Email this story to a friend!

Printable Version

Additional Resources
Archive of Press          Releases
AC Profiles
AC Magazine

Worcester Area
     News & Events

AC Calendar of Events

The Mission

Fr. Dennis Gallagher, A.A. '69, Vice President for Mission

Fr. Ernest: A Man to Be (Winter 2003)

Some recall the pep rallies where he skewered upcoming opponents as “uncircumcised Philistines.” Many remember him modeling for Assumption’s students a life given over to study. A number of us rate him as the best teacher we ever had. Fr. Ernest Fortin, A.A. AP’41, ’46, cheerleader, scholar, and teacher, died in late October, just two days after a host of former students and colleagues gathered with him to celebrate the publication of Gladly to Teach, Gladly to Learn, a collection of essays written in his honor. His last words, as reported  by those with him when he died, were “I think I see something beautiful.”

Fr. Ernest was a man to be reckoned with. This is true not only because of his immense intellectual gifts and breadth of learning, but because of what education meant for him: a “consuming, lifelong, and all-encompassing enterprise.” Part of a eulogy to his friend Alan Bloom, this description applied equally well to himself. In that same eulogy, Fr. Ernest noted that many Americans tend to go through school like a letter in the mail, coming out at the end pretty much the same as they went in, with only a diploma—a  cancelled stamp—to show for it. For him, education was a far more adventurous and dangerous undertaking, made possible only by what he frequently called “a root and branch change.” Such an intellectual conversion entailed the arduous process of freeing oneself from the dogmatic opinions of one’s own time by a genuine openness to, and serious study of, the greatest thinkers of the past. No one better embodied the promise of liberal education than Fr. Ernest.

In the course of bypass surgery six years ago, Fr. Ernest suffered a debilitating stroke. In addition to confining him to a wheelchair and robbing him of short-term memory, the stroke made it impossible for him to read. Stripped of the wherewithal to pursue his first love, Fr. Ernest’s life entered a different, often excruciating stage of vigilance, in which he counted on the faithful visits of students and friends to keep alive the communion of friendship and learning he had done so much to form. The tears and sufferings of these last years—a down payment, at least, on his purgatory—apparently culminated in a glimpse of the God in whose service he had devoted the best of his formidable gifts as priest and theologian.

The greatest theologian of them all, St. Thomas Aquinas, explains that one can never adequately compensate a teacher for his services, because what the teacher offers—the love of truth—is incommensurate with any material good. Those whose privilege it was to call Ernest their teacher understand that gratitude is no small thing—he taught us that himself in any number of ways. I pray that his legacy may continue to inform the life of Assumption College in these days of promise and peril for liberal arts studies.