Clothing of Fr Eric and Br Augustine
On September 1, the Very Rev. Provost Paul Pearson clothed Fr Eric and Br Augustine in the habit of St Philip, and they thus began their noviciates at the Toronto Oratory.
Fr Eric was born in Peterborough in 1987 and is the eldest of six siblings. After obtaining a B.A. at Trent University he was accepted as a seminarian for the Diocese of Peterborough and came to St Philip’s Seminary at the Toronto Oratory. He then attended St Augustine’s Seminary and was ordained a priest in 2015. After ordination, he served as Associate Pastor in St Mary’s, Lindsay and St Joseph’s, Bowmanville and was then made Pastor of St Joseph’s, Powassan and has most recently served as chaplain to the Catholic students at Trent University. Fr Eric had the joy of being a part of youth ministry in the Diocese of Peterborough through an annual walking pilgrimage, weekend retreats, and winter camping. In 2018 he presented a paper entitled Newman’s Intellectual and Moral Influence on Leaders of 20th Century Youth Movements at the Newman Association of America Annual Conference. He is delighted to return to the Toronto Oratory, this time as a novice.
Br Augustine was born in 2001 and raised in Whitby, Ontario. On April 16, 2022, he was baptized and confirmed at St Michael’s Cathedral, where he later worked as a sacristan. He obtained a BA in mediaeval studies, philosophy and political science from St Michael’s College and is completing an MA at the Centre for Medieval Studies, both at the University of Toronto. He has altar-served and sung in the Schola Cantorum at Holy Family Church.
The following is the Father’s address on the occasion.
Clothing of Fr Eric and Br Augustine (September 1, 2025)
Saint Philip saw the Church is his own day filled with religious orders and communities that were famous for their austere and impressive rules. He had no doubt that some people were called to that sort of life, but certainly not most people. If strict rules had produced holiness on a regular basis, the Church wouldn’t have been in the predicament in which it found itself in the 16th century. Philip had his suspicions that for most people, impressive rules did more to feed spiritual pride than to foster charity. External rigidity could serve as a smokescreen, behind which a person could hide, congratulating himself on his spiritual progress, but without really purifying his heart. Our Lord encountered the same spiritual pitfall in the Pharisees. Unlike John the Baptist (a special patron of all Florentines) and his mortified life, the hearts of the Pharisees remained proud and unconverted. They were unable to say John’s famous words, “He must increase, and I must decrease.” John the Baptist was impressive person—in fact, the greatest born of woman—but it was the purity of his interior conversion that made him great, not his austerities. They were merely means to an end—but useless means, unless they arrived at their goal of holiness.
Saint Philip saw that, for those individuals truly called to imitate John the Baptist in a life of austerity, strict orders already existed. He intended something different—in his day, almost shockingly different. Saint Philip chose to strip away most of the harsh externals of religious life. His way was to build a life that exposed the core of holiness—the day-to-day choice to do God’s will freely and generously. That left a life in community that was far more humane, more accessible, more congenial, more familial—a life in which those who were not drawn to austerity, or whose constitutions would not permit such extreme ways of living, could thrive.
Many in the Church were not impressed with what they saw as a slack way of life in the Oratory. Some of the saint’s many hecklers would yell out asking what little tidbits and delicacies he and his followers were eating. From the outside, at least in their day, the Oratory seemed like an easy way out, like “Christianity lite.”
But only those who were unfamiliar with Saint Philip’s ways could possibly think that. As soon as they looked closer, as soon as they “entered into Saint Philip’s ways,” what they saw deeply moved them. They saw a dedication to holiness and Christian perfection that rivalled even that of the desert fathers. Take, for example, Saint Philip’s famous maxim about food: “Community life has many mortifications— the food should not be one of them.” It might sound like an invitation to culinary indulgence, but look more closely. Philip doesn’t want austerity about food to stand in the way of embracing the more important mortifications, the challenges of community life, of serving the faithful generously, of embracing a life of prayer. He firmly believes in the need for self-discipline or mortification—he just doesn’t want the superficial or physical forms to overshadow the fundamental one: giving our wills wholeheartedly to God and our neighbour.
The way of life Saint Philip laid out in establishing the Oratory is not a religious blessing of a life of leisure and comfort. He is providing a matrix or framework for a life of personal commitment to the pursuit of holiness and prayer. If the Protestant reformation taught him anything, it was that a merely external impetus to a life of holiness just wasn’t sufficient. We need to internalize that drive to imitate Christ and grow in the life of grace. No one can do that for us; no one can force us to do it. If it doesn’t become our personal choice, our basic and guiding priority, if it fails to penetrate to the core of our being, it isn’t authentic or real. It is the superficial way of the Pharisees not the transformative way of John the Baptist.
Today, we welcome Fr Eric and Para (soon to be Brother Augustine) into our community. We welcome them into the life and way of Saint Philip, as passed on to this particular community through the focus and dedication of Fr Jonathan Robinson. We hope this way of life will serve both as a congenial and humane place for them to flourish as persons, but also as a foundation for their own commitment to the path of personal transformation. May they conform their lives to Christ and discover their true selves in the very act of losing themselves. And as we as a community witness their public conviction to enter into our life, may we be grateful to God and to Saint Philip that we continue to be blessed with vocations, especially as we approach the celebrations for our 50th anniversary. May this joyful ceremony serve as an opportunity for us to renew the spirit of our own clothing and to rededicate ourselves to the pursuit of a life directed to holiness through prayer and service to others. May God bless the work Fr Eric and Br Augustine are about to begin and continue to inspire and strengthen the life the rest of us have already chosen.