The Priest as Teacher
August 21st, 2008 by Fr. Dominic Legge, O.P.
Dominican friars have long been known not only as preachers, but also as friars who preach by teaching — an important dimension of the charism of the Order of Preachers. From the beginnings of the Order, St. Dominic wanted his friars to study in order better to preach the truth of the Gospel, and he sent them to the first universities. Once there, the friars soon began to receive many new vocations from the ranks of both the students and professors. It was not long before the Dominicans held chairs at the university — one need only think of St. Albert the Great or St. Thomas Aquinas, two of the most famous Dominican teachers.
That teaching mission continues today. In our province, we have two principal institutions of higher learning: Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island, and the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception (the Dominican House of Studies) in Washington, D.C.
As a friar newly-assigned to teach theology at Providence College, my days are filled with the work of preparing my syllabi and lectures. Today, as I readied a lecture for a course on the Development of Western Civilization, I came across an insightful commentary on the priestly vocation to teach, penned by the well-known scripture scholar, Fr. Raymond Brown. Fr. Brown writes:
Another function of the levitical priest mentioned in Deut 33:10 is teaching: “They shall teach Jacob your ordinances, and Israel your Law.” The Torah or Law of God was in the hands of the priest to communicate to men (Jer 18:18; Mal 2:6). . . . Judaism today has not lost the sense of the sacred character of the teaching function; the honorific title of the Jewish religious leader is “Rabbi,” which is the same title of “Teacher” given by the disciples to Jesus in John 1:38. Recently in a conversation with a well-known rabbi, I mentioned that some of the Catholic religious orders whose primary work was teaching were undergoing a vocation crisis, because the young aspirants were questioning whether teaching was a proper full-time task for a priest. The rabbi literally became white and exclaimed, “Have you Christians lost to such an extent your roots in Judaism? Have you forgotten that a man who teaches is performing one of the most sacred of all functions, one that brings him close to God Himself?” I could but hear in his words a distant echo of that unknown prophet whose book is the last in the collection of the prophets, a prophet who castigated priests because they had lost the vision of their vocation: “Teaching is to be sought from the mouth of the priest, for he is the messenger of the Lord of Hosts; but you have turned away from that course” (Mal 2:7-8).
Happily, we have more and more men who come to us desiring to teach. May the Lord grant us many new vocations for the new millennium, new teachers of the wisdom of Christ, ever ancient and ever new!
