Sometime around 1990, I enjoyed a two-week vacation with Philip Endean, S.J. He was in the final stages of his doctoral studies at Campion Hall in Oxford University of Karl Rahner’s spirituality.
Earlier that month, he had deduced that a hand-written letter that the library catalogue had attributed to Karl had actually been written by his brother Hugo (or possibly vice-versa—I can’t quite remember). On the first day we were together he explained this to me excitedly and at some length. I did my best to look encouragingly interested and assumed that that was the end of the matter. The next day, though, he reviewed the whole matter again in more detail. By now my empathy was wearing a little thin. On the third day, he returned to the topic. And, in my recollection at least, Karl’s (Hugo’s?) scrawled note dominated our holiday.
But that was one key aspect of who Philip was—a dedicated scholar, capable of getting wildly excited about some arcane byway of theological research. Philip died in September at the age of 68. He had been a Jesuit for 46 years.
If a contrast is sometimes drawn between theology and spirituality, Philip’s approach was always to hold the two together, letting each shape the other.
The doctorate was later turned into Philip’s major published book, Karl Rahner and Ignatian Spirituality, produced by Oxford University Press in 2001. It offered a reading of Rahner’s work in the context of the large-scale rediscovery of Ignatian spirituality in the third quarter of the 20th century, showing how Rahner’s theology had deep roots in his experience of the Spiritual Exercises. It then traced ways in which Jesuit retreat-giving had in turn in those years been influenced by the kind of theological approach espoused by Rahner. If a contrast is sometimes drawn between theology as a rather abstract discipline and spirituality as more practical, Philip’s approach, in his writing and in his practice, was always to hold the two together, letting each shape the other.
An earlier piece of writing, dating from around the time of his ordination, was commissioned and published by the journal Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits. Entitled “Who Do You Say That Ignatius Is? Jesuit Fundamentalism and Beyond,” it begins autobiographically, recounting Endean’s growing sense of vocation as a boy at Stonyhurst, the Jesuit college in Lancashire, England, in the early 1970s. What follows, though, is no pious memoir, but a desire “to cast radical doubt on the confidence with which people— perhaps notably our superiors—make assertions about Ignatius.”
Throughout his life, Philip was never one to take accepted ideas without challenge. His target here was the belief at the time that the way of life of the Society of Jesus could be easily traced back to Ignatius’ own autobiography. Arguing for a much more nuanced approach to the sources that we have about Ignatius and the early Jesuits, he still reaches a place where, he argues, these can serve as “an adequate basis for a life-commitment,” a life-commitment that he would find himself nourished by until his relatively early death.
Throughout his life, Philip was never one to take accepted ideas without challenge.
More than 25 years after this first contribution to Studies, in 2013 Philip edited two more issues of the journal, translating five essays on aspects of Ignatian spirituality by the then newly-elected Pope Francis. These had been written in the years when the pope was still known as Jorge Mario Bergoglio, S.J., and were the editor’s attempt to help a Jesuit and wider public to understand the new pope more fully. A decade later, these translations still, as Philip had hoped, “offer English speakers a chance to see what it might mean to have a pope who thinks like a Jesuit,” something that has come to even greater prominence with the current synodal process.
The other book that Philip is likely to be remembered for was a collaboration with Joseph Munitiz, S.J., another British Province Ignatian writer, who died in 2022. Ignatius of Loyola: Personal Writings, usefully gathers together texts of the Spiritual Exercises, the Autobiography, the Spiritual Diary and some key letters of Ignatius into one volume in the Penguin Classics series, with a commentary on their contemporary relevance by the two scholars. Still in print after nearly 30 years, it remains one of the most easily accessible sources for these works.
Those two books aside, most of Philip’s writing appeared as essays in journals and periodicals, rather than in longer published works. Between 1980 and 2022, for instance, he had 18 articles published in The Way, the spirituality journal of the British Province of the Society of Jesus. Topics ranged from Alfred Delp, the German Jesuit murdered by the Nazis in 1945 for his resistance to their regime, to a consideration of the referendum that led to Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union in the light of Luke’s account of Jesus’s final journey to Jerusalem! Philip was himself a passionate opponent of Brexit, to the extent that after that referendum was passed, this most English of Jesuits applied for the Irish passport to which one of his forebears entitled him.
In one-to-one tutorials, Philip’s proffered “That’s not an entirely stupid idea” was experienced as high and long-treasured praise.
As well as writing for The Way, for several years around the turn of the millennium, Philip was that periodicial’s editor. After a shaky start, including a major falling-out with a co-editor whom he had inherited from the previous staff, he quietly set about updating the periodical, culminating in a major re-launch in 2003. Its “particular concerns,” listed in every edition since then, offer a good sense of Philip’s own outlook and priorities:
- the role of spirituality in the struggle for justice
- the spiritual issues raised by inter-cultural and inter-religious dialogue
- the interactions between spirituality, politics and culture
- the fostering and development of the Ignatian spiritual tradition.
A placement in his final year of Jesuit training, called tertianship, had, for instance, led him to work with a group of young people suffering from mental disabilities in Germany, and had affected him so deeply that 30 years later the nun who ran the project, by then age 92, was one of those he thought should be the first to be informed after his death.
As well as being a writer, Philip was a respected and much sought-after teacher. During his university career he taught at Campion Hall in Oxford, at Heythrop College in London and then, for the last decade of his life, at the Centre Sèvres in Paris. Whether he was supervising doctoral programs or dealing with first-year undergraduates struggling under the burden of studies in their second or third languages, many found him to combine academic rigor with an empathetic understanding of the challenges they were facing.
After his death, a large number of his former pupils spontaneously contacted the Jesuit central office in London to express their appreciation of the help they had received from him. In one-to-one tutorials in particular, his proffered “That’s not an entirely stupid idea” in reaction to some point made in an essay was experienced as high and long-treasured praise. The desire to teach also took him beyond the academy. University vacations would frequently see him giving time to programs of theology for lay people, bringing Rahner and his like to a much wider audience.
Less obvious, because more hidden, was his commitment to academic administration. In each of the universities he was assigned to, Philip took his full share of responsibility for the day-to-day business of enrolling students, planning curricula and helping the institutions face the all-too-frequent funding crises. He could find university politics draining, and at times moving on to another setting became the best way of dealing with this. But in Paris, his final appointment, he did a valued job co-ordinating the second cycle, the program for students studying for masters’ degrees, a task that he was engaged in until a few weeks before his death.
If I might be permitted to end on a personal note, Philip was my friend (something many others have said since he finally succumbed to cancer). After a year together in the Jesuit novitiate, we hadn’t often lived in the same Jesuit community, and were for years at a time not even on the same continent. But the last time I saw him, a few weeks before he died, we spent time remembering and listing about 30 holidays we had spent together over four decades. There are few European capitals that we haven’t explored together as urban vacationers.
My own work in Ignatian spirituality—I spent six years as director of a spirituality center, and then another eight as novice master—has been deeply influenced by Philip’s writing and conversation. But more than the formal material he presented, it is the enthusiastic debates about little-known Rahnerian letters, conducted on the terrace of some summertime riverside café, that I will miss most.
