Eighteen years ago, this fellowship of Evangelical and Catholic pastors, theologians, and educators was formed to deepen the dialogue among our communities on issues of common concern, to explore theological common ground, and to offer in public life a common witness born of Christian faith. Since our founding in 1994, we have addressed, together, such important public policy questions as the defense of life, even as we have proposed to our communities patterns of theological understanding on such long-disputed questions as the gift of salvation, the authority of Scripture, and the call to holiness in the communion of saints. We hope that this collaboration has been a service to both Church and society; it has certainly drawn us closer together as brothers and sisters in Christ, and for that we are grateful to the Lord of all mercies.

At the beginning of our common work on behalf of the gospel, it did not seem likely that religious freedom would be one of our primary concerns. The communist project in Europe had collapsed; the commitment of Christian believers to defeat totalitarianism through the weapons of truth had triumphed; and throughout the world, a new era of religious freedom seemed at hand.

We are now concerned—indeed, deeply concerned—that religious freedom is under renewed assault around the world. While the threats to freedom of faith, religious practice, and religious participation in public affairs in Islamist and communist states are widely recognized, grave threats to religious freedom have also emerged in the developed democracies. In the West, certain religious beliefs are now regarded as bigoted. Pastors are under threat, both cultural and legal, for preaching biblical truth. Christian social-service and charitable agencies are forced to cease cooperation with the state because they will not bend their work to what Pope Benedict XVI has called the “dictatorship of relativism.”

Read the full statement here. Fr. Thomas Joseph White, O.P., is an assistant professor of systematic theology and director of the Thomistic Institute at the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception.  His most recent book is Wisdom in the Face of Modernity: A Study in Thomistic Natural Theology.

Father Jonathan Kalisch O.P., Director of Campus Ministry at Dartmouth College, invited Fr. James Schall, SJ, professor of Government at Georgetown University, to give the following lecture at Dartmouth College. Fr. Schall has been named among the top 10 Intellectual Catholic Americans of all-time. This lecture was part of the the 50th anniversary celebration of the dedication of St. Clement’s Chapel at Aquinas House.

Aquinas House is the Catholic Student Center at Dartmouth College, a community where students may nurture their faith and grow in holiness. By actively demonstrating the importance of religion to our daily lives, AQ students become positive role models for the wider campus community. Students not only come to understand their faith, but to articulate it for others who may not share their views. Most importantly, through worship, prayer, service, and fellowship, students draw ever closer to the person of Jesus Christ.

The guests in the church included all manner of family members, friends and associates, namely from his tenure as Archbishop of New York. As he looked back on his 80 years of life, he said he was happy to recall “in loving memory” those who have witnessed Jesus Christ to him.

Cardinal Egan spoke about the saints who have walked the same streets as the rest of us do each day, ticking off a familiar litany that began with St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, St. John Neumann and St. Elizabeth Ann Seton and included others such as Rose Hawthorne, founder of the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne; Archbishop Fulton Sheen, the great communicator; and Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement.

The reception was held after the Mass in the gleaming new Catholic Center at New York University, where the furniture had arrived only that week. Just a few blocks away from St. Joseph’s, which serves as the university’s Catholic parish, the new facility overlooks Washington Square Park.

The Catholic Center, on the ground floor of the five-story facility, includes a 181-seat chapel, a lecture hall for 200 people, a meeting room that can accommodate 180 and a common room holding another 100, plus a kitchen, a confessional room and other amenities. Father John McGuire, O.P., the pastor and director of the Catholic Center at NYU, said such a structure is quite in keeping with the university’s standing as home to the largest number of Catholic students in the nation.

Each week, a Dominican member of the Provincial Preaching Advisory board prepares this

Sketchbook

Pope Benedict XVI:

“When someone has the experience of a great love in his life, this is a moment of ‘redemption’ which gives a new meaning to his life…. The human being needs unconditional love…. If this absolute love exists, with its absolute certainty, then—only then—is man ‘redeemed,’ whatever should happen to him in his particular circumstances. This is what it means to say: Jesus Christ has ‘redeemed’ us. Through him we have become certain of God…. Man’s great, true hope which holds firm in spite of all disappointments can only be God—God who has loved us and who continues to love us ‘to the end.”… If we are in relation with him who does not die, who is Life itself and Love itself, then we are in life. Then we ‘live.”

Pope Benedict XVI:

“Only the great certitude of hope that my own life and history in general despite all failures are held firm by the indestructible power of Love, and that this gives them their meaning and importance, only this kind of hope can then give the courage to act and to persevere.”

