A BLAST FROM THE PAST
Dear Reader,
I’m grateful to the new Director, Alex Sidhu, for offering me a curtain call by appointing me guest editor of the September newsletter! After eight months of retirement, it’s pleasant to be engaged once again in the Dawson Centre’s business before returning to the equally pleasant joys of being master of my own time. I shall remain a member of the committee however, and greatly value that ongoing connection.
I begin this newsletter by paying a compliment to Alex. He has had a very difficult year. His principal and challenging goal has been to find funding to enable the Centre to continue, and to replace the special funding provided by the Archbishop, the Archdiocese of Hobart, and a great number of generous private donors that enabled to Centre to come into existence and to function successfully. In this he has had a large measure of success, so that survival for at least another two years is now assured – and there are promising signs of further support after that time.
But this effort comes at a cost and the newsletter had to take second place until we had a higher level of certainty about mere survival. There were also issues involving registration and compliance and all the other red tape burdens that complicate modern life almost to the limits of endurance. Most of that is now behind us now, I’m pleased to say, and plans are in place for a monthly newsletter from now on, and a colloquium in April next year. In the words of the old country and western song, I think we can say that ‘the circle is unbroken’!
The next thing I want to do is to thank Emeritus Archbishop Porteous for both his vision and his financial support. A Centre to proclaim and make more widely known the excellence of the Catholic intellectual tradition was his idea, and Christopher Dawson was his choice of namesake. One of the enduring false myths of the modern world is that Christianity and Science are necessarily at loggerheads, that religious people are not thinking people, that spirituality has no part to play in the intellectual sphere. That this is absurd is easily discovered from the lists of prominent scientists and thinkers who have also been religious. This needs to be better known, and the Centre’s principal purpose was to do whatever it could to spread the truth. We couldn’t do much on a large scale, but we early took as our motto Burke’s famous dictum that ‘no man made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little’.
Archbishop Porteous tendered his resignation as he was bound to do on turning 75 last year. After many months the Pope named Archbishop Ireland as his successor, and the latter was installed on 12 August. The ABC report was mean-spirited in unfavourably comparing the ‘compassion’ of new Archbishop with the implied lack of it in his predecessor. It is a mark of poor-quality journalism that reporting is too often confused with personal ad hominem commentary. Porteous had been dogged by negative commentary since his appointment to Hobart 12 years ago. A group called Concerned Catholics was unrelenting in its attacks. They clearly had and held the ear of the local ABC reporter who should have known better: undiscerning opinion is no substitute for investigative journalism. The national news agency should be above that kind of petty narcissism but sadly it isn’t. The kind of language used is always revealing: Porteous, we were told, was more interested in doctrine than compassion; he was conservative (code for stuck in the past); he ignored ‘the spirit of Vatican II’ (he had read all the documents, though); he was unsympathetic to ordaining women to the priesthood (so was Pope Francis). All these things were held against him. I came to know him well and now consider him a good friend. He was in truth a kind and gentle pastor who had to face a lot of disloyalty within the so-called Household of Faith. We can only hope that Archbishop Ireland will get a better deal from the public broadcaster and the other media, though we know from long experience that a Christian pastor who is true to his Faith must inevitably make enemies.
Archbishop Porteous continues his involvement as a member of the standing committee of the Centre, as do I. The fourth member of that committee is Mr Ron Ward, who was Business Manager/Financial Administrator of the Archdiocese for several years. He combines impressive governance, financial and administrative skills, with cool judgement and strategic wisdom. Ron also has a long record of voluntary work not only with Church-related bodies but also with worthwhile charities and social enterprises.
I propose to run two summer schools in January 2026. I taught the first annual Medieval and Ecclesiastical Latin school 36 years ago and always look forward to it, though numbers are declining. Not because everybody now knows Latin (certainly not true!) but because of the growing availability of online courses all over the world, some of them very good indeed. But for the personal touch one will always have to travel. The course will run over five full days from 5 to 9 January. It is aimed at people who have already done some Latin. The other course will be for absolute beginners in New Testament and Koine Greek, likewise an intensive five-day course in the week following, 12 to 16 January. For further information if interested please contact me directly at dccdain@gmail.com or take a look at full course descriptions on my Substack page @daviddaintree.
We’re not quite ready to put out a date-claimer for the 2026 Colloquium, but we’re looking at a Saturday in April as the most likely. It should fit within school holidays to suit teachers who are usually the largest bloc of participants. The venue will be in Melbourne and the theme is Can the terminal decline in western civilisation be turned around? And if so, how? Of course we’ll keep you posted.
As explained above, I am guest-editor of this edition of the Director’s newsletter. Please address all correspondence relating to the newsletter or the business of the Centre (other than the summer schools) not to me but directly to Alex Sidhu at director@dawsoncentre.org.
On behalf of the Director and Committee I extend our very best wishes and sincere thanks for your loyalty and patience,
David Daintree