Conversation: Anthony Succar, university student and president of the Society of St Peter

Sydney
1 June 2003

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Conversation: Anthony Succar, university student and president of the Society of St Peter - Faith, strength and kryptonite

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Conversation: Anthony Succar, university student and president of the Society of St Peter - Faith, strength and kryptonite

By Marilyn Rodrigues

After an accident left him paralysed at the age of 14, Anthony Succar (pictured) had to change schools to the only one in his area that had wheelchair access.

The other kids gave him a hard time for the first couple of years, not about his disability, but because he was openly Catholic and a quiet student in a school where most of his peers were running wild.

“I considered it the house of hell, it was that bad - the drugs, the drinking, the words people used, the way they spoke to the teachers,” says Anthony, now 21.

“But if Catholics are good at anything it’s handling suffering,” he says calmly.

“The Catholic faith is just pure strength.”

Anthony often refers to strength, or power, in relation to faith during our discussion.

He has experienced much need of both.

In this he is strongly reminiscent of St Paul when he wrote: “I am quite content with my weaknesses, and with insults, hardships, persecutions and the agonies I go through for Christ’s sake. For it is when I am weak that I am strong” (II Cor 12:10).

Before his accident, while in Lebanon, Anthony had been a student at St Francis Xavier Primary School, Ashbury.

Afterwards, because of the need for wheelchair access, his parents were forced to send him to an inner west public high school.

“I always had my cross on me so everybody knew I was a Catholic student,” he says.

“They would gang up to me and bag out Catholics, bag out the Church, bag out Jesus.

“I felt my heart was being ripped, and being outnumbered like that was really hard.

“I used to be very shy and I’d get intimidated, so I would just turn around and go away.”

Anthony, a third year computer science student at Sydney University, is president of the Society of St Peter, a society under the direction of the university’s Catholic chaplaincy.

His experience of isolation at school probably has a bit to do with his desire to establish a Catholic social “web” to attract new students at the university.

“We want to have something to offer all Catholics that pass through the university,” he says, including opportunities to establish friendships through social activities.

“But I call it our shifty strategy,” he says, “slow as serpents and innocent as doves.

“Our main objective is to reach as many souls as possible and all our other objectives stem from that. The aim is ultimately strengthening their faith and helping them come closer to God.”

That means the society’s calendar includes weekly barbecues, a trivia night, a ball, and post-exam day of paint ball skirmishes to interest those students who are not enthusiastic about the daily steady diet of Masses, rosaries and bible studies alone.

It has been a good year for the society and for the Catholic chaplaincy, says Anthony.

Ninety-five first-year students signed up to the society during Orientation Week this year, and took home prayer booklets and rosary beads.

More and more people are attending the regular talks on campus, which have featured guest speakers such as the Archbishop of Sydney, Dr George Pell, and Dr Anna Krone from the John Paul II Institute of Marriage and the Family.

“You can probably tell that I love my faith, it’s my source of power,” Anthony says with a smile.

“Catholic haters are my kryptonite, they kill me.”

Anthony, one of five boys in his family, has clung much more firmly to his faith, and grown in it, since his accident in Lebanon in 1995 when he was a passenger in a vehicle that toppled over and he found himself lying helpless at the bottom of a cliff for several hours.

Prior to that he was “extremely rebellious”.

“I’d go to church if my mum grabbed me by the ear, then when I was too old for my mum to grab me, I would never go,” he says.

“I remember lying there, I was conscious for a long time before I passed out, and the one thing I could think about was: ‘Oh no, what have I done?’.

“I spent all this time rejecting my faith, thinking my time will never come; I’ve still got years ahead of me.

“I prayed the Hail Mary and Our Father one after another, hour after hour because they were the only prayers I knew, unceasingly until I remember passing out.

“When I woke up in hospital all I could think about was praying.”

Eight years later, and the injury he sustained is a slight one; bruising to the area between his fourth and fifth vertebrae.

But the effects are enormous; paralysis from the elbows down. There is currently no cure.

“What hurts the most, what is the most daunting feeling to me is when I wake up in the morning and find myself much more disabled than everyone else and I see no reason for it at all,” says Anthony.

“It hurts, because it’s as though you’ve been singled out and you deserve it.

“But through my faith the Catholic Church teaches me,” he says

“The Catholic faith shines most brilliantly in times of suffering.”

Anthony spends much of his time, when he’s not at university or doing assignments, working from home in Croydon Park.

He has his own IT business, EF Marketing, and does web and graphic design, web hosting, domain name registration, on-line marketing, and internet and email advertising.

He types with the aid of a mouthpiece attached to his computer with a 30cm-long stick.

This is Anthony’s final year of his computer science degree and he expects to go on to study honours.

He hopes to one day work for the Church.

“I see some people working for big corporations; they earn money they go home, and whatever contribution they have made to their work, or what achievement their work has made means nothing, as long as they’re receiving a pay cheque,” he says.

“Well, I don’t want that.

“If I can be given the opportunity to contribute to the Catholic faith, to anyone’s faith, through the Church, it would be a dream come true, but whatever God wills, that suffices.”

With his confidence, dedication, fortitude and affable nature, Anthony seems a good candidate for politics if not the Church.

He has lobbied successfully for wheelchair access at local schools.

And he protests, in person, or through articles to leading newspapers, against the use of human embryos for research as unethical, when proponents of embryo stem-cell research dangle the hope of cures for people affected with injuries like his.

He made a poignant visual protest outside the Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre with some friends in January when Superman actor Christopher Reeve, who is paralysed in a similar way to Anthony, went there to speak in support of human embryo stem-cell research.

In 1999 Anthony was named runner-up young citizen of the year for the Balmain-Rozelle area.

All his self-imposed religious and civic responsibility doesn’t mean that Anthony considers himself above reproach.

“I’m a menace,” he warns. “Please don’t ask my mother about me, because she can give you all the dirt.”