Thomas Aquinas McGovern, S.J., Trustworthy Teacher

By Suzie Andres (’87)

 

Forty years ago, on the morning of February 19, 1985, College Tutor Rev. Thomas Aquinas McGovern, S.J., said Mass in Our Lady of Guadalupe Hacienda Chapel and prayed, at the intercessions, for all those who would die that day.

That evening, after a game of racquetball with a student and friend, Father had a heart attack and became one of those for whom he had prayed.

For those of us who were sophomores that year (including the dear student and friend who played racquetball with Father that night), we lost our favorite teacher. I can’t be sure I speak for all of us, but I think I do because we had been divided (in our small numbers) into two sections for classes, and the division was sadly awful.

Somehow one group had the majority of the silent students, while the other had the majority of the talkers, and since classes at Thomas Aquinas College are all discussions merely led (not professed) by the tutors, we now had one section battling each other from the opening question to the chaotic end of class, while the other sat silently, either asleep or praying someone would say something, from the opening question to the long-awaited end of class.

Except, that is, in our Sophomore Philosophy classes, both sections led by Fr. McGovern.

He was a brilliant teacher. Dr. McArthur used to say that Father was not natively the most intelligent tutor: sure he was smart, but he had to work and study diligently to prepare for class and for his homilies. He often refused a game of tennis with his buddy Ron because, he said, he hadn’t yet finished his work. But he was brilliant nonetheless.

“He was brilliant in the way a student dreams his teacher will be brilliant, even when he doesn’t know what that looks like yet. But I can tell you, because I was there.”

He was brilliant in the way a student dreams his teacher will be brilliant, even when he doesn’t know what that looks like yet. But I can tell you, because I was there.

Dr. McArthur, also an excellent teacher and leader of discussions, admired Fr. McGovern to no end because Father had come to the school after 16 years as a popular and successful philosophy professor at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York. There he lectured, as most do in standard departmental colleges. And yet when he began again at Thomas Aquinas College in California for the new college’s second semester of existence in early 1972, at age 51 this old dog learned new tricks. He fully embraced the tutorial and seminar methods and never looked back. He was just as popular as he had been at Canisius, and for our class, more successful than we deserved!

My husband (then just my classmate and now a tutor himself) had Fr. McGovern for three classes in our first two years: advanced Latin, Freshman and Sophomore Year, with a small group who’d had a lot of Latin before arriving at the school, and Sophomore Philosophy, in which we studied the Physics of Aristotle. I had Father for only that philosophy class, and it was perhaps my favorite of the whole curriculum, despite our section working horribly together — except under Father’s expert guidance.

I remember he would ask periodically, as though rhetorically and without waiting for an answer: “Do you have to trust your teacher?”

It seemed a funny question at a place where our teachers were the authors of the Great Books, not men and women standing before us to profess their opinions on the Great Books (or whatever else struck their fancy).

If a student puts himself under the guidance of a professor who lectures, then yes, he’ll have to trust his teacher in order to learn, because otherwise he might as well have spent the afternoon googling the answers to his deepest questions (or the ones on the test).

And yet if this kind of professorial teacher is untrustworthy, while he may be popular, he will not be a successful teacher even if his student trusts him. How often my husband and I saw and experienced at Notre Dame (where we were blessed to study under Ralph McInerny and Joseph Bobik, two quite wonderful and trustworthy teachers) the destruction that a skeptical teacher, or even one committed to error, could wreak on not just one, but a whole generation of young men and women.

So yes, certainly you need to trust your teacher, and this after you investigate to be sure he is trustworthy!

But what about us at Thomas Aquinas College with our Great Books and our discussion classes? We didn’t exactly have teachers, did we? We had tutors who asked opening questions, and while sometimes these were magnificently directed and insightful questions that could help break open the book before us in all its truth or error, at other times the tutors might ask such seemingly simple questions as, “So how would you divide this text?” or even, “What did you think of this?” It hardly looked like teaching when they made us do all the work, so did we need to trust them?

“Whether he was lecturing on Aristotle’s Physics in Buffalo, or leading a discussion on the Physics in much warmer climes, he was guiding his students by the hand to the truth, doing what good teachers have done from time immemorial.”