Pope Benedict XVI:

“Thomas Aquinas, as is well known, defined truth as the adequation of the intellect to reality…. The perception of the truth is a process which brings man into conformity with being. It is a becoming one of the ‘I’ and the world, it is consonance, it is being gifted and purified. To the extent that men allow themselves to be guided and cleansed by the truth, they find the way not only to their true selves but also to the human ‘you.’ Truth, in fact, is the medium in which men make contact, whereas it is the absence of truth which closes them off from one another…. If the truth purifies man from egotism and from the illusion of absolute autonomy, if it makes him obedient and gives him the courage to be humble, it thereby also teaches him to see through producibility as a parody of freedom and to unmask undisciplined chatter as a parody of dialogue. It is victorious over the tendency to mistake the absence of all ties for freedom. Thus, the truth is fruitful precisely by being loved for its own sake.”

Saint Thomas Aquinas:

“Truth and goodness include one another. The truth is something good; otherwise it would not be worth desiring; and the good is true; otherwise it would not be intelligible.”

Blessed Guerric of Igny:

“Jesus laid bare the whole strength of his love for his friends before pouring himself out like water for his enemies. Handing over to them the Sacrament of his Body and Blood, he instituted the celebration of the Eucharist. It is hard to say which was the more wonderful, his power or his love, in devising the new means of remaining with them to console them for his departure. In spite of the withdrawal of his bodily presence, he would remain not only with them but in them, by virtue of this Sacrament.”

Blessed John Henry Newman:

“We have no love for Him who alone lasts. We love those things which do not last, but come to an end. Things being thus, he whom we ought to love has determined to win us back to him. With this object He has come into his own world, in the form of one of us men. And in that human form He open his arms and woos us to return to him, our Maker.”

Monsignor Luigi Giussani:

“What is truth must be repeatedly looked at in the face.”

Resources

Readings

Seventh Sunday of Easter or the Ascension of the Lord

Sunday Preacher’s Resource

Seventh Sunday of Easter (Year B)

The Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord (Year C)

Additional Preaching Resources

• The Holy See: The Easter Season
• Fr. Thomas Rosica (Salt and Light Media)
• The Torch
• The King of Ages
• Fr. Francis Martin Website
• Biblius Clerus, a resource of the Congregation for the Clergy
• The Catena Aurea of St. Thomas Aquinas, O.P., for the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John

In a recent AP story appearing in the Washington Post, Fr. Dominic Holtz, OP, a priest of the Province of St. Albert the Great (Central Province) and a professor of philosophy at the Angelicum, is referenced as saying, ”the march united people from around the world against legalized abortion.”

Below is a slideshow of the March.

Incorrupt body of Bl. Imelda in the University Chapel in Bologna

For a person with no faith, the story of Bl. Imelda (1322-1333, feast – May 13) must seem one of the most frightening.  That might sound strange to say about this child-saint who is also the patron saint of first communicants.  But she is not so regarded because her story merely romanticizes a pious and devout first communion story, but because she enjoyed something a bit more unexpected in her first holy communion – death by love.

Bl. Imelda entered the monastery of Dominican nuns to the south of Bologna at the age of nine.  By the age of eleven she was begging to receive first communion, which wasn’t given out till twelve or fourteen in her day.  She had faithfully been following the monastic way of life, even at her incredibly young age, and was incredibly devoted to the Eucharist.  Nevertheless, her confessor would not let her receive communion until she reached the requisite age.  Yet, on the vigil of the Ascension in 1333, our Lord provided.

After Mass, the community went about their duties.  Soon afterward, a pleasing fragrance filled the air of the monastery and drew the nuns back to the chapel where they found its source.  There, before the kneeling Imelda, floated a miraculous host.  The chaplain was soon called.  When he approached, the host rested on the paten he had brought.  After this, he gave Imelda her first communion, and she died on consumption.  As one author wrote:

The transport of love which took possession of her little heart at this moment was too great for a finite being.  She died from sheer joy and made her thanksgiving for First Holy Communion among the angels in heaven.

Bl. Imelda was named the patron saint of first communicants because of the great love she had for Christ present in the Blessed Sacrament.  She loved Him so much, especially as He was present in the consecrated host, that her love overflowed into something uncontainable.  When she was joined to Lord in communion, she entered into full communion with Him in heaven.  The Eucharist wasn’t just food for the wayfarer for her.  It was that which truly joined heaven to earth and led her into the eternal banquet of the Lamb.  Her story adds a vibrant reality to the admonition that all of us should receive Holy Communion as if it were our last.

