Fr. Jonathan Robinson, longtime head of Toronto Oratory, dies at 91

The Catholic Register, 09 June 2020

There was something of Newman’s life in that of Fr. Robinson. Both were converts to Catholicism, men of great intelligence and a scholarly bent, whose pastoral work as priests brought them into contact with people of all walks of life.

The death of Fr. Jonathan Robinson of the Toronto Oratory is a sadness both for those who knew him and those many more who admired him from afar. 

Evening eventually comes for all, and is welcomed by those who have borne the burden and heat of a long day — he was 91 when he died on June 3 — in the vineyard of the Lord. His patch of that vineyard bore abundant fruit and his death was grace-filled. He died at home, his final illness having begun a week earlier on the feast day of his patron, St. Philip Neri. 

The Oratory of St. Philip Neri which Fr. Robinson founded in 1975 in Montreal — it moved to Toronto in 1979 — was introduced to the English-speaking world by St. John Henry Newman, the Church’s newest saint. There was something of Newman’s life in that of Fr. Robinson. Both were converts to Catholicism, men of great intelligence and a scholarly bent, whose pastoral work as priests brought them into contact with people of all walks of life, many of whom had no inkling of their intellectual work.

Newman lived to 89 years of age, Robinson 91. Just as our dominant images of St. John Henry are that of an old man, so too many of us only knew Fr. Robinson as a senior citizen. When I went to study at the St. Philip’s Seminary — operated by the Toronto Oratory — in 1996, he was already 67 years old. Which means that many generations, including my own, were not present for the most dynamic years of his ministry, when he was at the same time a pastor, a newspaper columnist, a lecturer and founder of a seminary, all alongside building up the Oratory to be one of the largest in the world.

His “senior” years would be most productive, with several acclaimed books, including The Mass and Modernity: Walking to Heaven Backwards (Ignatius, 2005). The subtitle was taken from one of Newman’s sermons, about how we make our way to Heaven in fits and starts, by trial and error, following straight and crooked lines. The book shows Fr. Robinson as both a gifted philosopher — he was chairman of McGill’s philosophy department for three years in the 1970s — and priest who loved the sacred liturgy. 

My favourite book of his remains not his more significant works, but a collection of his columns written for this newspaper, Jesus Christ: Revelation of the Unknown God. His capacity to combine biblical theology, philosophical erudition and pastoral good sense was a rare gift. His column on the women of Easter morning, that they discovered the most astonishing good news of the Resurrection because they were faithful to an ordinary duty of custom and respect — anointing a body for death — has shaped my thinking about Easter. We discover the glories we know by faith through fidelity to the regularity of piety and tradition. 

A gifted philosopher who taught me modern philosophy, perhaps it is odd that what I most remember from his classes was a phrase of St. Ambrose that he quoted so often that I memorized it: Non in dialectica complacuit Deo salvum facere populum suum.  He translated it thus for us: It did not please God to save His people through logic-chopping. 

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