The answer was yes. Fr. McGovern knew that, whether he was lecturing on Aristotle’s Physics in Buffalo, or leading a discussion on the Physics in much warmer climes, he was guiding his students by the hand to the truth, doing what good teachers have done from time immemorial. And he earned our trust by his confidence in our abilities, as well as by his patience, humor, occasional purple faced bouts of anger (or laughter), and his deep understanding of Aristotle, the real teacher he made ours too.

Without giving away which section (chaotic or comatose) I was in with my smart but then-mostly-silent and often sleeping future husband, I will say that I know both sections loved this class. Father got us thinking and talking in an orderly way, and I wonder now if it was as much due to his prayers for us as his talents. In any case, I have loved and remembered many things we learned while reading Aristotle together, and when on February 19, 1985, our classes together came to an end, it was a sad thing.

I had the opportunity to give my boyfriend, Tony Andres, a copy of the three binders of Fr. McGovern’s typed sermons for his graduation present. That and the Latin Summa I procured for him in Toronto (in those halcyon if harrowing days of used bookstores and no internet) are probably what induced him to propose in our first November of grad school. (Unless it was the roast chicken I made him …) We shlepped those red binders around with us as we moved from Notre Dame to Christendom College and back to Thomas Aquinas College over the course of 20 years, and it was a few more years before I finally had the joy of fulfilling my and Dr. McArthur’s (and many others’) dream of publishing some of them.

Dr. McArthur, our founding president, teacher, and friend, dictated the Foreword to the Selected Sermons of Thomas Aquinas McGovern, S.J. a few days before he went to join his former colleague and tennis partner in the House of the Father (where I imagine they are in St. Thomas’ mansion). Anne Forsyth (’81) and I (and the angels) had a blast getting the manuscript into beautiful form for publication (with help from others, too). And voila, Fr. McGovern was with us again, in pithy sermons that never cease to amaze me. I was so lucky to get to choose my favorites for the book, and I’ve seen my (possibly) very favorite, Xavier, posted more than once for the co-patron of missionaries’ (along with St. Therese) feast on Catholic Exchange, as well as Father’s ever inspiring sermon on the North American Martyrs on their feast.

I don’t know what I appreciate more: the way Father enlightens my mind with St. Thomas’s teaching brought down to my level, or the way he enflames my Carmelite heart with the love of Jesus poured forth from his own great Ignatian heart.

In a talk called “Reflections on Thomas Aquinas College,” Dr. McArthur had this to say about Fr. McGovern:

I was reminded just last month of the College when four of us … visited Fr. McGovern’s grave in Auriesville. The Jesuit cemetery shares its location with the Martyrs’ Shrine, where Isaac Jogues and his companions, saints all, gave their lives for the Faith, and where Kateri Tekakwitha, the Lily of the Mohawk, was born and lived all but the last years of her life.

“He left his companions of many years, changed his long-standing mode of teaching, and became subject not to a religious superior, or to his betters, but to an unknown group of laymen with an idea and little else.” 

The cemetery is impressive in its stark simplicity. All the graves are alike, uniformly marked with cut stone, and in exactly marked rows, as are the crosses in a military cemetery. All those who lie there were called not to the aggrandizement of self, but to put on Christ, so that they would give witness to their Master, who died for them on Calvary. How insignificant, I thought, compared with this calling were their own particular accomplishments, their notoriety or the acclaim of the world!

Thomas McGovern, so little known, lies buried with, among others, John Courtney Murray, Thurston Davis, Donald Campion — all prominent and well- acclaimed during their time. If, however, Fr. Mc Govern was little known in the larger world, he was certainly known and revered in this community. He came to us because he embraced our view of education, and so he left his companions of many years, changed his long-standing mode of teaching, and became subject not to a religious superior, or to his betters, but to an unknown group of laymen with an idea and little else. We often see people struggling to become humble, and sometimes succeeding. Fr. McGovern had no doubt so struggled, but he had struggled before we knew him.

