Born 04/02/1926; Ordained 08/01/1958.

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

Teacher, chaplain; born, Hawthorn, Victoria, 4 February 1926; died Melbourne, Victoria, 2 April 2011, aged 85.

Ian Dillon, a small man, with a long, purposeful stride and a loud, distinctive laugh, and trademark grin, lived an unobtrusive Jesuit life, without pomp or ceremony, but his story was of wider interest because it reflected some of the central changes in society, church and the Society of Jesus during his lifetime.

Dillon’s father Joe was personnel manager and trouble-shooter for General Motors in Melbourne. Industrial relations, particularly in a company with its head office in the United States, were robust and often confrontational. Joe Dillon had a wide reputation for being tough, but fair.

Dillon imitated some of his father’s style as a teacher. His regency was at St Aloysius College, Milson’s Point, 1952-54, as a science, mathematics and religion teacher, where his pupils remembered him with admiration, awe and respect, and fear. He made friends easily outside the classroom, but was a strong authoritarian inside the classroom. His fine sporting skills earned him the respect of teen-age boys. He was also openly spiritual, teaching his religion classes how to make meditative prayer, a practice that influenced some of his students. He was a man of deep but unostentatious faith throughout his life. From these days former St Aloysius’ students kept contact with him throughout his life, and they held a memorial service for him.

As a teacher Dillon portrayed teaching as a power struggle, in which the students and teachers were naturally pitted against one another. During his own school days at Xavier College, Kew, ending in 1943, he experienced the school as boisterous and edged. Disorder could break out at any time. He recalled with much amusement the mini-riots in the school hall. Teachers were unable to keep control until Thomas Montague, a diminutive priest, entered the hall, stood and surveyed the scene and its actors. The boys melted away. On another occasion, with much admiration, Dillon told of the occasion that Montague told a boy who had marked a classroom desk to carry it home on the tram and show it to his parents. Montague was Dillon’s model teacher, a man who projected power and control. As a schoolboy he stated that he wanted to become a Jesuit because he thought it was one of the strictest Orders in the Church.

He taught religion and mathematics at Xavier College as a priest, except for tertianship in 1961, from 1959-66, and was also a prefect of discipline, chaplain, director of sodalities, sports master, director of cadets and military chaplain. He did not give the impression that he relished teaching. He acquired the nickname ‘Matt’ after Matt Dillon the TV sheriff, because he was experienced as strict, stern and punitive, especially by the junior secondary students. In every adversarial game with his students, he made sure that he won. His strength and certainties could be intimidating. Much later, when Xavier received bad publicity about their ‘muck-up-day’, Dillon was heard to say ‘Wouldn’t have happened in my day!’

From these years onwards, Dillon worked on the frontiers. He went to New Guinea, initially reluctantly, 1967-84, as student chaplain and tutor in the history of science and technology at the University of PNG, chaplain to the medical college and administrative college, and coach of a student Australian Rules team that, in 1967, won the final of their football competition, with the fourth quarter advise, ‘Get it, kick it’. He still remained a military chaplain, and on one trip visited much of the Gazelle Peninsula, New Britain and the Sepik District, accompanied by a patrol officer.

The university accepted its first students in a preliminary year in 1966. By the beginning of 1967 there were some dozens of students doing First Year Arts, Law and Science. In PNG, science and technology presented these students with unending mysteries. Communicating scientific notions to these students presented real challenges. They might be prepared to give rational assent to the scientific explanation of natural phenomena, but their real assent was more than often given to their traditional magic. The parents of these students were village people without even an elementary education. A good number of these students began their formal education in mission schools in the almost inaccessible mountains or besides the jungle, or on the banks of one or other of the tortuous rivers, or on one of the 700 islands of the Territory. In his seminars, Dillon discussed social and economic problems of the Territory with his students. He also addressed a conference of nuns gathered from various parts of the Territory. He was also convenor of a sub-committee of the university to set up a Christian Centre, and spoke to ecumenical gatherings on creation and other theological topics. He was appointed chairman of the board of directors of the University Savings and Loan Society, and elected assistant secretary of the Welfare and Counselling committee.

During the university long vacation in 1967, Dillon took four of these students on a tour of Eastern Australia, three boys, two Sepiks, and a girl from Manus Island who knew and practiced the customs of her people. None of these students had been out of the Territory before, and so had no experience of Australian culture, which was in stark contrast in their own. In Melbourne they represented their university at the annual meeting of the University Catholic Federation of Australia.

