Page 34 - The Priest, Summer 2015

A group photo of the 2003 IMCSA (now ACSA) Conference held in Melbourne. Fr Jordan is anked by Fr Joseph Vnuk OP (then chaplain at the Uni- versity of Western Sydney), Archbishop Denis Hart, and Fr Bill Milsted (then chaplain at the University of Sydney). Several of the university students pictured have since become priests, including the author of this article and the editor of this journal. Photograph © Alex Sidhu, 2003. Used with permission.
“I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories, Mr Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t. They kept goin’. Because they were holding on to something . . . That there’s some good in this world, Mr Frodo. And it’s worth ghtin’ for.”
Samwise Gamgee, in The Two Towers, by J.R.R. Tolkien (1954).
made those vows in 1967). At the time of his death, there was no other priest alive who had been more in uential upon the ruling political caste of Australia. Many of the Abbott Government’s Cabinet had been educated by Gregory Jordan and he was no stranger to members on the other side of the Parliamentary Chamber.
The war goes on. There are forces in our ambient culture, hostile to our faith and/or more subtly corrosive of Christian souls. Darkness spreads across the land that threatens even the most isolated of Shire-lings. Be it a fundamentalist theis- tic caliphate that extols voluntarism and wills that all men conform — if necessary by force and fear — to a wrathful God; or a secular caliphate that longs to eradicate all Judeo-Christian belief from our law, institutions, culture and ultimately our hearts; the Two Towers now stand in op- position to the lofty Cross. One tower is wrapped in the ery eye of a wrathful god, the other commands rank upon rank of infuriated creatures led astray by a mis- guided hatred and an ignorance of what is
really True, Beautiful and Good.
In this 100th anniversary of the AN- ZAC campaign we would do well to heed St Paul’s advice to the Ephesians (6:12-18) and “gird our loins,” in the words of the Most Rev Anthony Fisher OP; “with the camo pants of Truth, our chests with the khaki of Righteousness, our feet with the boots of Peace, our heads with the helmet of Salvation, with Faith as our ack-jacket and the Spirit as our gun.” Gregory Jor- dan, himself an ANZAC of a kind, a sol-
dier of Christ both in Australia and New Zealand, knew this to be true. A general who loved his troops, Greg could see the battle looming and he braced each and every one of his troops for the onslaught. Yet, indefatigable to the last he main- tained an optimism and a hope, founded on Christ, that Christians were ultimately on the winning side and that they ght for a prize in this world that shall not pass away in the next (1 Cor 9:25). Vale magister meum, requiescat in pace. Ä
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