Hogan, Father John

1901, September 30

Date of Birth:  1829, June 21

Paris
November 13, 1901

Fathers and Very Dear in Our Lord:

We learned several months ago that a serious heart ailment was making Father Hogan subject to a sudden death.  He was himself aware of it and was holding himself ready to answer the call of God.  But that call came at a time when there was no indication of its proximity.  As sad as that death and some of its circumstances were for us, it seemed proper to us – as to many others – to see the hand of Providence in the choice of its time and place.  Father Hogan died at St. Sulpice in the early hours of the day he must have for a long time seen coming, and that day was the day the seminary reopened.  In the house which he loved so much, where he lived so long, his funeral took on a character which made of it the fit crowning of his career.  After his seventeen-year absence, it brought together around his casket (along with the seminary community) a gathering of priests truly remarkable by their number, by the age, the rank, the intellectual and moral distinction, the priestly dignity, of those who composed it.  Nearly all, in spite of the bad weather, opted to go to Montparnasse Cemetery to pay their last respects to their old teacher and to give evidence of the deep affection they had for him.

Father John Baptist Hogan was born on June 21, 1829, at Bodyke in Ireland.  There he spent his early years in the bosom of a large and religious family.  One of his uncles was a pastor in the Diocese of Perigueux.  He brought his nephew to France; the nephew was, from about the age of fifteen, successively a student at the minor and major seminaries of Bordeaux.  We know how readily – without losing the endowments of his race – he took perfectly to the French language and spirit.

In 1849, when he finished Theology, Father Hogan came to pursue higher studies at St. Sulpice for two years which turned out to be his entranceway into the Solitude.  It was at the end of his novitiate that he was ordained priest at Notre Dame of Paris on June 5, 1852.  At the following school year’s opening, he was assigned the Patristic Dogmatic Theology course.

During the following years he had several changes of assignment.  But from 1863 to 1884 he was regularly assigned to Patristic Moral Theology, to which, for thirteen years, he added the course of Liturgy.  Later, in America, he gave again courses in Holy Scripture, Preaching, Church History; and at Washington, much appreciated conferences in Ascetical Theology.

From his year of Solitude on, Father Hogan constantly showed the traits rooted in his heart and mind: thorough fidelity to the rule; thorough promptness at exercises; complete respect for his superiors and friendliness toward his confreres; anxiety to serve them; delicacy and care to the point of taking no account of slights others might subject him to, even though he was by nature a very sensitive person.  A great advocate of clarity of thought, he examined and discussed everything, and freely upheld his opinions with perfect gentlemanliness and without his criticism ever hurting others.

As a disciple of Father Renaudet, his Solitude Superior – who always showed him a great deal of sympathy and trust in spite of the differences in their make-up – Father Hogan steeped himself deeply in the principles of the interior life, of the spirit of sacrifice, of generous and devoted zeal for the work of the Society.

It is enough to have seen him and to have read over his personal writings to know how much he remained faithful up to the end in the humblest, as well as the most solid, practices of the interior life.

It was through that close union of God and that constant personal effort (at the bottom of every real Sulpician’s life) that he made himself capable of doing great good for many souls, good which created between them and himself such close and intimate bonds.  But his rare intellectual gifts; his studies – extending into nearly every branch of Theology; a particular insight and sympathy for understanding the broadest range of spiritual and emotional states and for taking a heartfelt interest in them; all these widened the circle of his doing good beyond the normal limits.

Very well based in theological principles and well aware of their limitations, he lived by the dominant tendencies of his mind, more the psychologist and moralist, the historian and critic, than the dogmatist and metaphysician.  His origin explains why he took special interest in the works of English theologians. In addition, his close association with the clergy of Paris – who in men of the world ran into all the problems raised by modern ideas and tendencies – constantly led his mind to the apologetic aspect of theology.  Besides, his teaching, while completely traditional, took on an atmosphere of reality to which it owed much of its attractiveness and usefulness.  Some of his students quite often wished for more precise solutions, more rigid rules, more positive answers, and fewer questions.  Father Hogan concerned himself especially with stimulating and opening their minds, with making them think for themselves, with training their judgment for the application of principles; and many priests have kept for him a deep acknowledgment for the intellectual profit they gained from him.  It is only right to say, nonetheless, that he might have made his teaching more generally useful by spending more time on theses and giving less to the objections which his mind enjoyed dealing with.

As for his goodness, his piety, the benefit of his talks on prayer and his spiritual readings; as for the edification he gave by this faithfulness to exercises, recreations, walks, his delicate service to others and his forgetfulness of self; as for his spirit of poverty and mortification.  There could never be anything but a single voice.  No one talked about these things with more powerful feeling than those who witnessed his last years.