|
|
|
|
|
Home > A conversation with > Article
|
Go back |
|
Fr Tony grew in watching his father pray
|
Printable version |
| By Therese Spruhan
2 August, 2009 |
Fr Anthony (Tony) Percy, the new rector of the Good Shepherd Seminary, Homebush, fits the description of an all-rounder.
The 46-year-old priest is a scholar, a leader, a sportsman and a die-hard Sydney Swans fan.
He loves his family, philosophy, his five-year-old Labrador William, and the challenge of translating Church teaching into accessible language for the everyday person.
Fr Tony was born in Sydney but moved to Cooma in 1967 with his family when his father bought the local newsagency.
The third child in a family of four daughters and two sons, he attended St Patrick’s Primary, Cooma, and Monaro High School.
His final two years of school were at St Joseph’s College, Hunters Hill.
His mother, Joan, and father, John, and his siblings were parishioners at St Patrick’s Church, in Cooma, where young Tony served as an altar boy until he was in Year 10.
“In those days, altar boys also had to serve weekday Masses, which were at 7 o’ clock in the morning,” he recalls.
“In Cooma with the cold weather it was a bit hard to get out of a warm bed.
“But one of my beautiful memories is of my father coming into my room and saying: ‘Come on, you’ve got to get up for Mass, you promised to do it’.”
As well as encouraging the young Tony to get to weekday Mass on time, John Percy played a significant role in the development of his son’s faith.
“Dad had a great devotion to visiting the Blessed Sacrament,” says Fr Tony.
“He would take us with him after work each day on his way home.
“He never said anything but I would see my father genuflect and kneel down and pray. As a little kid I would imitate my father.
“It really made me grow in faith just being there every day with Dad.
“We also had very good priests in Cooma who were very kind to me and who ran a lot of camps for the altar boys with great success.
“We had a lot of fun with them too.
“I was able to joke with them and got on very well with them.”
On leaving Joeys, Tony began a commerce and accountancy degree at the University of New South Wales.
After attending a lecture on auditing, he quickly swapped to a finance degree, which he found much more interesting and stimulating.
It was during his time at UNSW that he bgan to think seriously about becoming a priest.
“I had joked about it with a mate when I was in primary school,” says Tony.
“I didn’t think much about it in high school except for my last year at Joeys. When I went to uni it went out of my mind until about second year.”
The catalyst for returning to consider becoming a priest was missing Mass one Sunday.
“I had become a bit slack in my faith,” says Fr Tony.
“I never really stopped practising my faith but I’d become a bit of a submarine Catholic – those ones that come up for air when they need a bit of help.
“I woke up the morning after I had missed Mass thinking: ‘What’s wrong with me, why can’t I go to Mass’. I felt very ungrateful.”
After that episode Tony began reading more about his faith, attending daily Mass and going to confession.
“And then somewhere along the line I read a very old book of spirituality called the Salt of the Apostolate, which was Pope Pius X’s bedside book,” says Fr Tony.
“What it convinced me to do was to say that if you want to be fruitful in life then you have to pray.
“So I decided I was going to pray for 20 minutes in the morning.
“And then from that the vocation seemed to come.
“I seemed to want to be a priest.”
After completing his finance degree with honours in 1985, he knocked back a job offer and joined St Patrick’s Seminary at Manly where he began his six-year journey to becoming a priest.
Ordained in 1990, he then spent nine years as a parish priest in rural and regional areas at Young, Queanbeyan, Ardlethan and Ariah Park and Barellan.
In 1989 he went to the US where he spent four years completing a doctorate at the John Paul II Institute for Studies of Marriage and Families, which was attached to the Catholic University of America in Washington DC.
Combining his earlier studies in finance with Church studies, his topic for his PhD was the entrepreneur in the social doctrine of the Catholic Church from the New Testament through to John Paul II.
“My four years in Washington were a great blessing,” says Fr Tony. “I was taught by some really great thinkers and my area of study was very interesting.
His study included developing a definition of the entrepreneur and investigating where the entrepreneur can be found in the whole tradition of the Catholic Church.
