Recently in Theology Category

I frequently stand in awe of people who, like Pope Benedict, can draw my attention to the essentials of faith, reason and culture. His audience on Wednesday where he speaks about St. Bernard is one of these instances because he shows me the beauty of St. Bernard, the purpose of theology study, life with the saints, and why we have to suffer some things for the Kingdom. For example, the Pope offers a corrective in my work as a seminarian.

Here are a few germane sentences with emphasis added: In one place in the talk Pope says: "Faith is above all an individual and intimate encounter with Jesus; it means experiencing His closeness, His friendship and His love." He continues "St. Bernard, solidly based on the Bible and on the Fathers of the Church, reminds us that without a profound faith in God, nourished by prayer and contemplation, by a profound relationship with the Lord, our reflections on the divine mysteries risk becoming a futile intellectual exercise, and lose their credibility. Theology takes us back to the "science of the saints," to their intuitions of the mysteries of the living God, to their wisdom, gift of the Holy Spirit, which become the point of reference for theological thought."

And given that I think there's much discussion in a seminary work, sometimes too much discussion, I am leaning St. Bernard as he says, "but perhaps He can be sought better and found more easily with prayer than with discussion. We put an end here to the book, but not to the search." 

(Pope Benedict XVI, Wednesday General Audience, October 21, 2009) 

Father Joseph T. Lienhard, S.J., professor of theology at Fordham University and adjunct professor of dogmatic theology at St. Joseph's Seminary will present a lecture at St. Joseph's Seminary, Dunwoodie, Wednesday, November 4, at 7:30 p.m.

His subject will be  "Celibacy in the Early Church."  This lecture is part of the seminary's ongoing Dunwoodie Lecture Series. All topics for this year will center around the "Year for Priests" which was announced by Pope Benedict XVI last June and will run until June 19, 2010.

The lecture is free and open to the public.

About the presenter 

Father holds a doctorate in theology from the University of Freiburg in Germany. He entered the Society of Jesus after graduating from Regis High School in Manhattan.  He holds degrees in classics, philosophy and theology from Fordham University and Woodstock College. He was ordained a priest by  Terence Cardinal Cooke in 1971. Before coming to Fordham University in 1990 as a professor, he taught at Marquette University, in Milwaukee for fifteen years. He has held visiting chairs at John Carroll University, in Cleveland and at Boston College. In 2007, he was a visiting professor at the Pontifical Biblical Institute and the Gregorian University in Rome. His area of specialization is patristics or the study of the Fathers of the Church. Since 1997, he has been the managing editor of TRADITIO, a journal of ancient and medieval thought, history and religion published by Fordham University where he served as chairman of the department of theology at from 1992 - 1995.

He is the author, editor or translator of twelve books as well as the author of more than fifty scholarly articles. His works include, "The Bible, the Church and Authority: The Canon of the Christian Bible in History and Theology." One of Father's current project is writing on a book on St. John Chrysostom and translating into English for the first time two works by St. Augustine.

This  lecture is sponsored by the Terence Cardinal Cooke Chair in Sacred Theology at the seminary.

Information: 914-968-6200, ext 8292

G. K. Chesterton once wrote, "Catholic doctrine and discipline may be walls; but they are the walls of a playground. We might fancy some children playing on the flat grassy top of some tall island in the sea. So long as there was a wall round the cliff's edge they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries. But the walls were knocked down, leaving the naked peril of the precipice. They did not fall over; but when their friends returned to them they were all huddled in terror in the centre of the island; and their song had ceased." Orthodoxy Ch. 9

Just this morning one of the assisting priests where I am living and I had a brief discussion about purgatory and the need to raise our awareness of praying for "those who have gone before marked by the sign of faith." I don't get to think much about purgatory but it's been a funny thing: I've been thinking about the Catholic practice of praying for the souls in purgatory and need to keep in mind and heart the place the dead continue to have in our lives and in Church. I suspect that most of us observe All Souls Day once a year but is that enough? We probably don't think of those who have died, our family, friends and even those unknown to us personally, as needing prayers for purification. Perhaps we think of our dead as already being with God face-to-face and therefore in no need of prayer. Affectively this line of thinking is understandable. But really, do we think that our deceased friends and family were that perfect in life that aren't in need of prayer and sacrifice? 

