Here is a major address to the Church from our great Pope Francis. May the Holy Spirit inspire the Church in the New Evangelization!
Starting from his own conversion story, the Pope laid out the full spread of his impressions on the state of the Church, and his vision for the road ahead, tying together in the process the threads which have marked his two months on Peter's chair. (source)
One of the great joys I have had as a Dominican Friar was being novice master for our East African Dominican Vicariate. Our mission (Nyumba ya Mtakatifu Martino de Porres, "St. Martin de Porres Priory") is close to Lake Victoria in Western Kenya in a town called Kisumu.
Our current student master, Fr. Andrew Hofer OP, was there at the same time. He served as our Regent of Studies for our vicariate and he taught Theology to our student friars and many other religious in Nairobi at the Catholic University of East Africa and Tangaza College.
During our time in Kenya, we had young men in our novitiate from the countries of Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Southern Sudan, Angola, Mozambique & Zimbabwe (at the time other OP vicariates would send their men to us).
Three of these friars (Bros. John Baptist Ssemugabi OP, Leo Simon Itabara Mwenda OP, Thomas Nicholas Odhiambo OP), for whom I was novice master, will be ordained to the priesthood and transitional diaconate on Saturday, May 18 at St. Theresa's Cathedral (Kibuye) in downtown Kisumu, Kenya. I made a quick call to them this morning and wished them every blessing.
(click image to enlarge)
Each of these young men are very talented. From the moment they entered the novitiate, years ago, they wanted to give everything to the Lord and to preach the Gospel for the salvation of souls.
This has proven well when they preached during a Eucharistic-centered retreat that we have been doing in our vicariate called "UZIMA" which is the same retreat as YOUTH 2000 internationally. This retreat has been led by our friars in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda about 15 times for thousands and thousands of young people. A number of young men and women who attended these retreats are now priests, brothers and sisters in religious life in East Africa. The Lord planted deep seeds of conversion in their hearts. For some amazing photos click here.
YOUTH 2000 was taken to East Africa with the huge support and translating expertise of a great missionary priest from Poland, Fr. Wojciech Adam Kościelniak (his FB page) as well as generous parishioners from our parish, St. Gertrude in Cincinnati, where our novitiate is located.
As Virgil and Beatrice were to Dante, so Edmund Husserl has
been our guide to the three evangelical counsels. We have seen how his notions
of intentionality and givenness enrich our understanding of
what the vows offer to us and how we relate to them. Along the way we have also
discovered other parts of Husserl’s philosophical project, such as the phenomenological reduction and the
process of transcendental bracketing—the
removal of all that is contingent and inessential in search of what is true. It
is finally time to turn to obedience, the counsel according to the Dominican
Constitutions that is pre-eminent among the counsels:
“By obedience a person dedicates himself totally to God and
his actions come closer to the goal of profession, which is the perfection of
charity. Everything else too in the apostolic life is included under obedience (LCO 19.1).”
And yet what seems more counter-intuitive to today’s culture
than obedience? Isn’t that something for children and young people living at
home? Why do grown men, Dominican friars, make this promise of obedience,
including poverty and chastity under its yoke? Once again, Husserl can be of
help.
What in Husserl’s thought would correspond to obedience, the
pre-eminent counsel? This must be his principle of all principles:
“No conceivable theory can make us err with respect to the principle
of all principles: that ever originally preventive intuition is a
legitimizing source of cognition, that everything originally
offered to us in 'intuition' is to be accepted simply as what it is
presented as being, but also only within the limits in which it is
presented there (Ideas I, section 24).”
Everything given to us in intuition, everything perceived,
is presented according to its own mode of disclosure: we do not dictate terms
to the objects we find in the world. This is not a form of naïve realism: what
you see is what you get. To see things as they are in themselves requires hard
phenomenological work; we must follow the difficult and delicate steps of the
phenomenological reduction. Husserl offers an example:
“I have a particular intuition of redness, or rather several
such intuitions. I stick strictly to the pure immanence; I am careful to perform
the phenomenological reduction. I snip away any further significance of
redness, any way in which it may be viewed as something transcendent, e.g., as
the redness of a piece of blotting paper on my table, etc. And no I grasp in
pure ‘seeing’ the meaning of the concept of redness in general, redness in specie, the universal ‘seen’ as identical
in this and that. No longer is it the particular as such which is referred to,
not this or that red thing, but redness in general (The Idea of Phenomenology, 44-45).
Seeing something as it is in itself means stripping it of
all the contingent and non-essential elements. It means looking close at the
thing as it is given to consciousness
as an intentional object. Seeing in
this way is no mean feat, nor is it a normal daily occurrence!
