In Memoriam: David H. Gill, S.J.
Retired Associate Professor of Classical Studies David Gill, S.J., a member of the Boston College faculty for almost four decades whose life and career encompassed social activism, ministering with the poor, and running marathons as well as a love of classical studies, died on January 25. He was 91.
David H. Gill, S.J.
A funeral Mass was held for Fr. Gill on January 30 at the Chapel of the Holy Spirit at the Campion Center in Weston, Mass. (Scroll down to view a video of the service.)
Fr. Gill joined the BC Classical Studies faculty in 1969, though his ties to the Heights began earlier: He earned a bachelor’s degree in Greek from the University in 1956. “But in another sense, I’ve been here since I was 13 years old,” he said in an interview with Boston College Chronicle upon his retirement in 2007, explaining that he had also attended Boston College High School and the Weston School of Theology, which had close ties to BC—at that time, Weston graduates received Boston College degrees, as was the case with his 1960 master’s in philosophy. He also held a doctorate from Harvard University and licentiate in theology from the St. Georgen theology faculty in Germany.
By the end of his first decade on the BC faculty, Fr. Gill had become Classical Studies Department chair, served as acting University chaplain, and been appointed to the Library Building Committee (whose work culminated in the construction of the Thomas P. O’Neill Jr. Library).
In 1980, Fr. Gill became director of the College of Arts and Sciences Honors Program, which then-A&S Dean William Neenan, S.J., noted was “central to the college’s mission of academic excellence.” He said Fr. Gill’s “scholarship and serious concern for students will well qualify him for his new task."
“The program is a great challenge getting the best students matched up with the best teachers," Fr. Gill told Boston College Biweekly at the time of his appointment.
As A&S Honors director, Fr. Gill’s job included selecting 90 students annually for the program, overseeing advisement for 350 honors students, and directing the honors curriculum. Mark O’Connor, who was a faculty member in the program at the time, recounted Fr. Gill’s efforts to revamp A&S Honors, such as replacing its “Modern Man” sequence with an overview of the Western Cultural Tradition.
“This was much more than a sign of the times,” explained O’Connor, who later served as program director. “It challenged the faculty to reimagine how our freshman and sophomore seminars represented ideas and their consequences: about what, for a modern man or woman, searching out a just and moral life means in the context of what living a just and moral life has meant over the centuries.”
Fr. Gill stepped down as director in 1986 and returned to his role as Classical Studies chair. Looking back on his tenure in a 1987 Biweekly interview, he said the honors program provided students with “the furnishings of the mind. How can an educated person not know Achilles and Homer and Dante’s Inferno?”
To Associate Professor of the Practice of History Thomas Murphy, S.J., Fr. Gill was the essence of a classicist—immersed in the culture, art, and literature of ancient Greece and Rome—and a Jesuit role model.
“David understood both the rich heritage of the Society of Jesus and its renewal in the aftermath of Vatican Council II,” said Fr. Murphy, who like Fr. Gill was a Winthrop, Mass., native, and whose extended families knew one another. “As a classicist, a subject Jesuits have taught since the days of St. Ignatius Loyola himself, he was anchored in the earliest traditions of the society. But he also saw how the search for justice in the Scriptures and in the Classic could inspire pursuit of the Catholic Church's modern day social teachings and our [Jesuit Superior General] Pedro Arrupe's call after the Vatican Council for Jesuits to take a preferential option for the poor.
“David really embodied the proverb ‘The Church is always the same and is always changing as well.’”
Fr. Gill’s regard for the social justice aspects of the Church also was evident, and expressed in a perhaps unusual, but quite contemporary, manner. Around the time he joined BC, he began long-distance running and worked his way up to participating in marathons. In 1979, Fr. Gill ran the Boston Marathon to raise funds for Haley House, then a recently created social action center in Boston’s South End seeking to purchase a rooming house for low-income elderly, who were being priced out of the neighborhood.
His efforts were instrumental to the center’s success in creating affordable housing, wrote Haley House board member David Manzo ’77—who helped BC’s PULSE Program establish a partnership with Haley House that is 50 years old—in a remembrance of Fr. Gill, who continued to participate in the Boston Marathon for some years: “As St. Paul suggests, Dave has run the good race and kept the faith. We are confident his reward awaits him in Heaven and we will be forever grateful to him.”