He effaced himself so naturally that the commitment to his vows would reveal itself in only the smallest of increments. Several Jesuits told me at Fordham, where we went with the body before interment, that “Tom stood apart from all of us because he always obeyed the rule.” One priest related that “I told Tom one day in our novitiate that I was unprepared for the reality of what we were facing. We were scrubbing the floor, and Tom paused, pointed to a crucifix on the wall, said ‘That’s reality,’ and went on scrubbing. ‘I have,’ he said, ‘never forgotten that incident.’”

And what, for us at the College, were the results of Father’s dedication to “the rule” and the reality signified by the crucifix? Just this: He became a remarkable tutor, one of the very best, and inspired many of you to love and revere the truth; he celebrated Mass thoughtfully, devoutly, and without drawing the slightest attention to himself; he preached remarkable sermons, the fruit of his hours of preparation … and most appropriate for our college community, he befriended many of you when you were students, and gave you the example of the priest and gentleman; he gave us all the example of loving the truth more than his own opinions, and of following it wherever it led him; he praised and gave thanks to those who, as he thought, helped him in any way; he helped us all remain sane and Catholic in our own troubled times.

“He came for the same reason Fr. Jogues came to the Mohawks, and Kateri endured her sufferings … because he was serving the same Truth, Who is the Word.”

I thought of all this as we said the Rosary at the grave. After praying we visited the site of the Indian village where the martyrs died — hallowed ground where those heroic souls gave their lives for their faith and the Indians they were trying to convert, and where Blessed Kateri was born and lived, she too persecuted, beaten and humiliated by her own people because she believed in the religion of Isaac Jogues.

Then came the overwhelming conviction: Fr. Mc Govern did not come to us primarily because of the College itself (how pompous to think so) — because he agreed with us in our founding document, because we were to read Great Books. He came for the same reason Fr. Jogues came to the Mohawks, and Kateri endured her sufferings … because he was serving the same Truth, Who is the Word, for love of whom he joined the Society of Jesus in the first place, and for the sake of whom he was willing to give us, mere creatures with no accomplishments whatever, the best that was in him.

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We who had the inestimable grace to be taught by Fr. McGovern and Dr. McArthur, Mr. Berquist and Dr. Neumayr of happy memory, and Peter DeLuca still among us — the four founders of Thomas Aquinas College and the priest who joined them soon after they began – had trustworthy teachers. Looking back now on those class days, I see as us so young. No wonder we needed help in regulating our emotions and our speech, in reading texts, in working together to find what was being said and then, the best part, whether we thought it was true.

I have the added privilege and blessing of being married to a tutor myself now. Yes, it was a blow to discover that they are not, after all, demi-gods, and yet this makes them all the more my heroes. They sacrifice so much to prepare for class and lead the students to the truth, all in a background role, asking that opening question and inviting, prodding, gently bringing back to order the students in their search for understanding.

I hope these heroes of mine have as much fun as I do when we’re with the students. It’s hard to believe it’s been 40 years since my husband and I (and many of his colleagues) were in their same boat, or more often on the basketball court or in the chapel, though both of these places are now new and improved versions of our temporary digs in the 1980s … But when I’m with the students, I’m 18 again, and I remember Fr. McGovern and Dr. McArthur and our other tutors as they were in their prime, available for conversation in the St. Joseph Commons at meals, ready with their opening questions as we sauntered into their classes, leading us in the opening prayer, and in Fr. McGovern’s case, giving us Jesus in the Mass and Holy Communion as well as in St. Thomas.

You who read this now, please join me in commending all our beloved dead of the College to the infinitely merciful love of God: from tutors and chaplains, faculty and staff, classmates and alums, to the many benefactors who have given us food and shelter and rooms in which to study, learn, discuss, sleep, and pray, and the Board of Governors who have guided Thomas Aquinas College these many decades.

And let’s not forget to pray for each other still in exile, that our Blessed Mother, Seat of Wisdom, and her devoted son, St. Thomas Aquinas (for whom one of my favorite teachers was named) will obtain for us the docility and humility and missionary spirit of our fearless leaders, especially Thomas Aquinas McGovern, S.J.