Cardinal Meyer Lecture with Bishop Robert Barron

thank you holly so on behalf of all the faculty and staff here at the university of st mary of the lake really delighted to welcome you to the 2022 meijer lecture series just in time from los angeles we're able to offer bishop baron some chicago weather which i'm sure he remembers perhaps fondly i didn't know the snow was coming tonight but just a word about the lecture series itself and in our centennial year here i can't think of a more wonderful opportunity to welcome back home to mondeline one of her favorite sons and most illustrious alumni in bishop baron but the series is named for cardinal meyer the fifth archbishop of chicago graduate of the pontifical biblical institute and romey was a significant figure at the second vatican council and always championed a deeper engagement between the church and the modern world the lecture series was endowed by chicago priest father andrew greeley class of 1954 here at mondeline and his original intention was that this would be a strong intellectual engagement of topics and issues somewhat modeled on the famous uh gifford lectures the university of edinburgh but the meyer lectures while intended to focus on contemporary issues in theology in the church were also intended to be interdisciplinary drawing themes not only from theology but also literature law the social sciences and the arts and the talks are always formally published in the university's journal chicago studies so look forward to that in the coming months from tonight in addition to our seminarians i want to welcome all those students from the other schools here at the university the pontifical faculty the liturgical institute and the various ministry formation institutes also to welcome our alumni and many distinguished guests several members of the boards of advisors are here and so many generous donors while one might well say that bishop robert barron needs no introduction among this audience and on these grounds it is nevertheless most fitting that he be introduced tonight by dr matthew lovering one of our great scholars and theologians in his own right matthew holds the james n and mary d perry jr chair of theology here at mondeline seminary and along with his prolific scholarship he's generously shared his many gifts with our students both the seminarians and the other graduate students through his teaching and organization of numerous conferences on campus which really give a special opportunity for young scholars and graduate students to share ideas with some world-renowned scholars and theologians it was primarily through the efforts of then father robert barron that matthew came here to mondeline and joined the faculty and so it is with great joy that i invite dr levereen forward to please come up and formally introduce our 2022 meijer lecture matthew [Applause] [Applause] bishop robert baron taught at mundoline seminary for almost 25 years from 1992 through 2015. and in 2015 pope francis appointed him to be auxiliary bishop of los angeles prior to his appointment as bishop he served as director president of munlin seminary from 2012 to 2015. he graduated from underlying seminary with a master of divinity in 1986. it's safe to say that he's easily the most prominent person ever to graduate from or to teach at mundoline seminary bishop erin has published 18 books the most recent of which is his acclaimed light from light a theological reflection on the nicene creed published in 2021 among his other books are groundbreaking achievements such as his timely letter to a suffering church from 2019 his arguing religion a bishop speaks at facebook and google 2018 his biblical commentary on two samuel from 2015 his book length interview conducted by john allen and published as to light a fire on the earth 2017 and his classic theological introduction the priority of christ from 2007. bishop baron founded the global media ministry word on fire in the late 2000s the breakthrough came in 2011 with a production and airing of on pbs of his award-winning best-selling documentary series catholicism this extraordinary series has been followed by two equally prominent series catholicism the new evangelization and catholicism the pivotal players in addition to his long-standing website wordonfire.org which reaches millions of people each year bishop baron has recently founded the word on fire institute it publishes a journal titled evangelization and culture and sponsors numerous other activities currently there are over two twenty thousand members of the word on fire institute which in a few short years has become a major worldwide lay ecclesiastical movement for the renewal of the church bishop baron's youtube videos have been viewed over 90 million times and episodes of his podcast award on fire show have been downloaded over 4 million times he has 3.1 million faith facebook followers for his scholarly work and his contributions to evangelization bishop baron has received nine honorary doctorates and will receive his tenth in may he completed his regular doctorate in theology at the institute catholique at paris in 1992 he holds a master's degree in philosophy from the catholic university of america he has lectured all over the world and speaks and reads multiple languages to say that we are honored to have bishop barron with us tonight to deliver the 2022 meyer lectures is an understatement we welcome him as a bishop of the church as an imminent catholic leader in scholarship and in evangelization as the founder of initiatives that have brought the gospel to countless in need we welcome him as our former rector president our esteemed colleague and our dear friend we welcome him above all as our fellow christian a man who knows the power of grace a man of prayer and humility a true follower of the crucified lord it is a privilege and a delight to welcome bishop robert baron to deliver the 2022 meyer lectures thank you so much [Applause] thank you well thank you all god bless you for that i'm i'm a little wary of the standing ovation before i speak it's always the one after that you prefer but thank you that was very generous uh as father john insinuated i was thinking today it's march and it's snowing i must be home in chicago when i first got to california this about six years ago i was welcomed at a parish there they had a liturgy and then there was supposed to be a gathering outdoors to welcome me and i would describe the weather that night as about 68 degrees with a light breeze well when the liturgy was over the pastor got up and said well everybody since the weather's so blustery i think we're going to move the reception indoors and i took the microphone from him and said look you have no idea what blustery means uh as uh both the father john and matt levering uh uh stated and by the way may i say too that uh one of my my proudest accomplishments as rector was getting matthew lovering to this faculty so i was delighted to hear that uh introduction um but it both you know stated pretty clearly it means the world to me to be back here i spend a lot of my adult life in this place i started as a student here when i was 22 years old and taught for all those years as rector here and i've loved this place from the first time i saw it the first time i saw it was in the spring of 1978 with two friends i played hooky from the college seminary it was the first really nice spring day that year and we drove up here and um it was just a magical experience the combination of the physical beauty of this place plus the architectural program um it just uh it just was stupendous and i can honestly say though i've come on this campus a thousand times since then i've never lost that sense of the of the magical quality of this place so to be back is a tremendous joy for me it really is i'm also happy to be able to pay tribute and i want to do it briefly before i begin the formal talk to pay tribute to father andrew greeley who as you heard funded this lecture series made it possible i had the privilege of knowing him fairly well i know there are some in this audience old enough to remember him well it to my mind's kind of sad a lot of young catholics i know even very smart plugged in young catholics don't remember that name anymore but gosh go back to when i was ordained 30 some years ago he was the most prominent catholic in america and as you heard class of 54 out here distinguished himself first as a sociologist of religion did groundbreaking work still important work in understanding the dynamics of the church's life after the council then became a very popular theological writer and then finally turned to fiction later in life and that brought his fame to a to a new level i probably first came in contact with him on the old phil donahue show who remembers that so prior to oprah there was phil donahue and and he had some of the leading figures in the culture you know philosophers economists and politicians and so on and andrew greeley was frequently on phil donahue so here i'm this you know teenager with an interest in religion this catholic kid and to see this a very sharp bright articulate happy priest always wearing his roman collar proudly that had a big impact on me well i'm ordained in 1986 and i was living in a rectory with a newly retired priest called bill quinn class of 1941 if you want to look up his picture bill deserves his own lecture series he was a great figure and he was actually someone instrumental in launching andrew greeley's career as a writer and a speaker so one fine day this 70 year old retired priest says to me i was 27 at the time i want you to meet andy so down we went on a january day i remember it very vividly it was bright sunny beautiful but chicago it was about five degrees and greeley lived in the hancock building so we went to a restaurant near there and andrew greeley i remember came in and i can still see him wearing this big tan parka and the hood