I was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1941. I think I always wanted to be a priest, as far back as I can remember. I can remember thinking that I’d like to help people on their way to God. I never spoke about it with my parents, but I’m sure that their own devout lifestyle had a lot to do with it.
I joined the seminary in 1960, got a BA at University College Dublin and was sent to do theology at the Lateran University in Rome. I’d done well in Philosophy, so after ordination found myself teaching philosophical anthropology (what a human being is) back at the University College Dublin. I enjoyed the nearly 40 years teaching I did there. Along the way I picked up a PhD in psychology on the theory of human relationships.
The courses I was teaching led me to finally finish a book due out this year called From Big Bang to Big Mystery: Human Origins in the light of Creation and Evolution. In it I explore where human beings come from and trace the material part of our origins from the Big Bang through to evolution, including the almost 7 million year hominid sequence up to the first humans in Africa over 150,000 years ago. I also try to explain what paleontologists and archaeologists call ‘the Big Bang of Human Consciousness’ by exploring human origins from a philosophical perspective.
I focused on a few things, like what I called ‘boundary questions’ – the issues that are raised by the natural sciences but can’t be answered by them. The Big Bang is the best example, since astrophysics makes it hard to avoid the ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’ question. And I’m suggesting there’s an even bigger boundary question when we come to the origins of human beings. So I’ve four chapters on what makes humans different from animals (in terms of our genetic origins, our brain and vocal tracts, our use of language and symbolisation, and our capacity to understand and make free choices).
The book’s come out not just from courses I have taught, but also from a look at how some modern philosophers – in Europe and sometimes in the US – have focused on the person as the source of their philosophy. (Karol Wojtyla’s The Acting Person and his famous series of reflections on the theology of the body are a great example of this kind of approach in the contemporary Church).
Underlying this immense Odyssey of the human spirit lies a common thirst for transcendence, and often accompanying that awareness is the sense that it’s not only the human in search for the divine, but that the divine is seeking out the human.
While still living in Ireland I was very often involved in radio and TV interviews. What I was interviewed on included my awareness that while the West has had plenty of ‘liberty,’ and the former Eastern bloc countries and still China, enforced ‘equality,’ we got rampant individualism in the West and totalitarian dictatorship in the East and in China. But without the third element in that famous French Revolutionary slogan, ‘fraternity,’ liberty and equality are unbalanced. I criticised both overemphases, and suggested a different, fraternity-based paradigm for doing politics.
A Christian alternative it seems to me must take two well known principles of Catholic Social Teaching. (1) Subsidiarity – encouraging each person to fulfill his or her capacities in the market place and in political life as fully as possible. (2) Solidarity – being aware that your neighbour, who can be the least of your brothers and sisters, is Jesus, so you’re acting in such a way as to build up communion between persons, and not just for your own personal profit. Those two principles taken together are a beautiful realisation of the Unity-Communion of God (solidarity) and the unique individuality of each Person (subsidiarity). When I had to retire at 65, I thought I’d rather grow old disgracefully rather than gracefully, and since we’d had Cardinal Pell over in Ireland to give a few talks, I asked him if I could work in his archdiocese and maybe do some philosophy teaching as well, both of which I’m very happy to have been doing since I came to Sydney in September 2010.
I’ve never felt anything other than enormously helped by our faith and our theology. My vocation deepens my philosophical outlook, and that outlook also supports and underpins my faith and my vocation. It’s an experience of the wonderful complementarity that Pope John Paul II underlined with the title of his encyclical Faith and Reason – with an emphasis on the ‘and’.