O’Connor, who often ran with Fr. Gill, quipped that the long-distance running served another purpose. “All our administrative tasks and curriculum goals got hammered out on the streets around Boston training for marathons. He was way ahead of me there, too: He ran close to three hours in covering the 26 miles and 385 yards.”
Fr. Gill also looked well beyond Boston for opportunities to serve those in need while broadening BC students’ understanding of the wider world. In January of 1989, he co-led a cohort of 17 undergraduates to Haiti, where they visited schools, hospitals, and orphanages, playing with children, feeding newborn babies, and holding the hands of the dying. They went a week without showering and availability of safe drinking water was at a minimum.
“I think there’s no way you can understand extreme poverty, extreme deprivation, and all that just from books,” he told Biweekly after the trip. “You have to have a face on it, names of people. And I think there’s no other way to do it other than to go walk around and talk with people. If you’re interested and concerned about them, there’s no substitute for being there.”
In November of that year, Fr. Gill delivered the homily at a memorial Mass in St. Ignatius Church for the six Jesuit faculty members at the University of Central America (UCA) in El Salvador, who along with their housekeeper and her daughter were killed by government troops. He had befriended one of the slain Jesuits, Martin Baro, while they were students in Germany, and earlier in 1989 Fr. Baro had visited BC in hopes of establishing a network of social scientists who would study people enduring extended periods of poverty, political repression, and the threat of violent death.
“At BC, he told us the story of his personal journey into that dark place,” said Fr. Gill, who five years later accompanied Professor of English Joseph Appleyard, S.J., on a visit to UCA. “I think that he would like you to know about it. For it is not only his story; it is the story of many of his fellow Jesuits in Central America and elsewhere. It is also a story that is not only for Jesuits and for Central America and for now; it is a parable of many other places and times, when brave men and women have peacefully stood up to injustice, out of the conviction of their faith, and have paid for that stand with their lives.”
Almost a decade after the UCA murders, Fr. Gill accompanied nine BC undergraduates to El Salvador to immerse themselves in peasant culture and, as he explained to Chronicle, “to put names and faces on the problem of poverty. Why is it that El Salvador is so poor and we are so rich? There’s no way to know what it’s like there unless you go.”
In 1994, Fr. Gill was among five faculty members who published Wealth in Western Thought: The Case For and Against Riches, a collection of essays in which each co-author used individual scholarly interests to frame Western attitudes and beliefs concerning wealth. Fr. Gill—who had come up with the book’s subtitle—offered historical and classical context in analyzing the relationship of wealth and poverty in ancient Greece. Wealth that was excessive, ill-gotten or unjustly used was held as reprehensible, he said, but the uneven distribution of wealth or the many obstacles to upward mobility were not.
Professor Emerita of Classical Studies Dia Philippides praised Fr. Gill’s “many initiatives to transmit the values and to broaden the appeal of classical antiquity throughout the BC community”—offering courses on the prose works of Greek historians, but also poetry, especially Homer and ancient Greek tragedy, either in the original texts in Greek or to broader audiences in English translation.
“By all reports he was a memorable teacher to his students,” she said. “Many students within but also beyond Classical Studies must recall a unique course, Justice, that Dave developed and then taught for a number of years: The class was cross-registered in several departments and became famous across the University.”
By the time of his retirement, Fr. Gill was working at BC on a half-time basis while serving as pastor of St. Mary of the Angels Catholic parish in Roxbury, a routine he hoped to keep for “the foreseeable future,” he told Chronicle.
“I’ll still be around gathering memories, I guess. I’m sure that my fondest memories will be of students I have taught, colleagues I have worked with, and companions I have shared life with in the Jesuit Community.”
The son of the late Henry A. and Alice E. (Donovan) Gill, Fr. Gill is survived by his brothers Richard, Peter, and Henry Gill Jr., and predeceased by brother John Kevin. He is survived by nieces and nephews as well as his many Jesuit brothers.
In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Jesuit Community, Campion Center, 319 Concord Rd., Weston, MA 02493, to support its ministry of care for elderly and infirm Jesuits.