furlined hood pulled up against the january cold under both arms piles of books that he was giving us his gifts and it was just uh it's one of the sparkling memories of my early years as a priest interested in everything at least he pretended to be interested in what i had to say and for the next about i don't know 10 or 15 years every summer he invited monsignor quinn and me to his uh house in grand beach and those were marvelous uh experiences we would you know spend the the day a couple days there and um you you'd come in and andy would would hand you his latest published book and then he'd say over there is the manuscript finished for the next one and i'm currently working on a third book in the computer i remember greeley sitting on this chair and just both sides piled up with books and articles and he read everything and so just scintillating days of conversation and so i heard a lot about this lecture series because i was there when he was kind of thinking it through and making the um the contribution financially to it and as as father john said he wanted this to be the american version of the gifford lectures he wanted to be a very high level academic engagement between the church and the wider culture well that's had a big impact on me and my own work my word on firework is very much under that same aegis but i'm very happy tonight to be able to pay tribute to him and maybe see this lecture of mine as a bit of a sign of gratitude just one more thing this happened oh maybe 15 years ago there was a big symposium up here on the bible and it was designed for academics and they asked me to give a paper so i gave a paper on the biblical hermeneutics of saint irenaeus in light of the historical critical method that was the talk it was a it was a real barn burner but it was designed for this high-level academic conference and i think the scholars there appreciate it but after the talk was over a lady came up and she wasn't fooling she was genuinely mad at me and she said what what was that all about and i said well you know it's an academic lecture series i brought high school kids down from wisconsin to hear you so let me if that lady's here i want to apologize in advance uh so we're going to follow uh father greeley's desire and i'll give a somewhat higher level just one last practical note some of the myra lecturers have done two discrete papers i haven't done that i've really written one long paper which i've kind of divided roughly into two halves a little bit shorter tonight a little bit longer tomorrow so the first half there's not an elegantly crafted conclusion to the first half it'll come a bit to a screeching halt i'll let you know when the first half is over and then i know some are coming back and then we'll have the second half of this this paper tomorrow and so with that let me turn to the text anyone who's been following my work over the years knows that i've been preoccupied with the question of the unaffiliated that's to say the army of those people especially the young who have absented themselves from the practice of faith and from church attendance there's simply no way to avoid the conclusion that the christian churches at least in the west are facing a practically unprecedented crisis of disaffiliation in the early 1970s roughly 3 percent of our country would have claimed the status of none when asked about religious affiliation today that number has reached an astonishing 26 and among the young the numbers are worse still reaching 40 percent of those under 30 claimed to have no religious affiliation one need not be an expert in statistics to discern this does not bode well for the future of the churches when asked why they've disaffiliated the nuns give a variety of reasons chief among them that they have simply lost confidence in the teaching of christianity since i've explored this and many other causes of disaffiliation before i will not focus so much on the sociology of the issue rather what i want to do in these two presentations is take a deeper dive examining the culture that's given rise to the loss of religious commitment and then proposing some ways forward some insights and practices i hope whereby the religious sensibility can be reawakened now permit me to say something at the outset though we religious leaders and educators might be tempted at this time to wring our hands and give in to despair we should on the contrary i think sees this moment as i hope to make clear in these lectures the secularist ideology is soul killing and the human heart naturally rebels against it we should not be begging the avatars of secularism for a place around the table on their terms we should be reclaiming our own incomparably rich spiritual tradition in order to feed the hunger of the unaffiliated this is not the time to retreat but rather to go out as paul tillich said in his german mit klingendem spiel which you might say with fife and drum confident in what we uniquely bring i'll develop these reflections as follows first i'll look at the intellectual matrix that has made the army of the disaffiliated possible namely what charles taylor calls the culture of the buffered self the ego cut off from any living contact with the transcendent then using the three great transcendentals the good the true and the beautiful as my framework i will propose ways to break through the buffered self and to open the restless heart to a consideration of god and the things of god though i'll develop these thoughts in a disciplined academic way i want to make clear from the outset that my purpose is not purely speculative instead i'm proposing a strategy for the creative engagement of the nuns and a program useful i hope for the purposes of what the last several popes have called the new evangelization okay so first now the buffered self in his magisterial text the secular age the canadian catholic philosopher charles taylor constructs a complex narrative designed to explain the intriguing fact that in the year 1500 practically everyone in the west believed in god whereas today again in the west god's non-existence is taken as a very lively option by a considerable number of people to make this claim a bit more precise many contemporary people hold something that their early modern forebears would have found unthinkable namely that the good life can be had apart from any relationship to a transcendent reality now tracing all the lines of taylor's complex and sinuous analysis would take us way too far afield i want to draw attention only to a particularly pivotal insight that sheds considerable light on the present situation taylor insists that the self that existed in the west certainly until 1500 and to a large degree up until very recent times could be characterized as a porous self which is to say open to the influence of a supernatural or transcendental order of things and the self that obtains within the secular space today might be described his famous term now as buffered which is to say cut off from that transcendent realm or perhaps to state it more accurately indifferent to it convinced again that his fulfillment can be found in what taylor calls quote an exclusive humanism as i mentioned many different reasons are given for disaffiliation but i believe the fundamental ground for this move whatever motive is consciously acknowledged is the buffered self one rather obvious form that the buffering takes is the rejection of a naively enchanted universe inhabited by ghosts goblins and spiritual agents both malign and benevolent one might think here of even such hyper-sophisticated pre-modern thinkers as origen of alexandria and thomas aquinas both of whom took for granted the view that angels are responsible for the movement of the planets i don't think for a moment it would be a desitoratum to return to that sort of pre-scientific cosmology however there is a far more deleterious disenchantment of the world which amounts to a rejection of the contingent universe's connection to a transcendent cause or source along with many others john milbank louis dupre brad gregory for instance i've argued that this disjunction followed from the loss of an analogical conception of being and the consequent compromising of a participation metaphysics the rather clear result of this disconnect is an ideological materialism and on the epistemological level a scientism which is to say the reduction of all knowledge to the scientific form of knowledge there's no doubt that the astonishing success of the physical sciences and the life enhancing value of their concomitant technology have contributed mightily to this view since the sciences have it seems been so thoroughly capable of explaining the world and since their technologies have made our lives so much longer and more comfortable why would we even bother to explore other paths of knowledge and why would we not appreciate phenomena previously seen as spiritual the soul the arts the longing for meaning moral commitment as simply epi phenomenal the effluvia of brain nerves and evolutionary impulses and in point of fact this latter reductionist perspective has been very effectively propagated in the popular culture by the so-called new atheists another cause and consequence i would say of the buffering of the self is what i've termed the culture of self-invention the roots of this worldview are certainly in nietzsche's will to power and transvaluation of values but also inserts prioritization of essence over existence and perhaps especially in foucault's insistence that truth claims typically come down to displays of power the upshot of this high philosophical speculation is that one's capacity to determine through freedom the meaning of one's own life is now the default position of practically every teenager in the western world any proposal of a norm that ought to govern freedom or of an objective value that ought to be incorporated into one subjectivity is routinely unmasked today as