A long-serving Marist priest celebrated his 100th birthday on Tuesday.
Members of the Society of Mary, friends and family joined Father George Duggan at the St Joseph’s Home of Compassion in Upper Hutt, where he received a special blessing from Pope Benedict.
Father George Duggan, also known as Chalky, was a lecturer, a dedicated scholar of theology and a regular in the letters pages of The Listener.
George Duggan was born in Runanga near Greymouth. He was educated by the Mercy Sisters and Marist Brothers in Greymouth and Reefton, and his secondary education was at St Bede’s College, Christchurch, where he was dux in both 1927 and 1928. He won a University National Scholarship in 1928, the first St Bede’s student to do so.
His ordination as a priest of the Society of Mary took place in Rome on 7 March 1936, the feast of St Thomas Aquinas, an auspicious date, given his future dedication to the works of St Thomas Aquinas which informed much of his later teaching and writing.
His friend, Fr Brian Quin describes George Duggan as a modern example of John Bunyan’s Mr Valiant-for-truth. “All his priestly life he has been noted for his forthright defence of Church teaching,” he wrote recently. “In this, he has shown an exemplary sense of the Marist commitment to loyalty and to the teaching authority of the Church.”
Fr Quin went on to note the difference between the public face of the man, who could be pretty sharp at times in written comment, and the private Fr Duggan who was known to his many friends, students and colleagues as a wonderfully sympathetic and kind spiritual director, and also a lively and interesting conversationalist.
A reading of his countless published letters shows that while he was critical of views and opinions which he regarded as not authentically Catholic, he was careful for the most part to confine his comments to issues rather than to personalities.
Source
- Stuff.co.nz
- Lyndsay Freer- The Marist Messenger
- Image: Flickr