Chief Justice Emeritus Vincent Degaetano writes:
It was with great sadness that many former students of St Aloysius’s College, including myself, read that Fr Anton Azzopardi SJ had passed away.
For those who attended SAC in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, Fr Anton stands out as one of a generation of Jesuits who dedicated their lives to the education of youth in Malta.
Like other confreres who had passed to eternal life before him – Anton Caruana, Eddie Camilleri, Mario Jaccarini, Robert Darmanin, Salvino Darmanin, Maurice Naudi, Victor Formosa Gauci, to mention just a few – Fr Anton believed that a sound education based on solid Christian values was a prerequisite for the progress of any nation and that the education of youth was the key to all change: in the words of a 16th century Jesuit institutio puerilis est mundi renovatio, the education of youth is the renewal of the world.
After his initial studies at Heythrop Hall, near Oxford, and a three-year stint as division prefect at SAC between 1950-53, Fr Anton proceeded to Belgium for his theological studies. After ordination in July 1956 and completion of his tertianship in Florence, he went back to Oxford from where he obtained his MA in English. In 1961, he commenced his long association with SAC as prefect of studies. Between 1970-78 he was also rector of the Gozo Seminary.
When Fr Anton was rector at SAC – I remember him in that role when I was there in the late 1960s – his very presence inspired discipline, if not perhaps even a little bit of awe. He was a perfectionist, as we soon found out whenever he would take a class if one of the other teachers happened to be absent.
He (and Fr Mario Jaccarini) took us through the intricacies of English grammar, making the subject sound almost entertaining, and also drilled us in diction. Together with Fr Anton Caruana, who was then in charge of the college choir, Fr Azzopardi would direct the stage performances for Prize Day and when, later, the soiree became an annual feature of sixth form life, he would often chip in to direct one or more performances.
In the 1980s Fr Anton was in the thick of the struggle to ensure the survival of Catholic schools in Malta.
Fr Anton’s last years were plagued with cardiac problems, as a result of which he was virtually confined to his room at Loyola House. This did not stop him, however, from working up to the very last few days.
His desk and his computer were his work station, where he was always translating official and other documents, editing articles, writing short articles on various topics and corresponding by e-mail with his friends. I was privileged to be one of those friends.
We corresponded on every subject under the sun – from the palaces of Saverne, the empty churches in Brussels and the Menin Gate Memorial in Ypres, to the mass rubric of the Novus Ordo, liberty of expression and whether the word “Elizabeth” in the official Latin prayer for the queen should be in the nominative or in the accusative.
Sometime after I moved to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, in 2010, a minor issue arose as to the proper use, in one of our judgments, of the verb “to be” in the subjunctive form. I e-mailed Fr Anton and he replied in minute detail. My section president, Sir Nicolas Bratza, was tickled pink when he got to know that I had “appealed” the matter to my former headmaster and was delighted that Fr Anton had agreed with his (Bratza’s) rendering of the verb and not mine!
Perhaps Fr Anton’s greatest literary (and historical) contribution is his four-volume work on the Jesuit schools in Malta covering the period from 1592 to 2007.
One of the last articles Fr Anton had penned, for the online Jesuit newsletter, was an interview with Fr George German SJ, who passed away last March.
Fr Anton seemed to sense that the end was near but he accepted it with the serenity that comes from a deep Christian faith. On February 17, this year he wrote to me: “I must end with a happy note. I was 90 a few weeks ago (on Jan. 14 to be exact) and the community gave me a big do. God bless them all. I need prayers for after that age one’s health usually tends to ‘drift down the river pretty fast’.”
Au revoir my friend. Till we meet again.