a ploy of a domination system so scientism ideological materialism the self-invention culture have effectively locked many people especially young people into the stuffy confines of the buffered self this is not a matter of merely academic concern for this cutting off of a living connection to the transcendent as i suggested does enormous damage to the soul and i can see the effects of it practically every day in my ministry to seekers and doubters and enemies of religion armies of people today are straining to convince themselves that an exclusive humanism is adequate to their deepest desires but their restless hearts say otherwise i'm convinced the needful thing therefore is to knock holes in the buffered self letting in the light during the many years that i was professor here at mundoline i would speak often of the soul doctoring quality of our theological and spiritual traditions prior to the split between spiritual spirituality and theology bemoaned by hans urs von balthazar as the greatest tragedy in the history of the church interesting isn't it think of all the tragedies we've gone through he thought the greatest was the split between theology and spirituality i think in the history of the church the most important theologians for centuries were the spiritual masters and vice versa irenaeus chrysostom augustine maximus the confessor anselm bernard thomas aquinas just to name a few for it was taken for granted that the doctrines of christianity are productive of a manner of life that they are intended to heal and order that most fundamental dimension of the self that we call the soul my many years of experience now in the fields of cultural analysis and evangelization have taught me that the sole doctoring of the buffered self is sorely needed and and that the church is the privileged agent of this administration again that's why we go out with fife and drum everybody not not begging the secular culture for a place at the table but we go out with this very rich tradition to address the pressing spiritual need of our time i'm continually amazed at the enduring presence of plato's parable of the cave in the contemporary culture one thing's for example of ray bradbury's novel fahrenheit 451 or of c.s lewis's fantasy story the last battle or of such films as the truman show and of course the matrix trilogy in all these narratives someone trapped in a metaphysically superficial world manages to escape from his constraints and to make a journey to a higher more densely real and beautiful mode of existence in all these archetypal tales as in the platonic original the limited perception of the main characters is a function of a severe restriction imposed upon them from the beginning and heightened perception is the consequence of a necessarily painful and disconcerting liberation in plato's telling the emancipated prisoner who has left the cave and seen the world outside as well as the sun that's the ultimate provider of the light returns to his former colleagues but appears a comical figure stumbling his way through the dark now unable to perceive clearly even the shadows that formally beguiled him this everybody is the religious person making his or her way through the secularized world today moving among buffered cells she has seen more than they and she wants to draw them toward her vision but they can only hear her stories as fantasy and can only mock her as someone hopelessly out of touch with reality so the challenge is finding our way out of the cave and encouraging other people to do so in the interest of breaking through the buffered self and ultimately establishing a connection to god the work of the great catholic philosopher dietrich von hildebrand i think is of signal importance in the face of the relativism that was already in his time insinuating itself into western culture von hildebrand famously distinguished between what he calls the merely subjectively satisfying and the objectively valuable the merely subjectively satisfying and the objectively valuable the merely subjectively satisfying is what pleases me without any particular reference to the objective goodness truth or beauty of that which gives me the pleasure the example that von hildebrand often brings forward is a flattering but utterly unjustified compliment i might indeed find this remark pleasing but it has no basis in reality in this case the pleasure derived trumps completely the ontological status of what prompted it now there might be some substance to the compliment but in the case of the merely subjectively satisfying the stress falls on the subjective state of affairs on the other hand the objectively valuable is a good or a truth or an aesthetic reality and here's von hillebrand's language that is important in itself whether it pleases displeases or has any particular effect on the one who takes it in it is recognized intuitively as right or good or beautiful in itself and for its own sake two plus three equals five whether i like it or not whether that some pleases me or not it would be true across space and time to speak with the modal logicians it would be true in any possible universe and even if holding it would become a deeply unpopular opinion it's still true the same obtains in regard to for example the self-sacrificing act of a maximilian kobe the nobility of a thomas moore even the simplest gesture of generosity or the forgiveness of an enemy and the same is equally true with respect to beethoven's seventh symphony the farnese palace or dante's commedia the objectively valuable in itself calls forth what von hildebrand terms of value response and this can take place in the intellectual volitional or effective order the mind accepts and celebrates the truth that it takes in the will seeks the good that's been perceived the heart and hildebrand is one of the great contemporary philosophers of the heart the heart exalts and sings an answer to any type of value and this implies that love is the essential move in the presence of the objectively valuable by which i mean some transcendence of the ego some moving out of the sphere of mere self-interest an act of real ecstatic union with the perceived value a remarkably parallel view can be found in the writings of another 20th century philosopher with whom i'm fairly certain von hildebrand had no contact iris murdoch the great irish novelist and philosopher impatient with the largely kantian and behavioristic accounts of the moral life prevalent in the mid-20th century murdoch endeavored to recover elements within the platonic metaphysical and ethical systems most particularly the idea of the good in her wonderful essay the sovereignty of good over other concepts murdoch following suggestion in plato's fedras draws our attention to an unselfing that's her evocative word an unselfing that happens through an encounter with the beautiful or the good terms that she uses in the platonic manner more or less interchangeably she invites us to consider a scenario in which a person is looking out the window in a very anxious state of mind i'm quoting her now brooding perhaps on some damage to his prestige suddenly his attention is caught by i'm quoting again a hovering kestrel kestrel being a type of small falcon i'm continuing out a quote from her in a moment everything is altered the brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared there's now nothing but kestrel and when he returns to thinking of the utter of the other matter somehow it seems much less important close quote the point is that the good or the beautiful thing has relativized the self has knocked it off its perch reoriented it in such a manner that is no longer the center of operations and this is why the beautiful or the good i'm quoting again from murdoch both in its genesis and its enjoyment is a thing totally opposed to selfish obsession it invigorates our best faculties and to use plato's language inspires love in the highest part of the soul close quote there's the hildebrandian element the intrinsically valuable awakens self-transcendence and indeed self-donation which will make clear a non one of iris murdoch's key ideas is that human beings are crucially compromised though she consistently shies away from explicitly religious language she seems to me anyway fairly at home with a notion like original sin for her this consists in our tendency to draw all of reality into and under the aegis of the ego which functions a bit like a black hole that draws everything into itself not even light can escape good art as well as the beauty that appears in nature i'm quoting again from murdoch is something preeminently outside us and resistant to our consciousness we surrender ourselves to its authority with a love which is unpossessive and unselfish close quote one is reminded here of james joyce's distinction between true art and all forms of pornography the latter always operating utterly in the orbit of subjective sensual desire the truly beautiful doesn't submit to the authority of our subjectivity rather it rearranges and redefines our subjectivity murdoch knows that plato took the beauty and rigor of mathematics as another example of this phenomenon but she herself identifies the learning of a foreign language as an instance of it closer to her own sensibility i'm quoting again from iris murdoch if i'm learning for instance russian i'm confronted by an authoritative structure which commands my respect love of russian leads me away from myself towards something alien to me something which my consciousness cannot take over swallow up deny or make unreal close quote you might want a foreign language to correspond to your expectations and be subjectively satisfying to you but the language does not care and will not yield i've been studying spanish a lot since i've been out in california and those who wrestle english speakers wrestling with spanish know the distinction between ser and estar the two forms of the verb to be