Fr David Strong SJ, The Australian dictionary of Jesuit biography 1848-2015, Second Edition, 2017:
Carlile, Edward

Teacher and pastor; born Drouin, Victoria, 23 January 1894; died Sydney, 5 February 1972, aged 78.

Edward Carlile was a convert from Anglicanism at the age of 25 as a result of the preaching of Fr William Lockington, and was 28 years of age when he entered the Society, 23 February 1923, at Loyola College, Greenwich. He had asked to be admitted as a brother, but the mission superior, William Lockington, wanted him to be a scholastic. He had left school to go into a bank at the age of 14, and had little knowledge of Latin, and seemed to have very little ability for learning.

Owing to his age he continued with his studies without regency, one year in the juniorate at Rathfarnham, 1925-26, followed by philosophy and theology at Milltown Park, Dublin, 1926-33, and tertianship at St Beuno's, Wales.

These studies were very hard for him and these years seemed to destroy in him whatever prudence he had. He had a burning zeal to convert everyone to the one true Church. No one from Anglican archbishops or protestant schoolchildren was safe from this confrontation with the truth. He found it hard to confine his ministrations to only one parish. It was his inability to join zeal with prudence that made him unfit for parish work, for which, from many points of view, he seemed admirably suited.

His priestly ministry was in the parishes of Hawthorn and Lavender Bay from 1935-39, but he had to be taken off that because of indiscretions. He spent 1939-42 teaching at St Ignatius' College, Riverview, but that was not successful, either, and he retired to Canisius College, Pymble from 1949 until his death.

From that time he led a life of comparative inactivity, being a house confessor. He needed to be watched and kept under the eye of superiors. He certainly did have strangely illogical ways of justifying the many devices he used to elude the vigilance of superiors and escape into the big world to talk to all and sundry with well-meant but very often imprudent directness, urging them to become Catholics. He usually said the earliest Mass, and attended as many, or served them, as he could. The miraculous cures of his arthritis were as well known as they were short-lived. While most charitable himself, he gave many opportunities for others to smarten up on the greatest of all virtues. At Pymble the rule of companion was strictly enforced to protect Carlile and the neighbourhood, but as he frequently gave his companion the slip, those willing to take on this burden became very few.

He loved meeting people and made friends very easily. He had an incredible resilience, and his good nature was inexhaustible. In spite of a lifetime in which he was continually surprised to find himself at odds with the system, he was almost invariably good-humoured. His unwillingness to speak unkindly of others was one of the most attractive features of an extremely likeable man, whose exasperating actions almost always were funny enough to prevent anyone being annoyed with him for long.

His life was a tragico-comic one, with the tragedy heavily on his side. The general view of his contemporaries seems to have been that he should not have been ordained. He could not be trusted with priestly authority, his undoubted zeal being quite without discretion. He deserved himself the name he gave in admiration to others - a character. In his estimation a character was second only to a prince, and this was a title conferred only on Rolland Boylen, Lou Dando and Tom O'Donovan.

From his time as a junior he operated from a large interpretation of presumed permission. When he came to theology and learnt about common error, and epikeia, and the canonical principles lex dubia non obligat and lex odiosa non stricte est interpretanda, he gained a new lease of life. Carlile had asked one superior for permission to miss class one morning because he had an appointment with a prostitute who had accosted him in the street and whom he was engaged in converting. The rector refused permission; Carlile invoked the natural law; and an appeal had to be made to the provincial before the appointment was given up. Another superior told him 'in this community (which consisted of the superior and Carlile) there is no epikeia and no presumed permission’, but this did not contain his apostolic exuberance.

However, he was a good man, very gentle and mostly well meaning, except with superiors. He had a simple piety. He loved devotions, novenas, indulgences, stories of miraculous cures and apparitions and prodigies. He loved to exercise any sacred function, and to recite public prayers. He had to be restrained from substituting for the priest whose turn it was to say litanies if he was not among the first arrivals in the chapel. One's predominant memory of him is of great good-humour. No doubt his generosity and patience, his acceptance of the orders of obedience won him his eternal reward.

(Reproduced by permission of Fr David Strong SJ.)