The vow of obedience is similar: If we want to be free we
must obey. The Catechism links
freedom with obedience in this way:
“The more one does that is good, the freer one becomes.
There is no true freedom except in the service of what is good and just. The
choice to disobey and do evil is an abuse of freedom and leads to ‘the slavery
of sin (CCC 1733).’”
The Dominican Constitutionssimilarly stress the need for obedience in the achievement of
freedom:
“Because obedience ‘plants the roots of self-discipline in
our hearts’ it is of the greatest benefit to that freedom of spirit
characteristic of the children of God, and disposes us to self-giving charity
(LCO 19.3).”
Pope Honorius III and St. Dominic
- L. da Ponte
The vow of obedience is an offering of one’s freedom in
return for a greater freedom in the service of the highest good: God’s will.
When a friar takes the vow of obedience he is offering himself as an instrument
of God under the direction of his superiors. We again meet the structure of intentionality: obedience is for something, it is for the apostolic
life in fulfillment of the God’s call. Although easily misunderstood, obedience
is not a negation of freedom, but a development of authentic freedom in serving
the good, serving God in a particular way. Obedience is not against freedom,
but for it!
The notion of givenness
also illumines obedience because when the vow is lived out one receives
something, or rather, someone:
“Through obedience, we imitate Christ in a special manner,
Christ who always obeyed the Father, for the life of the world. We are thus
more closely united to the Church, to whose building we are dedicated, for its
common good and that of the Order (LCO 18.1).”
Just as the other vows give the religious Christ in a special
way (the poor Christ, the chaste Christ), the vow of obedience gives him Christ
as obedient to the Father, the one who St. Paul speaks of when he says:
“Have
this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was
in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but
emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of
men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto
death, even death on a cross (Philippians 2:5-8).”
Obedience unites the friar to Christ who always followed the
Father’s will. But this obedience is not easy, especially given the assumptions
about freedom and maturity in the world today. It is difficult to imagine that
others know better than you do about what is right and wrong, yet it is nevertheless
true! We do not see the world correctly unless we are trained to see it
correctly, with the eyes of faith, and obedience is the primary lesson in the
school of vowed learning. With obedience we learn to order our desires and
passions rightly towards true and authentic goods instead of fleeting and
apparent ones. Like the method of phenomenology, this kind of seeing takes
patience and practice; it is by no means an easy task. But the promise of both
phenomenology and obedience is surely worth the effort: to see the world as it
is and to know one’s proper place in it according to God’s will.
Because Husserl has been our guide on this journey it is
appropriate to end with a passage from another journey, Dante’s Paradiso. In Canto III Dante meets
Piccarda who inhabits the first circle of Heaven. In response to his question
about whether she has any desire to move to a higher place she says:
Paradiso Canto II.49 -
G. Doré
“For it is of the essence of this bliss
to hold one’s dwelling in the divine
Will, who makes
our single wills the same, and His, So that, although we dwell from sill to sill throughout
this kingdom, that is as we please, as it
delights the King in whose desire We find our own. In His will is our peace: That is the
sea whereto all creatures fare, Fashioned
by Nature or the hand of God.”
In God’s will is our peace, for obedience gives us Christ,
and everything else along with him.
All Men considering a vocation are invited to an extraordinary event in the life o the Order of Preachers: a Mass of Solemn Profession for our friars when they will consecrate their lives to God "usque ad mortem" (until death). Please let me know if you will join us!
1. The practice of receiving a priest’s “first blessing” after his ordination Mass is a praiseworthy custom, but there is no specific indulgence attached to receiving such a blessing or, for that matter, to attending a cleric’s ordination Mass.
2. There is a specific plenary indulgence attached to attending a priest’s first “scheduled” or “public” Mass (regardless of whether it is designated a “Mass of Thanksgiving”, although it likely will be so designated), and to the first such Mass only.Enchiridion 1999, conc. 27. The celebration indulgenced here is not the same as the ordination Mass itself.
“I have a particular intuition of redness, or rather several such intuitions. I stick strictly to the pure immanence; I am careful to perform the phenomenological reduction. I snip away any further significance of redness, any way in which it may be viewed as something transcendent, e.g., as the redness of a piece of blotting paper on my table, etc. And no I grasp in pure ‘seeing’ the meaning of the concept of redness in general, redness in specie, the universal ‘seen’ as identical in this and that. No longer is it the particular as such which is referred to, not this or that red thing, but redness in general (The Idea of Phenomenology, 44-45).
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