which to us english speakers is deeply annoying because it runs all through the language it affects almost every dimension of it and it's unnecessary as far as we're concerned and it's a constant source of frustration well occasionally i'll say to my spanish tutor it's sarah and a star and she looks at me and says spanish doesn't care but that's iris murdoch's point spanish doesn't care it doesn't i'm trying to make it subjectively satisfying if i were the king of spain i'd get rid of the sarah starr distinction i'd say let's make it one or the other but spanish doesn't care see it knocks me off my pedestal forces me to come to terms with it now remember iris murdoch is very much a platonist murdoch interprets plato's cave that place of flickering images insubstantial not the real world as the ego where we don't see things as they are or in all their depth but only in the measure that they can be useful to us or pleasing or interesting to us once again even having escaped that narrow place we feel a constant tug backward like the israelites longing for the flesh pots of egypt here's again murdoch the difficulty is to keep the attention fixed upon the real situation and to prevent it from returning surreptitiously to the self with consolations of self-pity resentment fantasy and despair close quote the master concept that presides over this entire manner of thinking is what murdoch in at least quasi-platonic way calls the good it is for her a kind of heuristic device a limit idea an ideal toward which we strive and under whose influence we move in our journey out of the narrowness of the ego again i'm quoting your goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself to see and to respond to the real world in light of a virtuous consciousness hang on to that little phrase as we get to this idea of the true what causes my consciousness to overcome a vicious tendency to draw reality into itself this of course is why plato compared the form of the good to the sun which is to say to the source of light which itself is practically impossible to see murder quotes the master himself this is plato it the good is that which every soul pursues and for the sake of which it does all that it does with some intuition of its nature and yet at the same time baffled close quote it's marvelous we see here a fundamentally two-step process of escaping from the buffer itself by a first move we have simply to break free of the extraordinary gravitational pull of the ego so breakthroughs conversions turnings around rearrangements are the order of the day here notice everybody how often poems and novels and short stories turn on these moments when everything gets shifted around so one might think here is still another mid 20th century figure not entirely unlike iris murdoch in temperament namely the great novelist flannery o'connor in o'connor's stories time and again people who are stuck in the narrow space of their own self-regard are violently invaded by what the author recognizes as a divine grace mrs turpin and the story revelation is the best example but there are many more in her fiction and in point of fact o'connor's writing illumines the second step beyond the shaking and shattering of the ego namely the introduction to the real all the way to the experience of the fully real the utterly valuable that we call god and i'll be trying to trace this now as i as i go thomas aquinas's fourth argument for god's existence commonly recognized as the most platonic of his demonstrations moves very much within this ambit thomas begins with the acknowledgement possible only for a decentered self that there's a world of values hierarchically arranged we say that some things are more or less good noble just and beautiful it's crucially important to see that thomas is not speaking of any and all kinds of discernment and discrimination higher lower dirtier redder etc rather he's speaking of qualities that are in themselves unlimited since they are coincident with being as such in regard to these it is indeed correct to say that we gauge variations in intensity and degree in reference to something that's recognized as unconditioned hence equine is correctly intuitive that we make these judgments with an at least implicit knowledge of what is highest noblest best and hence he says highest in being gone now it's not my concern in this presentation to analyze that argument any further or answer classic objections to it it's really to indicate the trajectory i'll be following throughout breaking out of the buffered self and pushing toward a transcendent horizon okay that's the introduction no i'm only kidding that is the first part of the paper so what i'm going to do now is i'll look at the true the good and the beautiful the three transcendentals as three strategies for doing this breaking of the buffer itself i'll do the truth with you tonight which should bring me right about to the end then we'll do the good and the beautiful tomorrow so don't worry just not just a few more pages so i want to begin with this transcendental property that the tradition calls the truth i'll argue that on the classical reading of things authentic truth breaks through the buffered self and leads ultimately to a consideration of the source of all truth but in order to grasp this we have to notice a sharp contrast between the traditional understandings of truth and the typically postmodern sense of truth as information the latter fosters the buffering of the self while the former undermines it now i don't know anyone in the west today who's not massively impressed by the availability of information through our quasi-miraculous technology i mean it's no exaggeration everyone in the developed world now carries in a device in his or her pocket a means of accessing anything we want to know from the winner of the 1939 world series to the structure of the genome in a matter of moments these data appear on a screen before us that we have in numberless ways benefited from this access is not subject to doubt however i want to draw a sharp distinction between bits of information and what the classical authors and our tradition mean by truth a first mark of information is that it's eminently detachable from the event or thing or experience that generated it information is always about something in the words of dc schindler quote it indicates relation or reference from a distance information is knowledge about something as distinct from direct acquaintance close quote and from this follows a second principal mark of information namely its transferability what a delight we take in sending and receiving information on our various devices precisely because these data are detachable they are transportable even across enormous distances to others who have like us had no original contact with the reality which generated the data in the first place now contrast that to the authentic knowledge which as the bible suggests in his peculiar usage carries a sense of real intimacy so mary in luke 1 34 i do not know a man compare gathering information indeed all of it correct about the 1939 world series and actually attending a world series game set side by side a wikipedia article about a famous person and sitting down with that person for a dinner conversation though the internet summary could be shared with millions of people in a very real sense the conversation can be shared only between the two of you another crucial point of demarcation between the two modes of knowledge is that information always remains largely under the control of the subject i can receive change manipulate and send these data anywhere they are quite literally at my fingertips now and under their domination but real knowledge of another thing or person puts the subject in a far more receptive mode the ego is not in control but rather invited into openness and responsiveness to the other having made this crucial contrast we're now in a position better to understand what pre-modern thinkers meant when they spoke of knowledge and truth as a transcendental property of being with typical scholastic understatement thomas aquinas defines truth as the adequacio intellectus at ray i'm going to translate that as the adjusting of mind and thing in most english renderings this lapidary definition is translated as the correspondence of the mind to reality but this can give the wrong impression that truth consists in forming a mental picture that adequately imitates or represents what exists out in the world so the truth exists primarily or exclusively in here in the mind but this is to miss so much of the flavor and texture of what the definition is meant to convey if we take adequatio to mean something like adjusting or equalizing we see there's a truth already existing in things that makes truth in the mind possible thomas means that the intelligible form of a person thing or state of affairs is the objective truth that calls out to an inquiring mind an intelligibility seeking correspondence with an intelligence another way is to speak of intelligibility is to speak simply a form which according to aquinas and the scholastics gives being to a thing we ought to think of form as one detachable aspect of an object but rather as the englobing intelligibility that orders all the elements that make up a thing form corresponds to the question what is that and this is why the medievals took it to be the bearer of essay or the bearer of to be as such it always represents something more than simply the sum total of its parts simply all the data that could be reasonably assembled regarding its manner of existing it is both a kind of whole and something utterly interior elusive to the observing and calculating intellect in regard to living things this form aristotle termed soul it's extremely instructive to note aquinas's characterization of the relationship between body and soul and human beings the soul he says is in the body not as contained by it