O Lord Jesus Christ, who, wounding the Blessed Virgin Imelda with the fire of Thy love, and miraculously feeding her with the Immaculate Host, did receive her into heaven, grant us, through her intercession, to approach the Holy Table with the same fervor of charity, that we may long to be dissolved, and deserve to be with Thee, who lives and reigns for ever and ever.

For young men considering a vocation to the Order of Preachers there are excellent opportunities available this summer to meet many friars and visit houses and priories of the Province of St. Joseph. New England, New York City, Ohio, Maryland, and our nation’s capital will be the venues for ordinations, professions, special masses, a silent retreat, and for the first time: a high school vocation event.

Prof. Charles Stinson
1931 – 2012

In Memoriam

Prof. Charles Stinson

In the summer of 1985 before entering Dartmouth, my classmates and I received an unofficial, student-published, guide to the College. There was an intriguing section that rated the best professors at Dartmouth, men and women that the editors irreverently referred to as “gods.” One of those gods, ironically, was someone who would teach me a lot about God: the religion professor Charles Stinson. Although I was a history major, I ended up taking three classes with him. Those classes and the wisdom he imparted made an indelible impression on me and have served as intellectual touchstones ever since.

The first of them was on the theology of St. Augustine. It was not long before we realized why Prof. Stinson was so popular as a lecturer. He would pace back and forth, narrating the life and writings of Augustine, interspersing wisecracks and flights of fancy with an effortless treatment of various points of view – modern, traditional, believing and unbelieving. At times he would stop and stare at a point on the floor and intensely review some key matter, for instance Augustine’s treatment of memory in Book 10 of the Confessions, and compare it favorably to the latest reflections of scientists and philosophers. Charles, a practicing Catholic, was yet not apologetical: he objectively communicated the modern take that Augustine was judgmental and a prude. But he also was fair to his source, and one always got the sense in that class, amidst the secularism and decadence of student life, that maybe, just maybe, the sinner turned saint had something valid to say today.

The second class I took was the most natural sequel – the theology of Aquinas. As ever, Charles’ lectures were gripping. He gave a marvelous context to Aquinas’ thought, exposing the advent of the scholastic method with Anselm, Abelard and Lombard, and, once we got to passages from the Summa, taking time out to compare them to works of the Franciscan school. Again, despite Charles’ presentation of alternative views, his subject would shine through. One began to appreciate why Aquinas “won”, so to say – that is, why he became the Universal Doctor and quintessential Catholic theologian. His explanations of, for instance, the Eucharist and angels, as elucidated by our professor, made sense. At least for me, there seemed no possible superior way to address these topics. Through Professor Stinson’s class, I glimpsed a Thomistic worldview that, for me, replaced a merely political or ideological one. It was truly profound, high as the heavens, and as wide as all reality.

The last class I took, my senior spring, treated the history of Christian thought since the Reformation. Prof. Stinson ably presented the drama of Christian theology as it passed into the modern age. Famous names became familiar and great intellectual movements were examined at their roots. I remember three thinkers from the class chiefly: Calvin, Schleiermacher, and Newman. They were respectively representatives of the Reformation, of liberal Protestantism, and of the Catholic response to philosophical  Liberalism. My own favorite was Cardinal Newman naturally, and it was a blessing to have a professor who, although he didn’t push a view on the class, was sympathetic to the argument that Newman, among these different thinkers, simply spoke the truth. There was a juxtaposition in Charles of academic independence and Catholic loyalty. He joked irreverently about the long-reigning anti-Liberal Pope Pius IX, but then recounted the story of a Protestant theologian who went to Rome, suspicious of the pomp of the Vatican, and was stunned to see in this pontiff a thoroughly simple Christian disciple.

The great twentieth century Biblicist and apologist, Msgr. Ronald Knox, published a book called The Hidden Stream in 1953. The title refers to an underground watercourse at his beloved Oxford that served as a metaphor for the quiet but vital Christian intellectual life still present in that skeptical atmosphere. To me, Charles Stinson represented that hidden and life-giving stream of Christian intellectual life. He was not a crusader, just a man of faith and an academic. In his retirement, we talked once about how it was not necessary for a professor to defend Catholicism at a secular liberal arts institution like Dartmouth; one merely needed to let it speak for itself, to give it a fair shake. Since Dartmouth, I have had many excellent professors of Christian theology, but Charles and those wonderful classes still stand out. Thank you, Prof. Stinson, for giving Christianity a fair shake so brilliantly. Rest in peace.