This time was a blessed change for Dillon. He and his world had narrowed at that time, and he would have had to struggle to adjust to the rapid changes in education and society. In PNG he was not in a position of power, and was able to associate convivially with a wide range of people, including those who had power unjustly wielded over them. He accommodated himself to their culture, their rituals, symbols, the land, and kinship, before inculturation became a more acceptable mode of evangelising. He thought and worked at the deeper forces that were being played out in that culture. On one occasion he wanted to address an impending Bishops’ Conference about some issue that he thought needed to be addressed and resolved. The Bishops denied his request. Not to be outdone, Dillon parked outside their meeting place and turned up his utility radio to its highest volume level and waited. Very soon he was approached and asked to turn off the radio because it was disturbing the Conference. Dillon informed the messenger that it would be done if he could address them. This was accepted, and they responded positively to his request. His assessment of these bishops was that they didn’t have a clue.

His students held him in high regard as a courageous, approachable pastor, capable of outfacing thuggery and sorcery, and Dillon enjoyed his rapport with them. In particular, he protected female students from intimidation. He was a constructive academic staff member, a rock of stability in a rumbustious environment, respected also by both non-Catholic and irreligious colleagues. He was a successful mediator between police and students at the university during student riots in May 1979. He acted with great courage, independent judgment and a cool head in circumstances that were dangerous and even terrifying. Dillon recalled the story of being carted off once on a stretcher by the local people in the middle of the night to some distant location to debate the difference between his God and the indigenous people’s God, which was the crocodile. He was often involved in murder, sorcery, disputes and dress designing, among other demands.

He finished up as chaplain to the university in 1981, and took up his duties as parish priest of Waigani-Morata. His residence was a Mekeo paramount chief’s house and the church was designed as a traditional spirit house. The Morata end of the parish, where there was a second church and house, was a settlement of Highlanders, many of whom were Catholics.

It was not easy for him to return to Australia in 1985, as the country had changed significantly from his previous experience. Now he was an observer, and disconnected from Australian culture, somewhat cynical about its certainties. In PNG he had found freedom from the sharply defined institutional forms of living and working that had been characteristic of the Catholic Church and of its religious congregations. His taste for freedom was by then widely shared among Catholics, but there was a cultural gulf between Dillon and the rest of the Jesuit province that did not have the vocabulary or courage to engage him about his experiences.

In an inspirational move, he became a chaplain with the Industrial Trade and Mission. He moved easily on the shop floor, ate and drank with the people among whom he worked, and for some years lived in an industrial suburb, Brooklyn, where he became well known at the Rising Sun Hotel. He spoke directly with people about faith and life in a practical, and understandable style.

It was also at this time that he began his long association with the parish of Kilmore in regional Victoria, where he supplied Mass on Sundays for over 23 years. His connection with the parish began nearly 150 years previously, as his family had settled in the area from 1862, his father Joseph born in Broadford in 1898. Besides pastoral duties, he played golf at Kilmore, sometimes in mid week competitions. This was his game from New Guinea days.

Within Catholic and Jesuit circles, Dillon’s move was part of a more general desire at the time to make ‘an option for the poor’. This involved imaging life and the world from the perspective of the deprived and not of the comfortably well off. This change of perspective inevitably involved changes of living style and of work commitments. Dillon was no theoretician. For him the change was visceral, a place of freedom.

In 1998 Dillon placed his wisdom, authority and presence as chaplain to Jesuit Social Services. During this time there was no agenda. He was always available, always encouraging, always inviting people to focus on what really mattered. He still lived on the fringes, and enjoyed his contemplation of the powerful that ‘didn’t have a clue’.

Dillon struggled with declining health after by-pass surgery in 1992. By 2003 he decided that it was time to move from private accommodation to Campion College, Kew, where he would receive more care and support. Here he also became involved with retreat work and spiritual direction, especially to country diocesan priests.

He will be remembered as a man with the common touch, particularly at home with the ordinary person, with the disadvantaged, the poor, those on the margins of life; a strong, tough man, but one who could also show gentleness and compassion, and who never sought sympathy for himself. There was no fuss about the quiet way he cared for others, in the factories and workplaces and the hotels, among staff and clients of Jesuit Social Services, among those whom he accompanied in their search for a deeper relationship with God. He had exactly the right approach, never imposing, never interfering, completely confidential, supporting and encouraging. He treated all, whatever their religious belief, with respect and equality, never concerned with what someone professed to believe, their status or any other external marker. Dillon left his mark on all who had been associated with him.

(Reproduced by permission of Fr David Strong SJ.)