but rather as containing it that's a complete difference from a cartesian typically modern understanding of the soul is in here or the mind is in the body somewhere for thomas it's it's containing the body not contained by it the mind engages in intellection from the latin term suggestive of reading into into a slash array accordingly the adequacio involved in truth is the intimate organic coming together of intelligence and intelligibility it is at the risk of sounding overly dramatic the ecstatic act by which subjectivity overcomes itself finding itself in the other in aquinas's luminous account intelligence and intelligibility bring each other to act in his latin intellectus enactus intelligibility in octu that means that knowing in act is the intelligible in act each one as it were illuminating the other it should be clear that we're a world removed from anything like the cool observer forming an interior image of the worldly object in the words of fergus carr a crisis epistemology is not of the subjective observer type but rather the objective participant variety the subjective observer kind of mind on display in descartes res kojitans thinking thing taking the measure of res extense extended things came to full expression in the highly analytical data collecting style of enlightenment era scientists newton may be the best example and over and against this newtonianism gertha famously rebelled favoring a far more contemplative type of rationality the subject entering sympathetically into the rhythms and patterns of what it's thought to know hence the scientist in the girthian mode would not rip the plant from the ground and dissect it but would rather move non-invasively into the space of the living organism drawing it he was quite an artist following its movements allowing it to ask and answer its own questions once again an attitude of love breaking free of the preoccupations of the ego is a prerequisite for this kind of adequacio now having come to a clearer sense of the meaning of truth in the classical tradition let's take the next step because we are embodied creatures endowed with senses our first contact with the outside world the world outside the self comes through the vivid experience of touch sound taste and vision but the mind relentlessly pushes us beyond this merely animal level of perception spurred on by what aquinas terms the intellectus adjens the agent or acting intellect this acting intelligence keeps asking in regard to what's perceived what is that quid sit what might that be in the western philosophical tradition it's socrates who's generally regarded as the first one consistently and courageously to ask this kind of question thus the platonic dialogues are typically constructed around questions such as what is justice what is piety what is love etc what's perhaps too often overlooked is that this type of question is not merely the fruit of intellectual curiosity but also of a real transcendence of the immediate needs and concerns of the ego the one who poses such an inquiry is not interested in the effect that the idea or object under consideration might have on him or the benefit that might accrue to him upon understanding it more fully he's been drawn out of this self-preoccupation and into a new spiritual space he's not after the usefulness of the matter under consideration but only its intelligibility intellectus and octu eston telegibili in octo the the intelligence is actualized by the intelligibility another way to express this is to say that the inquirer has moved from the visible to the invisible now i hesitate somewhat to use this language for it gives the impression that there are two types of realities some relatively solid others relatively ghostly that exist side by side what i mean by the invisible here is another dimension of reality beyond the merely sensible but at the same time deeply implicated in it in point of fact aristotle's account of the rapport between form and matter is more adequate here than plato's but when someone in the socratic manner asked the question what is that he has indeed left the cave behind and left his own self-preoccupation behind and fallen in love with being in a more intense manner if we follow the platonic prompt we see that the first step upon exiting the cave is the confrontation with shadows and images in the outside world these correspond in plato's epistemology to mathematical objects and relationships which are quite rightly appreciated as invisible one of my predecessors is meyer lecturer is david tracy now emeritus professor at the university of chicago in a recently published essay entitled the ultimate invisible tracy draws our attention precisely to this platonic construal of the mathematical here's his quote aside from religions the major form of invisibility in our time is that provided by mathematics and the mathematization of modern science nurtured in the early modern period by galileo close quote tracy observes that the classical definition of a circle a locus of coplanar points equidistant from its center is easy enough to memorize but absolutely impossible to imagine or concretize in fact a picture of a wheel might suggest to the beginner in geometry the notion of circularity but it could never adequately represent it and hence could never i'm quoting here suffice to answer the question why is the circle round in point of fact we could never answer such a question by remaining in the field of the merely visible we can answer the question but only by moving into a realm of intelligent supposing a realm that can neither be seen nor imagined it can only be supposed and understood the inquiry mind knows these invisibilities by entering into intimate communion with them in their distinctive arena of existence as suggested above the modern and now postmodern sciences are deeply indebted to mathematics indeed unthinkable apart from it here's tracy again i'm quoting since galileo descartes newton leibniz and others modern science has employed three essential elements dispassionate empirical observations mathematical conceptual formulations of its hypotheses and theories and experimental testing of all its theories close quote if we focus on that second indispensable step in the scientific method we see that the very disciplines that in the minds of many today most root us in the empirical order in point effect lift us beyond to the invisible order therefore the search for intelligibility continues to lead us out of the cave and into more intense expressions of being but the journey comes to his conclusion only when to follow the platonic master metaphor we gaze up to the sun the light that finally illumines anything that we perceive or know only when we see the one who gives intelligibility and hence who gives being the one who in plato's language lies therefore beyond the beings do we come to rest but why should we suspect there is such a giver at all david tracy comments that the science has come to the end of their capacity when they confront the puzzling limit question which they on their own terms could never possibly address namely why the world should be intelligible at all precisely because they rest inevitably on this very assumption the scientists themselves could never answer this query albert einstein himself grasped the nettle of this when he commented quote the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it's comprehensible close quote as josef rossinger argued in his indispensable introduction to christianity the only finely credible answer is that there is a governing intelligence that has imbued the universe in every detail with intelligibility in point of fact this intuition rottinger contends is evident in our term recognition when we recognize a truth we are re-cognizing it thinking again what has already antecedently been thought and once we grasp this notion we come to the spiritual heart of thomas aquinas epistemology when the human knower finds adequacio with the form of the thing to be known when he affects and short a real union with that intelligibility he's attained at the same time and encode but deeply real oneness with the divine agent who has through a series of secondary causes imbued that object with form in the first place even when a person is in intellectual contact with an inanimate thing he's therefore ultimately in contact with the supreme person whose intelligence grounds the intelligibility he has grasped and thus we can see the truth of thomas's claim in the famous day veritate 22 that in every concrete act of knowing god is implicitly co-known if even the simplest act of real knowledge and not just gathering information if even the simplest act of real knowledge involves self-transcendence we see now that this is only an invitation to the radical loss of self which is involved in coming to know the intelligence behind the intelligibility and with that i'm bringing the first half of my talk to a close without an elegant conclusion but thank you for listening [Applause] thanks for those are coming tomorrow so we'll look at the good and the beautiful as as all the next strategies for breaking through the buffer itself i think we have some q a time i think you have to come forward if you folks have a question i can't really see too well yeah just come forward to the microphone to the mic please thank you so much for your great talk let me briefly introduce myself i am physicist senior scientist from fermi national laboratory over not far from here oh good i'm also a philosopher in my spare time and i'm a author and host of science and religion program weekly program in russian chicago radio okay so uh i i'm listening to you for many years already and i'm taking so much from you and i'm impressed by your mission which you which you took with your word on fire and but actually i'm again impressed very much by you tonight talk uh and your attention to the importance uh of the connection of science