“Part of the definition of the entrepreneur is that they have an interest in money but that doesn’t equate to a love of money,” says Fr Tony.
“So it’s quite possible for an entrepreneur to be extremely wealthy but also to be deeply concerned about social development and to be quite saintly. The Church appreciates social justice, which is really important but we don’t promote poverty.
“The people who can alleviate poverty are entrepreneurs because they see these opportunities and they take literally thousands of people with them in providing work for them, which is a very important social function.
“In the Church we need wealth to carry out our apostolate?
“Someone had to bankroll Jesus; someone had to bankroll Paul. So who were these people? You see in the Gospels that there were very wealthy disciples who were part of our Lord’s group.
“They had a common purse and they all lived this common life but entrepreneurial people provided the finance to help Jesus and his disciples to carry out their work.”
During his final six weeks in Washington, Fr Tony launched into another scholarly area, writing his book on the Theology of the Body Made Simple.
The book simplifies Pope John Paul II’s work for the lay person and covers the topics of sexuality, the human body and relationships and how these teachings by John Paul II have meaning and purpose in our lives.
“Catholic teaching doesn’t necessarily make Catholic learning so we have to make more of an effort to translate so that what is said is more easily understood,” says Fr Tony.
“Today the body is either regarded as a machine or a sort of blob of matter with chemical reactions or as simply a pleasure beast, so it’s very important for people to understand that the body is symbolic.
“It carries the person present and the soul, and the human body is meant for love.”
After completing his doctorate, in 2003 Fr Tony returned to the archdiocese of Canberra and Goulburn to take over the reins at the historic former cathedral of St Peter’s and Paul’s in Goulburn where he remained until the end of 2008.
In January this year, he succeeded Bishop Julian Porteous as Rector of the Good Shepherd Seminary at Homebush, which currently has an enrolment of 42 seminarians.
“It’s a great thing to do,” says Fr Tony. “My job is to maintain unity among staff and students.
“Unless you have a unified staff that can talk freely and openly about how the seminary and the seminarians are going, and can give me feedback on how I am doing, then you are going nowhere.
“The final decisions lie with the rector but we have to work as a team. And we’ve got a great team and really great students who are very keen young men who are maturing well.”
Determined to help create great priests, Fr Tony says a great priest is somebody who has a deep love for Christ and a deep love for the Church and the people.
“The key to the formation process is the human formation,” he says.
“Once a seminarian can begin to blossom humanly then he begins to blossom spiritually. But if he only has a layer of piety and doesn’t improve humanly there are going to be cracks.
“So to produce a great priest is to produce priests that I have known.
“Guys that have persevered have had their ups and downs but have been able to relate and give of themselves generously and have a great love for the Eucharist.”
Fr Tony says what has to be very clear in the formation of the Good Shepherd’s seminarians is that they have to produce diocesan priests – guys who are general practitioners.
“As much as we love the Jesuits and the Franciscans and all the other orders that are more specialised, we need to be conscious that we are producing diocesan priests – priests who can add up figures, priests who can change a light bulb, priests who know how to do without, priests who know how to run a parish council, how to talk to teenagers, to prepare couples for marriage, to baptise, to counsel someone who’s child has been born outside wedlock, and with families in the parish.
“It’s a real challenge and it takes training and so what we try and do here is to be really truthful and give them constant feedback on where they are going well and where they need to pick up.
“So we need to love them with a father’s heart and with a mother’s heart.”
While his job can be all-consuming, Fr Tony tries to find some time to watch the Sydney Swans, which he has been following since they moved to Sydney in the early 1980s. He also enjoys heading down to Clovelly Beach on Saturdays for a swim and brunch with friends or going for a bike-ride or a run.
He also always tries to make time each day to take his dog William for a walk.
“He’s magnificent,” says Tony.
“He’s packed on the kilos so he’s a bit overweight at the moment. He’s great company.”
Happy in his role, it seems those early dreams of following a vocation to the priesthood back in chilly Cooma in the 1970s have led to a very contented and interesting life.
“I enjoy being a priest,” says Fr Tony. “It’s a wonderful life.”
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
