In Search of Grace

03, Apr 2000
The one thing I know, having gone to St Mary's College from 1959-1965, is that Father Pedro Valdez, the then principal, personally courted Count Finbar Ryan, the then Archbishop, with an obsequiousness that seemed to suggest that he, Father Pedro, would be Ryan's favoured and most obvious successor. Then there was no rival on the horizon.

But "obsequiousness" may not be apt, may not be quite the right "word," for that word suggests a kind of slavish fawning. It may have appeared so to me back then, but then I was an immature youth fraught with heavy psychological insecurities masked diligently by a "brave-danger" front that would never seek compromise on any issue of the heart or of the mind. And certainly not inclined to exhibit dignified responses to racist challenges.

One such as me was made to seem an obtrusive marauder storming the hallowed halls of a citadel where one certainly was not wanted, when according to one priestly exemplar, "the floodgates were opened" through a new dispensation. I may have misread what I saw of Father Pedro in that period. I may have misinterpreted firm commitment to one's vocation and genuine loyalty to the Order of the Holy Ghost Fathers as fawning behaviour.

There remains though in my mind one quite funny event that occurred back then. The student population was assembled in the Chapel, it may have been during one of the annual "retreats," awaiting an address by Count Finbar Ryan and anticipating his usual introduction: "Now, boys..." At that time renovation was being done on the Chapel and there were painters around on scaffolding. As the Archbishop hobbled in from behind the altar, a painter almost fell from the scaffold and some students laughed loudly. The rest of that scenario is cloudy.

The Count, misinterpreting the cause and target of the sudden laughter, turned and left. Father Pedro was livid. As the youths would say today, he went "ballistic." How dare we disrespect the Archbishop of Port-of-Spain! The gospel truth was quickly revealed and Father Pedro departed to return with a happy Count Finbar who could not now hide the slight smile at the corner of his lips as he began his sermon: "Now, boys.."

But the "times" were not in Father Pedro's favour. Probably his very closeness to Count Finbar Ryan, the last foreign-born Archbishop, may have caused his undoing. In this intense period of decolonisation and nationalist fervour, it was not popular for one to be so closely associated with foreign control. It is even alleged that Eric Williams, father of the Nationalist Movement, intervened.

The politics of transition after Count Finbar retired was hotly contested, I was made to understand, and Father Pedro fell ill after he lost and, never fully recovering from his ailment, he subsequently died.

Did he die heart-broken, one wonders? Did he come to terms with himself and his unfulfilled desire to serve the society, his church and his God at the very highest level? I suspect he did for he had the qualities of character to enable him so to do. Most certainly his strength lay in some capacity for administration and his deep penchant for order as exemplified by his work at St Mary's College over the years. In the end he must have seen that the best choice had been made in the interest of nationalist order.

In 1968 Father Anthony Pantin was anointed as His Grace. I never met the man. In my time at St Mary's he was not there. But based on what I have heard about him it would seem that had he been at St Mary's in the period 1959-1965, my rites of passage through those hallowed halls may have been smoother and less traumatic.

There were two Pantins there in that period. One, now deceased, taught me Spanish, the other taught me nothing. Father Anthony, based on what has been said of him, possessed the characteristics essential for all leaders, spiritual and secular, in the brave new world of the late '60s and '70s. Throughout Latin America, the liberation theology of Father Camillo Torres and others as expressed in the Golaconda Declaration had become prevalent and many Catholic clerics were openly joining political and guerrilla organisations on the grounds that they could not be Christians and stand by uninvolved in the midst of such brutal dictatorships.

Che's teachings on the need for a New Humanity had become the new religion in Latin American universities. Rome had to come to terms with such developments in the region. There was need for a new human face to the Church and in T&T Anthony Pantin fit the bill perfectly. He did not need, like so many others, the social explosion of February-April 1970 to become wise. He seemed to be there already, quick to meet and treat with all and sundry, even those not of his own faith.

On the other hand there were those who had by force and shock to drop their natural stance of pompous superciliousness and seek Grace even in plagiarised versions of the "pedagogy of the oppressed."

Grace is that godly gift within each of us that by necessity must be shared freely for our sanctification and salvation. That is what I did not learn at St Mary's.