The Meeting of Sts. Dominic and Francis by Fra Angelico

In April, we announced the publication of a new book on St. Francis Assisi by Dominican historian, Fr. Augustine Thompson, OP, of the Province of the Most Holy Name of Jesus.  The book, entitled Francis of Assisi: A New Biography, is an attempt to provide a new perspective on this legendary saint based on the historical record.

Recently, Our Sunday Visitor had the opportunity to interview Fr. Thompson about his book.  In that interview, published on the OSV website, Fr. Thompson discusses many of the common views of Francis that find little support in the historical record.  In discussing the book, the article lists three of the most common misconceptions that people make about Francis, according to Fr. Thompson.  The first misconception revolves around the story of his parents’ strong opposition to him.  Rather, says, Fr. Thompson, the earliest accounts of Francis’s life reveal that:

they don’t understand they have a saint on their hands, that’s the earliest description of the relationship. … By the time you get to the 1240s, his father has been turned into a totally evil person and his mother has become the secret protector, but in the earliest versions [his father is presented] as someone who is suffering and doesn’t understand his son.

The second misconception revolves around the timing of his conversion.  The common view is that this occurred at about the same time Francis renounced his fortune, removing even the clothes on his back so as not to take a anything from his family.  But, Fr. Thompson is quoted in the article as pointing to another far more important event in his life:

[St. Francis's] encounter with lepers, not the act of stripping off his clothing before the bishop, would always be for Francis the core of his religious experience.  As near as we can tell, it happened on the outskirts of Assisi. … Wherever the leprosarium was, Francis lodged there with the residents and earned his keep caring for them. His experience with them had nothing to do with choices between wealth and poverty, knightly pride and humility or even doing service instead of conducting business. It was a dramatic personal orientation that brought forth spiritual fruit. … Francis says, ‘When I was in my sins, God took me among the lepers and he worked mercy through them and he made what was previously bitter to be sweet. I did not wait long to leave the world.’

St. Francis of Assisi

Finally, the third greatest misconception regarding St. Francis relates to the modern tendency to bestow upon Francis a modern, progressivist outlook.  The modern world tends to view him as fiercely independent and individualistic, and in such a way that runs in opposition to the authority of the hierarchical Church.  But, according to Fr. Thompson, as a devout 13th century Catholic, Francis would never have identified himself as “an ecologist, a feminist, you can go down the list.”  He would have identified himself as a faithful Catholic, obedient to the Church’s legitimate authority.

This is most clearly seen, for Fr. Thompson, in his approach to the liturgy.  In his writing, Francis exhibits what a modern progressivist might term a near obsession over the need for clean altar linens, proper liturgical vessels, and correctly following rubrics.  But the proper and worthy celebration of the Holy Mass was a major part of Francis’s own understanding of a healthy and Catholic spirituality.  As Fr. Thompson is quoted in the article:

[Francis] has six letters harping on this. The usual biography of Francis just deep sixes that because today being a rubric hound and sacristy rat is not what those who like to talk spirituality think a saint should be.

Confronting these truths about St. Francis can often bring anxiety to people used to the Francis of modern myth.  As Fr. Thompson explains:

I have often been astonished at how unhappy students can be when they encounter a different Francis from the one they expect. Oddly enough, the most painful moment usually comes when they discover that St. Francis did not write the ‘Peace Prayer of St. Francis.’ … The ‘Peace Prayer’ is modern and anonymous, originally written in French, and dates to about 1912, when it was published in a minor French spiritual magazine, La Clochette. Noble as its sentiments are, Francis would not have written such a piece, focused as it is on the self, with its constant repetition of the pronouns ‘I’ and ‘me,’ the words ‘God’ and ‘Jesus’ never appearing once.

But it is important to clear away some of the modern clutter that obscures the real story of one of the Church’s greatest saints.  Only then can we understand truly what his life can teach us.  As Fr. Thompson observes:

The core of his spirituality was absolute dependence on God, and the desire to always be the lesser brother. … His willingness to follow wherever God leads him even when it’s not something he expected, that kind of spontaneous seeking to do God’s will … is a theme of his life, a beautiful theme and I think it’s true.

For more information, or to purchase the book, see the Friars’ Bookshop.