and especially platonic part of science physics and religion which has long-term roots which very few scientists actually understand and appreciate i know my colleagues and we all need to explain this that's what i am trying to do in my philosophy talks and in the radio and there is a very special part of this argumentation of the proofs i would say of god's existence which follows from contemporary science not from the uh general russia analogy but from the success of say last hundred years of science and this means what you what you mentioned uh from albert einstein the most incomprehensible things in the world and there is also a beautiful article of eugene wigner uh which which is unreasonable about unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in natural science and there is a pythagorean argument of god existence which i myself developed developing and publishing and talking about this and i i presented in in the international society of neoplatonic studies where i led a session about this and presented my platonic pisagorian argument of god existence and actually i received an award from a foundational question institute which which is predominantly atheistic society and i think my essay on the pythagorean argument of god's existence is only openly theistic as savage received an award from the foundational questions and i'd like to present you my papers and i would appreciate on that i would appreciate any any your response thank you so much oh good just a just a couple remarks uh as you know for young people the supposed conflict between religion and science is is often the number one reason they give for disaffiliation and so this is something i think we need to address at all levels of the church's life and what you're pointing to is is yes something that i feel strongly about is at the heart of the sciences is something like this mystical intuition of the intelligibility of being to put it in scholastic terminology but as einstein himself saw you can't get any science off the ground unless you're assuming something like this objective intelligibility and what i'm pointing to here is that lovely ecstatic moment when the knower realizes that now the next question then where's that intelligibility come from why would why would the universe be in every nook and cranny marked by intelligibility so there's that double thing of first breaking the the grip of the kind of information gathering self to break out of that into a really contemplative vision and then how that leads you by a next step to god so that's kind of the heart of this section of the paper please please hello bishop aaron hi my name is uh michael frankiewicz i am a pt-1 seminarian for the diocese of chicago oh good it's wonderful to have you here tonight thank you very much for this first talk on truth and i look forward to talk some beauty and goodness tomorrow my question is one of policy and application um quite clearly there's potentially some application of what you've talked about with truth bringing oneself to god uh and i wonder how can we change our catholic schooling systems uh to perhaps be more in line this is this simply just changing of motto and a little bit of style or should we really fundamentally training teachers in a different way no i appreciate that very much and and i've been doing a lot of that practical work this is more kind of stepping back theoretically but you're right on it i think we have to resist the temptation to um technologize all of our knowledge the number of kids now that are staying away from liberal arts programs from the humanities and opting again and again for in the model i'm using here more an information gathering type of knowing again nothing wrong with that in itself but if that's the predominant mode of knowing i'm not going to break out of this this grip of the ego because i'm still very much in control of that kind of data the great value of the liberal arts precisely because they're useless in a practical way that's the whole point because no but i mean that's it aristotle said the highest things in life are the useless things right because they're not sought for any other purpose if something's useful it means i'm i'm using it for something else but when you finally reach that something else then you found the useless part of life and that's where the humanities come in and philosophy and religion in the measure that those are dying and they are sadly in our academic settings um we're we're really suffering and so i think the catholic schools ought to be leading the way in emphasizing the liberal arts but you know i fight this again and again out in in california is these the catholic school boards and all that want to keep pushing no stem stem stem right it's all science technology engineering math i mean great great but see the reason i was quoting david tracy there was to say if you really keep looking deeply at engineering and the sciences you're going to find the mathematics which in fact is a useless form of knowing it is in fact this deeper contemplative way of knowing so that's what i would say is that we need to fight against the hegemony of the kind of stem mentality the techno technologization of knowledge and move into this contemplative mode we used to be great at teaching that i think we were great avatars of the of the liberal arts uh and i think we should resist the temptation to to give that up thank you good thank you please hi bishop aaron hi um so i'm the director of campus ministry at the newman center at the university of illinois in chicago oh good and so working in campus ministry i'm finding and our staff's finding more and more that college students especially those falling into the nuns category like you were sharing tonight are confused and distinguishing between real truth or that which is revealed to us by god and has been passed down through scripture and tradition versus false truth or that which is influenced and driven by secular influences and so my question tonight is how can we better accompany young people in discovering that real truth and rejecting the false truth that is often fed to them by the secular world yeah well there are disciplines around that that's the whole point of let's say a humanistic and i would say ultimately a catholic education is to teach people the disciplines of how to get out of the cave how to break free of a merely superficial vision of things how to break free especially of the propaganda or plato would have called it the sophistry right which is kind of just using knowledge cynically to attain some self-interested end well we have to break free of that and a lot of the platonic dialogues i think are just that they're a set of instructions in how to break free of a merely sophistical way of knowing into authentic knowledge and i again i'd suggest poetry the liberal arts uh philosophy our great religion ultimately are the best ways to do that um we're we're truth-obsessed people we catholics because you know the word became flesh and his name is the truth and so we we love the truth wherever can be found and we want the strategies to get us beyond merely sort of self-interested um sophistry so you know that's the task that's the task that you have and people involved in catholic education thank you for that please good evening my name is luis gutierrez i guess i'm just the regular guy yeah father four under eight um first of all thank you for the word on fire bible it certainly has inspired our small group community you know i i we recently started acts and i read something you wrote that's kind of been on my heart particularly the meaning of the word satanas and diabolos as the accuser and and and divider and and so my question is more particularly under the lens of social media um you know you see a lot of kind of christians battling each other and my question is how can we as christians sort of break through the buffered self in the medium that allows us to dehumanize each other particularly and my question's more guided towards my kids um you know now myself being 44 i sort of see myself aging out where i i don't even know what they're going to be dealing with so that's what my my question is more for just as a dad you know how do you see you know this battle that sometimes you don't you can't even fight how do we raise kids that can break through the buffer itself yeah it's a good question i use the social media a lot in my work so i i believe in it i think it can be used for the good and and the church would be derelict if we didn't use it so let me say all that having said that i'm very down on social media for the very reason you're saying because and i'll tomorrow i'll talk about the good so tonight was about the epistemological side of it how to break through free of a merely kind of technologized way of knowing but there's that whole ethical side you know what does it mean really to love someone else means to break free of the black hole of the ego right what you see sadly and so much and and i i'm ashamed to say it in much of catholic social media is just that the meanness and the vituperation and the us against them and as you say correctly the diabolic and the satanic meaning the dividing and the accusing i mean if if a non-catholic goes on a catholic site to be edified or what are these catholics all about and they read the comment boxes god help us um no so it's a serious problem and i think just as it contributes at the epistemic level to a problem as like data gathering as opposed to real knowledge in the same way and i'll say more about it tomorrow you know i have all these friends on social media and i like them well i mean that stuff means next to nothing if it's backed up by you know violence and hatred and verbal abuse and gosh our young people that breaks my heart when i think of like teenagers today thank god i didn't grow up with the social media but they are growing up with it and it's not a healthy