Duffie, Donald Churchill

ENCAENIA, MAY, 1967
DONALD CHURCHILL DUFFIE
to be Doctor of Laws

We salute in her President the University from the North Shore which has come to share out campus.

The eldest in a talented family of ten, the Oromocto altar boy and the Oxford Blue seems only sub-consciously to have worked for his life's twin goals, the Law and the Church. The seed planted in the village school and nurtured at Fredericton High was strengthened at St. Joseph's, where the 300 ft. frontage of the university building almost stamped him as a 100-yarder. Our Law School in Saint John stole a budding politician. But it was the vision of our own Lieutenant-Governor, whose benign interest has set many another tiro on the path of fulfilment, that steered his promising junior into a Rhodes Scholarship. At Brasenose College Oxford, amid grinding for the B.C.L. and playing hockey for the University, there came the revelation of his spiritual goal, and he returned to train in Halifax for the priesthood.

Laval cemented the marriage of the Legal with the Ecclesiastic, and the offspring of this uniquely reciprocal union performed perhaps his most fruitful labours as Defensor Vinculi for the Maritime Matrimonial Tribunal in fostering that blessed state among the laity.

Never a practising lawyer, he became a professor of Canon Law as of Political Science, while giving of his energies and experience to committees, councils, and clubs.

Mr. President, I present to you in Mgr. Duffie a man of many parts, a man who embodies a scholar's brain, a decisive grasp of affairs, and a composure unruffled by the thorniest problems; on whom for extra measure his Creator has bestowed an irresistible twinkle in the eye, and in the heart a vein of the purest gold.

From:
Cattley, Robert E.D. Honoris causa: the effervescences of a university orator. Fredericton: UNB Associated Alumnae, 1968.