Most Jesuits I know are tired of being reminded that any selection of Messrs Abbott, Hockey, Pine, Joyce, and Shorten went to Jesuit schools. And tired, too, of the intense gaze and fearless investigative questions that follow the reminder: 'Are you happy with them? Why won't you take responsibility for their evil-doing? When will you and the offending school publicly dissociate yourselves from them?' (Not from all of them, of course, but after a division on party lines.)
There are various strategies to deal with these questions. Ever the coward, I mildly respond with another question, 'Yes, but did you know that we Jesuits also educated Robert Mugabe, Fidel Castro, Gordon Liddy and Chuck Fleetwood-Smith?' In the puzzled pause that follows, as my interrogator wonders how these gratuitous facts may be relevant, I make my escape.
But the fact that these questions are more often asked about Jesuit than other kinds of schools suggests Jesuit education has a mystique. It is enshrined in the dictum, 'Give me a child till the age of seven and I will show you the man', attributed to Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits. This is taken as testimony to the power of Jesuit education to mould the character and beliefs of its students, and consequently as grounding the demand that Jesuits take responsibility for the way in which their students later behave.
There are two problems with the conclusions drawn from this aphorism. First, Ignatius did not say it — he disapproved of Jesuits teaching young children. But, more to the point, it is daft. No school up to, or after, the age of seven has that kind of power.
My own experience may be illuminating, if only because it ought to support the myth. I was educated at a Jesuit school and was very happy there. I liked, admired and was inspired by some of my teachers, Jesuit and lay, enough to become and to live happily as a Jesuit. So I was clearly influenced by the values and beliefs articulated and embodied in the school.
But the reason I was open to influence was that the values and faith of the school were coherent with those of my family and of the broader Catholic culture of the time. Were they not so I would have resisted what the school imparted, as many did.
The power of the school to shape me according to its values was also limited by my temperament. No retelling of the story of Ignatius' courage after his leg was broken by a cannon ball could overcome my innate timidity.
The school's power to instill its values was also limited by the nature of communication. The beliefs and values enunciated by the school were necessarily translated into a boy's world and were changed in the process. Caps were mistaken for faces. If communism, heresy and divorce were wrong, for example, it followed that communists, non-Catholics and divorced people were bad or inferior. The Gospel message of loving your enemies was lost in transmission.
Neither did the school rule beyond the grave. It was the beginning of the making of the man, not its end. Beliefs, attitudes and values commended and embodied there — and not all the stated values were embodied in school practice — were tested by new experience and new relationships, and either chosen or ignored as a rule for living. The exhortation to serve the poor needed to be confirmed by getting to know people who were poor, and priorities intellectually affirmed had to be embodied in hard choices.
The critical events and relationships that shaped my lasting religious, political and social commitments came after schooldays. I believe that this is almost universally the case.
From this perspective it seems absurd to hold schools responsible for the way in which Messrs Shorten, Abbott, Joyce, Pyne and Hockey behave in their adulthood. Schools will have influenced them, too, in good and bad ways, but ultimately they are their own men, not simply old boys of this or that school. It is as absurd to hold the school accountable for any bad things they do as it is to credit it for the good things they do. School are necessarily unprofitable servants.
So we Jesuits have no call to apologise for, or to take pride in, Mr Abbott and his fellow students of Jesuit schools. We are not responsible for them. But we are responsible to them, as we are to all our alumni, even if they languish in public life or in public prisons.
That responsibility is to see them as human beings and not as things, to respect them for the flawed humanity we share with them, to deplore the inhumane actions or policies they may be responsible for, and to refuse adamantly to exclude them from our prayers, or ourselves from their company.
Oh, by the way, did you know that Voltaire and the Marquis de Sade went to Jesuit schools?
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street.