Father Jonathan Robinson
Influential priest and founding father of the Toronto Oratory
FATHER JONATHAN ROBINSON, who has died aged 91, was the founding father of the Toronto Oratory, which, for all who love traditional Catholicism, is an oasis of beauty in an otherwise drab landscape.
He was ordained in 1962, just as the Second Vatican Council was beginning. Unlike many contemporaries, who welcomed the Council’s reforms, Robinson recognised the need to preserve many of the traditions which were being swept away, not least the old form of the Mass in Latin.
He was ordained to serve in the Archdiocese of Montreal, where he acted as Cardinal Paulémile Léger’s secretary for several years. He later joined the Congregation of the Oratory, an association of priests living together without religious vows, and in 1975 oversaw the founding of Canada’s first Oratory, initially in Montreal and from 1979 in Toronto.
As a student at Edinburgh University, Robinson had visited the Oratories of Birmingham and Brompton Road, London. This had implanted the idea of founding such a community in Canada.
The Toronto Oratory was established at Holy Family Church, Parkdale, where Robinson was parish priest as well as Provost; as the Oratory expanded it took over the neighbouring St Vincent de Paul Church.
Robinson was also the founding Rector of St Philip’s Seminary, buying houses to create a complex of connected buildings; this institution provided a constant stream of new clergy for the parish.
Holy Family, situated in a less prosperous part of the city, did much work with the destitute and the sick. In 1997 the church was destroyed by fire and Robinson oversaw the construction of a new, classically inspired building.
Jonathan Robinson was born in Montreal on May 21 1929. His father, also Jonathan, was a lawyer who served Quebec’s Liberal government; his mother was Florence, née Macmaster.
He was educated at Bishop’s College School, Sherbrooke, then at Bishop’s University, Quebec. He went on to Mcgill University in Montreal, where he gained a Master’s. He completed a PHD in Hegel’s philosophy at Edinburgh, before becoming a priest; later he studied
Theology at the Gregorian University in Rome. After ordination, he became chairman of the Philosophy department at Mcgill.
Robinson was the author of numerous books, including The Mass and Modernity (2005), subtitled “Walking to Heaven Backwards”, a critical examination of the liturgical changes of Vatican II. While not favouring a wholesale return to the past, he proposed a further “reform of the reform” which became one of the major themes of Benedict XVI’S papacy.
In 2016 he published In No Strange Land, a book about the mysticism of the Oratory’s 16th century founder Saint Philip Neri.
His analysis of the woes of contemporary Catholicism was trenchant. “Saying Mass facing the people is the biggest single failing in most places today,” he said. “The modern practice has turned priests into social animators who must … impress their personalities upon their congregations…
“This practice has also emphasised the congregation in a deadly way, so that the community and its concerns have begun to take the place of the sober Catholic presentation of the fallen nature of man, of suffering, of death, and of judgment, [and] prevented the splendour of the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of the Lord from shining through the liturgy.”
Though immensely serious, and somewhat vain, Jonathan Robinson was a man of great kindness, and was considered by many to be the most important personality the Oratory had produced since Cardinal Newman. He provided much-needed support to the Birmingham Oratory in the year leading up to Newman’s Beatification. Recently he was adviser to a new Oratory in Jamaica.
Father Jonathan Robinson, born May 21 1929, died June 3 2020