space so i think we've got to be very wary of it and very careful as parents and as teachers get kids reading more books give them plato and get off of them you know and i i i hope i'm saying that not just as an old curmudgeon there's there's something that's so important about the contemplative element to take a book that you hold in your hands and you have to take time to read all this screen stuff and room and just do a text and put up a like and unlike and that's deeply problematic i think and uh give them more books to read and and the the contemplative patience required to not just reading but how about to listen to to beethoven or to read dante's divine comedy or really look at the sistine chapel ceiling i do worry that our our kids are going to be less and less capable of that and that means less capable of the contemplative move than i'm describing here that breaks free of the of the buffer itself so that's i think right on what i'm talking about thank you please you're welcome please thank you bishop uh for coming my name is colin kaiser i am a second pre-theology seminary from the diocese of wichita and my question is um with uh um many of the youth today because of social media uh the op the opposite effect that it should have has on them they feel very isolated they fall into great depression um how would what advice would you give to me and my other brothers as future priests uh how to reach to them and show them the beauty of the faith is it more through the rational approach um through the teaching of the fathers or show them the beauty and richness of our spiritual tradition obviously not to the exclusivity of one over the other but which one has the primacy all of the above obviously but go back to that iris murder quote that's one that stays in my mind the most so she's imagining someone who's depressed as indeed a lot of younger people are today there's been a lot of studies of that that show the correlation between screen time and depression and it should be obvious the more screen time the more depression so that's been established but think of murdoc's thing here's someone anxious depressed and they suddenly see this gorgeous little falcon outside the window and they're so absorbed in it that now it's all falcon and then the way it ends that lovely quote that when they come back to their problems which they will somehow they seem less pressing and less severe that's what the good does the true the beautiful they break in and there's plenty of connor they're thinking i'm quoting james joyce a couple times joyce and i'll say more about him tomorrow after he has this great experience of seeing the woman off the strand in dublin my job now will be reporting epiphanies joyce says now he's you know joyce had a love-hate relationship with the church but he was it was a priestly calling right to he had an epiphany of the beautiful that broke through because the character you remember it's the stephen daedalus and the portrait of the artist is brooding and he's depressed and he's anxious of what my life what's my life all about and then suddenly sees this beautiful woman off the the shore and it it so changed him that at the end of it he says oh heavenly god see that's exactly the platonic thing but you need the good or the beautiful or the true to break through the carapace of the buffered self and what's happening today is our social media is contributing it seems to me to that buffering and so part of our job that's why i say we're maybe the privileged uh agent of this to bring forward this tradition and and teach people how to take these things in to let them impact them you know and that's why i use that word contemplative again there's a contemplative quality to the great tradition that is i'm afraid is going to get lost that was i quoted girtha over and against newton that's what gerta didn't like about newton he thought like this bright light get the animal put it on a table cut it up open it up analyze under the bright light and i'm going to get a lot of data even very useful data but but gertha said you'll never understand the animal you'll never understand that living organism that way now i'm oversimplifying by making that harsh distinction but you see the point you know and so the type of knowledge is very techne-oriented as opposed to contemplative we should be masters of that contemplative way of knowing and a lot of preaching and teaching and liturgy is about that look at the liturgy by the way the most useless thing we do is the liturgy because it's the highest thing we do right what's the point of the liturgy well there's no point it it's its own point the liturgy is is it right and so all those things are ways that we can break through the buffer itself thank you for that go ahead bishop baron uh thank you for being here tonight my name is john phillips i'm a senior in high school at loyola academy oh good chicago um i obviously very very much enjoyed your talk um you know but when i'm encountering you know friends classmates um it seemed to be a very subjective mindset yeah and i can't really come at them with you know well you see there's the intelligible and the intelligent you know i can't it's just not gonna work um so my question i guess is how can i you know in a practical way accompany my my friends my classmates when a lot of all i hear is well this is my opinion i know well see there's a quick little move you could do there which is up and down the philosophical tradition so when someone says i'm a complete subjectivist it's all just a matter of my private feeling you got your private feelings the question is well is that just a subjective opinion you have then well yeah well then they've undermined themselves that you can't consistently maintain a complete subjectivism they have to hold to something both at the epistemic and the moral level that's objective otherwise they wouldn't be able to make their argument right everything's subjective well is that objectively true everything's subjective do you have strong moral feelings about that the answer to both is obviously yes therefore they've undermined their own position so that's the first thing but here's the second thing so you're a senior right when my my nephew is now out of mit he went to mit brilliant kid and when he arrived at mit i said to him did you feel uh prepared for day one at mit and he said yeah well for kudos to his high school first of all who in math and science brought him to the point where he was ready day one to be outstanding student at the highest stem school in the world right so that's my way of answering your thing about intelligence intelligibility why when it comes to the humanities do we think we have to dumb everything down my nephew when he was your age was taking in the highest level of scientific uh terminology and conceptuality so why wouldn't we talk to high school seniors about gerta and newton and thomas aquinas and epistemology and why not but see sometimes we see catholics we did it to ourselves that's i think one of the great tragedies after the council the communists didn't come in and make us do this we dumb down our own religion and it's been a pastoral disaster and i don't hesitate now to say that in any way we've had two or maybe three generations that have suffered from a dumbed-down catholicism my nephew's high school didn't dumb down his stem education one little bit they gave him high high high mit level so why don't we do that in philosophy and religion and the arts and the humanities um anyway so that's my answer to your first uh the first question yeah thank you but thank you for that [Applause] hi my name is reuben i'm sorry but to start i'm in currently an rcia part of my growth in faith and learning about the faith has been largely surrounding morality i also happen to be an engineer i work at a defense contractor surrounded by other christians and catholics and i've been questioning more and more especially since the recent events in eastern europe where how can we morally or ethically work in industries that rely on war that profit off of events like this how can we as christians and catholics morally work in these sorts of industries yeah it's a fair and a classical question i'd have my colleagues in moral theology answer it but we talk about different forms of cooperation with evil you know remote and and uh you know formal and material et cetera so you know the quick answer is uh sometimes one may cooperate with what's seen as an evil if the cooperation is distant enough and removed enough from your own volition um so it's a fair question and there's no way to answer it with with complete you know objectivity it depends on the circumstances um is there such a thing as a just war yes as our great tradition and so you know cooperating with let's say people that produce weapons is that necessarily bad no but we have to look at it in the in each particular situation and gauge it in terms of the level of our cooperation with evil so that's a general way to respond to a complex question you know please um please thank you your excellency for that speech i'm looking forward to tomorrow and maybe i'm anticipating a bit of what's to come tomorrow by stepping into potentially a very loaded subject in the church right now um as we watch factions uh tear apart or not tear apart that's maybe a bit too aggressive um but uh stick to their uh preferences to the extent that uh they want their liturgy one way and another person wants their liturgy another way and with like the recent modiproprio inflaming once again the preferences that people have about how they want to engage in the liturgy one of the things that comes to mind with this talk um particularly as um i'm observing um my life in my parish or the parish i belong to it's not mine um and i guess i i wonder when we engage with truth and beauty and goodness um now and then we look at what's happening in the church amongst the laity