Each week, a Dominican member of the Provincial Preaching Advisory board prepares this

Sketchbook

St. Catherine of Siena, from Dialogue

The human heart is always drawn by love. He could not have shown you greater love than by giving his life for you. You can hardly resist being drawn by love, then, unless you foolishly refuse to be drawn…. The human heart is drawn by love and with all its powers: memory, understanding, and will. If these three powers are harmoniously united in my name, everything else you do, in fact or in intention, will be drawn to union with me in peace trough the movement of love, because all will be lifted up in the pursuit of crucified love. So my Truth indeed spoke truly when he said, “If I am lifted up high, I will draw everything to myself.” For everything you do will be drawn to him when he draws your heart and its powers.

St. John of the Cross, from The Spiritual Canticle

You considered

That one hair fluttering at my neck;

You gazed at it upon my neck

And it captivated You…

Oh how worthy of utter admiration and joy! God is taken captive by a hair! The reason this captivity is so estimable is that God wished to stop and gaze at the fluttering of the hair, as this verse asserts. And as we pointed out, for God, to gaze at is to love. If in His infinite mercy He had not gazed at us and loved us first—as St. John declares (1 John 4.10)—and descended, the hair of our lowly love would not have taken Him prisoner, for this love was not so lofty in its flight as to be able to capture this divine bird of heights. But because He came down to gaze at us and arouse the flight of our love by strengthening and giving it the courage for this (cf. Deut 43.11), He Himself as a result was captivated by the flight of the hair, that is, He was satisfied and please. Such is the meaning of the verses, “You gazed at it upon my neck and it captivated You.” It is indeed credible that a bird of lowly flight can capture the royal eagle of the heights, if this eagle descends with the desire of being captured.

St. Thomas More, Treatise upon the Passion

Who can in adversity be sure of many of his friends when our Savior himself was, at his capture, left alone and forsaken by his? When you go forth who will go with you? If you were a king would not all your realm send you on your way alone and then forget you? Will not your own family let you depart a naked, feeble soul, you know not whither? Let us all in time, then, learn to love as we should, God above all things, and all other things for him. And whatsoever love be not referred to that end, namely, to the good pleasure of God, is a very vain and unfruitful love. And whatsoever love we bear to any creature whereby we love God the less, that love is a loathsome love and hinders us from heaven. Love no child of yours so tenderly but that you could be content to sacrifice it to God, as Abraham was ready with Isaac, if God so commanded you. And since God will not do so, offer your child in another way to God’s service. For whatever we love that makes us break God’s commandment, we love better than God, and that is a love deadly and damnable. Now, since our Lord has so loved us, for our salvation, let us diligently call for his grace that in return for his great love we be not found ungrateful.

Bl. Pope John Paul II, Homily 4 May 1997

“I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide” (Jn 15:16). Mother María Encarnación Rosal, the first woman from Guatemala to be beatified, was chosen to continue the charism of Bl. Pedro de San José Betancourt, founder of the Order of Bethlemites, the first Latin American order. Today its fruit endures in the Bethlemite Sisters who, together with all the members of the great family of the Lay Association, strive to put his evangelizing charism into practice in their service to the Church.

A constant and tenacious woman motivated above all by charity, her life was fidelity to Christ her assiduous confidant through prayer and the spirituality of Bethlehem. He brought her many sacrifices and troubles, having to wander from one place to another to establish her work. Giving up many things did not matter to her, as long as the essential was saved, as she said: “May all be lost, except charity”. Basing herself on the lessons learned in the school of Bethlehem, that is, love, humility, poverty, the generous gift of self and austerity, she lived a splendid synthesis of contemplation and action, uniting to her educational activities the spirit of penance, adoration and reparation to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. May her example continue among her daughters, and may her intercession accompany the Church’s life on the American continent, which is preparing with hope to cross the threshold of the third millennium of the Christian era.

God calls everyone to holiness, but without forcing anyone’s hand. God asks and waits for man’s free acceptance. In the context of this universal call to holiness, Christ then chooses a specific task for each person and if he finds a response, he himself provides for bringing the work he has begun to completion, ensuring that the fruit remains. “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you You are my friends” (Jn 15:9, 14), the Lord continues to repeat and he waits for our answer, as he did with the new blesseds. Their example reminds us that, each in a different way, we are all committed to bearing fruit, not only for our own good, but for the whole community.

Resources

Readings

Sixth Sunday of Easter

Sunday Preacher’s Resource

Sixth Sunday of Easter (Year B)

Additional Preaching Resources

• The Holy See: The Easter Season
• Fr. Thomas Rosica (Salt and Light Media)
• The Torch
• The King of Ages
• Fr. Francis Martin Website
• Biblius Clerus, a resource of the Congregation for the Clergy
• The Catena Aurea of St. Thomas Aquinas, O.P., for the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John