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Bernard Michael O'Brien (born 9 December 1907) is a New Zealand Jesuit priest, philosopher, musician (cellist)[1] , writer and former seminary professor.
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He was born in Christchurch, New Zealand and was educated by the Dominican sisters at St Thomas's Academy, Oamaru and at Christ's College. His father was a surgeon.[2]
In January 1924, O'Brien commenced his studies as a Jesuit novice at the Loyola Noviciate of the Society of Jesus in Sydney. There and at Riverview College he also advanced his study of Greek.[3] O'Brien obtained his BA at the National University of Ireland where he also studied music.[4] In 1929, O'Brien went to the Jesuit house of Philosophy at Pullach, a village just ouside Munich where, after learning German, and with many German, Austrian and other students from many countries, he embarked on three years of laborious philosophic studes. The Philosophy taught was fundamentally medieval scholasticism, as modified by the sixteenth century Jesuit Suárez. O'Brien's "best teacher" was Father Alois Maier who promoted Kant. O'Brien made a special study of Plotinus in relation to the Psychology of art. Karl Rahner was two years ahead of O'Brien but amongst his companions were Hans Urs von Balthasar, Joseph Neuner and Alfred Delp. In 1932, at the end of his Philosophy couse, O'Brien received minor orders from Cardinal Faulhaber, Archbishop of Munich.[5] He then returned to Sydney and was given the job of coaching young novices who were beginning their university studes.[6] In 1935, O'Brien went to the Louvain in Belgium to study Theology. His most important teacher there was Joseph Maréchal who combined the "best insights" of Thomas Aquinas with the transcendental speculations of Kant. "His teaching set flowing one of the principal streams of present-day Catholic Philosophy and Theology, a stream from which André Marc and Karl Rahner, J.B. Lotz, Emerich Coreth and Bernard Lonergan have all drunk". O'Brien read particularly the German theologian and mystic Matthias Scheeben and wrote a theological dissertation on Friedrich von Hügel. O'Brien was ordained a priest in 1938 at Louvain and after spending the first few years of World War II in Jesuit establishments in England and in Ireland, he returned to Sydney in 1941.[7]
In Australia, O.Brien was appointed to St Patrick's College, Melbourne to teach boys in 1941 and then in 1942 he was appointed to the Jesuit scholasticate at Watsonia to take care of the university studies of the Jesuit scholastics as he had before. On 2 February 1942 he was admitted to his final vows as a Jesuit. In 1943 he was appointed to Corpus Christi College, Werribee (a seminary for the training of secular priests) near Melbourne to lecture in theology. He filled this position until 1949.[8] In late 1947 temporarily and then permanently in 1950 O'Brien was appointed to Holy Name Seminary in his home town of Christchurch. At that time it was a minor seminary with generally 70-90 secondary school age boys boarding there. By 1959, however, the school aspect had been fazed out and the seminary was teaching Philosophy to men who had finished secondary school and were in training to be ordained as secular priests. The result of the change for O'Brien was that he then became a Philosophy lecturer and set about preparing courses in Logic and Theory of Knowledge and the Philosophy of Being.[9] Philosophy hitherto had been taught at Holy Name in programs of a traditional Thomist stamp, whether taught directly from the Catholic textbooks known as "manuals", or from private course notes which represented an updated form of the scholastic system. Even in the 1950s, textbooks were still in Latin, with students expected to know enough of the language to make their way through the three-volume "Summula Philosophiae Scholasticae" of J. S. Hickey, or, if this was beyond them, with the simplified "dog Latin" of the "Manuale Philosophiae ad Usum Seminariorum" of Giovanni di Napoli.[10] O'Brien, with his broad interests and education, and his colleagues initiated great changes and he gave Philosophy studies at Holy Name Seminary some standing and "twenty years of clergy owe, if not an appreciation for scholarship at least an acceptance of it to him." [11]