i'm sure there's people in the clergy that are engaging this as well um in the sense of engaging that in a perhaps very self-seeking way that they want to be affirmed and their preference is um how can we are we not one are we not called to a deeper engagement with truth beauty and goodness in a way that's challenging to our preferences in a way that pulls us further down the road towards beauty like the highest beauty the highest good and the highest truth um even if that makes us uncomfortable or even if we don't fully understand that yeah it's a good question it's got a number of facets to it i would go with the old um ignatian adage of century kumiklasia you know to to feel to sense with the church and so there's always been variety in the life of the church that's from the beginning different styles of theology different styles of liturgy different spiritual schools different monastic expressions and great you know that's fine that's fine but then if it reaches a point where it becomes conflictual or a particular expression becomes problematic from the standpoint of ethics or orthodoxy we have to feel with the church and the church makes certain um judgments in regards to certain expressions you know so i would just recommend that that you feel with the church and that enables you to get beyond maybe your own subjective preferences which are fine as far as they go but if they become a source of conflict we have to feel with the church and accept the discipline of the church i would say um stick with the councils and the people teachings and you know i think we'll be good good evening bishop aaron marlon pacheco coordinator of religious education uh and i think the biggest catholic parish in volume in the archdiocese of chicago i'm an immigrant myself coming from central america and i think i found that faith in latin america you know it's something that has come with it of catholics being a coordinator of relief is challenge that i found myself it's a biggest challenge that i found myself is trying to uh see that there's a huge break between the tradition that at least uh practice back in our homeland right and also with those that are being born in this culture that are being immersed in everything that you have described you know uh and it is um i find it really challenging to be able to connect both of the both of those realities you know what would be uh an advice that you can give us for those that are in the field right now especially working uh with those realities that you have a mother and a father that i really devoted coming to church practicing the faith and also having a child that obviously it's kind of like that's completely nonsense you know yeah thank you there are a lot of hispanics of course in my part of the world now in santa barbara and the two counties that i have um supervision over and uh they're wonderful people lovely people and i always say don't let your kids and grandkids become americanized so quickly that's what's happening is a lot of the immigrants come from mexico and from you know south america and they come with this vibrant faith and and they know how to practice their faith and to express it publicly and then the american thing though creeps in very quickly by which i mean privatize religion and then eventually no religion seem watch that by the way when people say oh you know religion's a private matter it's not a that's that's a very short step from that to no religion and we see it all the time right so i can watch with the hispanics the you know the abuela has the faith very vividly and then the her son maybe has this privatized thing but then the grandson it's gone so i always tell hispanics resist that resist this americanization and let us be challenged by your vibrant faith you know in the years i was coming of age there was a lot of talk about how to reach out to hispanics forget that how about how get the hispanics to reach out to us no i'm serious [Applause] no because i i don't mean that to in some rabble-rousing way i think it's just true that the the hispanic people bring so much of a vibrant catholicism and they're coming out of a cultural matrix that's different that's much more naturally catholic than ours ours is a very protestantized cultural matrix which has now become secularized so i i say you know tell tell your hispanic colleagues reemphasize your own cultural heritage and don't be ashamed don't try to fit into the american thing try to evangelize america from the inside you know yeah you're welcome hi bishop baron my name is frank klepich first of all i wanted to thank you for your sunday sermons my wife and i really enjoy them and look forward to them good thank you just a quick question on the buffer itself 20 years ago i had the opportunity to spend the weekend in a conference with father tom keating and he talked about centering prayer and contemplative prayer yeah and what he started out with on a it was a friday night was the fall self would i be correct in comparing the false self and the buffered self yeah it's all from merton of course the true self false self and behind merton is the whole spiritual tradition and you know merton uh was asked to define contemplative prayer and he said it's finding the place in you where you are here and now being created by god which is a marvelous because it's right out of thomas aquinas you know the creation is not a distant act in the past but it's happening now aquinas says well to pray is to find that place in me where i'm here and now being created by god we'll see how that's a radical de-centering move so i live my life think of iris murdoc's anxious person you know it's all my ego and i'm being threatened and i'm not getting what i want and they're against me and then you see this beautiful bird and it decenters you it knocks you off your own perch you know but then the ultimate move be beyond that bird is the creator of that bird who's here and now creating you and so that's centering prayer at its best i identified that some of the students might remember as the first step in the spiritual life is find the center right and so yeah i would say that the false self in our spiritual tradition is is related to the buffered self certainly yeah so how do you break through now again visit the aesthetic tradition so many of the great writers and artists and poets they're they're naming that moment of breakthrough um even like i'll quote bob dylan my musical hero tomorrow but when you ain't got nothing you got nothing to lose that's not just a clever little line that's that's a very very deep spiritual insight that's a breakthrough moment and that song is all about someone that you know is full of ego and full of the world and so on and then she's knocked down but that breaks something open there's now an ecstatic possibility it's like james joyce and the and the girl off the strand in dublin and just go through work of art after work of art they're often about this moment you know so yeah false self buffered self the the self absorption what breaks through that that's the work of great spiritual masters and writers and so on good thank you for that this is the last question okay sure please um in post-world war ii american history i see the buffering that you talk about in three main phases um and in the 50s and 70s what we had is a disney vacation of the culture um in the 80s sorry in the 80s and 90s we this thing's going to work mass consumerism so on and so forth now we have the uh simulcrub the facebook call of duty world of warcraft abstracted reality that we are all complaining about rightly what do you think the next step the enemy's going to do is yeah that's a good question i don't know that's it's a fair way to put it because there's been different forms of it and see that the spiritual masters all talk about that is the way that if i can use this language the way the dark powers once they're thwarted one way they'll find another it's like a like a virus you know it's blocked here but then it mutates and so there is that in this spiritual order i think and and all three of these that epistemically in terms of truth that's our radical subjectivism uh look how beauty is subjectivized you know it's just my private you know opinion how the good is subjectivity look at talk to anyone under the age of 25 today and it's my good and don't tell me what to do and you got your good and let's just tolerate each other but those are all strategies of the false self aren't they they're all strategies of the buffer itself so those are the three great transcendentals what's the next move i don't know i'd have to be a prophet to answer that but i think it's a good instinct behind that question it'll be something and see that's why the church though we should get over this and it's a post conciliar thing this coming had in hand to the culture oh please take us seriously oh please listen to us forget that i mean we paul vi said we're the we're the experts in humanity meaning we got 2 000 years of this rich tradition about what goes wrong with the human soul what saves it what you know so we don't go hand in hand to the culture we should go out with a great vibrant confidence you know to it but yeah it'll find some new way to express the fallen self but you know we've probably seen some version of it before good listen thanks everybody [Applause] i hope to see some of you anyway tomorrow there's a you know the gifford lecture one years ago alfred north whitehead the great one of the greatest philosophers but extremely dense writer he gave the first gifford lecture and it was a big crowd the audrey was filled the second lecture there were like four people there so i'll have to see tomorrow if anyone comes back for part two god bless you all thanks [Applause] you

Channel: Mundelein Seminary

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Length: 96min 21sec (5781 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 10 2022