“He was shocked by their mediocrity, cultural and spiritual. He could not understand why these young priests were setting out to make a professional career of clerical advancement. He rarely discovered one with an "authentic passion for study. They were so little curious to understand the ways of God in their spiritual lives.”
- Fr Peter Knowles O.P., “Alexander Rzewuski (1893-1983): The Catholic Church viewed with 'fresh eyes'”, AD 2000, vol. 8:8, 1995, p.14

This week marks the 16th anniversary of the death of the inimitable and always “fresh-eyed” Australian Dominican scholar priest, Fr Peter Knowles.  The words Fr Knowles had written in his article cited here were about the exiled Polish-Russian aristocrat convert, Dominican friar Alexander Rzewuski, to whom he pays tribute – but the description might well apply to Fr Knowles himself.

Peter Knowles lived his priestly life with a combination of deep scholarship and high culture in the often frugal and frayed sleeves of an exiled Eastern monk. In many ways he was an urban exile. He was loved by his many friends, but he never fitted smoothly into the bureaucratic contours of modern church life. He supervised and guided the work of students, artists and writers, while his learned articles and university life emerged from hours of intense and private study.

Visitors might find him at a Viennese light opera spinning on a portable turntable, behind a teetering pile of patristic and liturgical books (in Latin, French or Slavonic), scattered about with one or two worn paperbacks on travel, photographs, notebooks and a plate with black bread and honey. He undertook the austere Eastern Lenten and other fasts but had an eye to high quality. He had a taste for crisp conversation, potted herbs, pickled herrings and the treat of Noilly Prat (a French vermouth).

Fr Knowles was born in Adelaide into a “well-to-do” family in 1927. Instead of following his family’s life into a well-bred but respectable business, the young Peter became a restless traveller, an outback jackaroo, a private scholar and a man on a quest for “God’s ways” in the monastic paths through his own life. He spent time in Thomas Merton’s Trappist house in the United States and then some intensely rich time in the Carthusian House of Parkminster in England. He used to say: “My time with the Carthusians fed a type of camel’s hump in me, which I have lived off ever since.”

Returning to Australia, he entered the Dominican Friars and served for a time as the chaplain at Monash University and master of the residential Mannix College.

In 1995, Fr Knowles was described as a “regular writer for AD 2000”, the magazine that was founded by B.A. Santamaria to address the challenges of Catholic and religious faith and life in the years leading up to the turn of the millennium.

In the previous decades, the multilingual Fr Knowles, who for some bore a resemblance to the suave actor, Sean Connery, had made dangerous forays behind the Iron Curtain with supplies of clothes and religious publications for the underground faithful. From the 1960s he served as chaplain to the small Russian Catholic community in Kew. His priestly care extended to many others – both Orthodox and Latin Catholics, Protestants and those unsure of their religious affiliation or the states of their souls.

Fr Peter was adept at bringing perspective into the lives of those searching, consoling the morally distressed and acerbic to the puffed-up and petty. He fought for the continuing liturgical and cultural integrity of the Uniate churches, especially against what he saw as the “philistine” depths to which the dominant Western churches had plunged in the modern era.

Many found in Fr Peter a man of profound learning, pastoral wisdom, wit and magnetic good company.

By the arrival of 2000, and the launching of Thomas More Centre summer schools and events, Fr Knowles became one of its most electrifying speakers and visiting mentors. His ability to fuse doctrine with the importance of culture, and the theology of history with the liturgy of the Byzantine tradition, set a high bar for TMC talks.

I can still see his steady and critically penetrating eye, challenging the TMC in our own time to excellence and good sense.

We hope to pursue what Fr Knowles writes of in the lessons and example of Fr Rwezuki himself:

He held that human culture, an objective philosophy, and the deep waters of contemplation must play their role if the Church's life is to be healthy; these were the elements that could liberate it from Philistinism, introverted subjectivity and that "busyness" that passes for activity.

We have not set ourselves to learn this lesson, much less to master it, although the Church is called to do so in Veritatis Splendor where Pope John Paul says: "In order to protect himself in his specific order, the person must do good and avoid evil, be concerned for the transmission and preservation of life, refine and develop the riches of the material world, cultivate social life, seek truth, practise good and contemplate beauty" (par 51).

Memory Eternal, Fr Peter – may we follow in your legacy!

Anna Krohn
Executive Director
Thomas More Centre