutarch who suggested that it was “not by lamentations and mournful chants ought we to celebrate the funeral of a good man, but by hymns, for in ceasing to be numbered with mortals he enters upon the heritage of a diviner life.” 

What a gift he has been to all of us.  When shall we see his like again?

Over recent days the College and the Brothers have been overwhelmed by the many expressions of condolence they have received.  One came from an Old Boy of Brother Michael, and also of mine, Dr John Loadsman, whose son Nick is now in Year 11 at the College.  The final lines of his email provide a kind of neat literary enclosure to this eulogy that might have pleased our Brother Michael and with John’s permission I quote him:

I have not had the opportunity to use much Latin nor retain much, but in his honour I will have a go. It is not the dactylic hexameter of which he was so fond, and I fear for the correctness of the syntax, but it's the best I can do after so many years...

 

Vale Frater Michaele. In veritate homo magnus Dei eras.

 

Filius Mariae et frater Champagnati, semper in meliora contendebas.

 

Brother Michael Green FMS

26 March 209