Over at First Things Rusty Reno reviews the idea of defending truth by looking at the work of Dominican Father Reginald-Marie Garrigou-Lagrange. What a novel notion! Reno gives us another look in this seminal thinker and priest.

Using the method of Saint Cyril and Methodius Pope Benedict spoke about the work of the Church in making the faith intelligible to people using their own language. The task of inculturation is an extremely difficult work because of the nuances of language and culture. Just look at the headaches in translating catechisms, papal speeches and liturgical texts today. The coalescing of faith and culture is a work the Church has done since the time of Christ. Watch the video clip on the subject.

The Pope said, in part: 

This was a decisive factor for the development of the Slavic civilization in general. Cyril and Methodius were convinced that the various peoples could not consider that they had fully received Revelation until they had heard it in their own language and read it with the characters proper to their own alphabet.

To Methodius falls the merit of ensuring that the work began by his brother would not remain sharply interrupted. While Cyril, the "philosopher," tended toward contemplation, he [Methodius] was directed more toward the active life. In this way, he was able to establish the foundations of the successive affirmation of what we could call the "Cyril-Methodian idea," which accompanied the Slavic peoples in the various historical periods, favoring cultural, national and religious development. Pope Pius XI already recognized this with the apostolic letter Quod Sanctum Cyrillum, in which he classified the two brothers as "sons of the East, Byzantines by their homeland, Greeks by origin, Romans by their mission, Slavs by their apostolic fruits" (AAS 19 [1927] 93-96).

The historic role that they fulfilled was afterward officially proclaimed by Pope John Paul II who, with the apostolic letter Egregiae Virtutis Viri, declared them co-patrons of Europe, together with St. Benedict (AAS 73 [1981] 258-262). Indeed, Cyril and Methodius are a classic example of what is today referred to with the term "inculturation": Each people should make the revealed message penetrate into their own culture, and express the salvific truth with their own language. This implies a very exacting work of "translation," as it requires finding adequate terms to propose anew the richness of the revealed Word, without betraying it. The two brother saints have left in this sense a particularly significant testimony that the Church continues looking at today to be inspired and guided. (Wednesday Audience, June 17, 2009)

... we contemplate the Most Holy Trinity as Jesus introduced us to it. He revealed to us that God is love "not in the oneness of a single Person, but in the Trinity of one substance" (Preface). He is the Creator and merciful Father; he is the Only-Begotten Son, eternal Wisdom incarnate, who died and rose for us; he is the Holy Spirit who moves all things, cosmos and history, toward their final, full recapitulation. Three Persons who are one God because the Father is love, the Son is love, the Spirit is love. God is wholly and only love, the purest, infinite and eternal love. He does not live in splendid solitude but rather is an inexhaustible source of life that is ceaselessly given and communicated. To a certain extent we can perceive this by observing both the macro-universe: our earth, the planets, the stars, the galaxies; and the micro-universe: cells, atoms, elementary particles. The "name" of the Blessed Trinity is, in a certain sense, imprinted upon all things because all that exists, down to the last particle, is in relation; in this way we catch a glimpse of God as relationship and ultimately, Creator Love. All things derive from love, aspire to love and move impelled by love, though naturally with varying degrees of awareness and freedom. "O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!" (Ps 8: 1) the Psalmist exclaims. In speaking of the "name", the Bible refers to God himself, his truest identity. It is an identity that shines upon the whole of Creation, in which all beings for the very fact that they exist and because of the "fabric" of which they are made point to a transcendent Principle, to eternal and infinite Life which is given, in a word, to Love. "In him we live and move and have our being", St Paul said at the Areopagus of Athens (Acts 17: 28). The strongest proof that we are made in the image of the Trinity is this: love alone makes us happy because we live in a relationship, and we live to love and to be loved. Borrowing an analogy from biology, we could say that imprinted upon his "genome", the human being bears a profound mark of the Trinity, of God as Love.