[Nota bene:  There was never a time when thomistic moral theology was not taught at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C..  -- Fr. Bill Garrott, OP]

By Antonio Gaspari

ROME, DEC. 3, 2008 (Zenit.org).- Moral theology based on St. Thomas Aquinas is among one of theology’s most popular branches today, says a Vatican official, but this popularity has come about only after decades of disdain.

Archbishop Jean Louis Bruguès, secretary of the Congregation for Catholic Education, spoke about his journey with moral theology when he delivered an address at a conference last Friday in Rome, which marked the 30th anniversary of the St. Thomas Aquinas International Society.

Archbishop Bruguès contended that “after May of ‘68, moral theology, at least in France, fell into profound neglect.”
“During two years, the seminarians of Toulouse received no classes on this subject, considered disagreeable and boring, as no one was found who was willing to teach them,” he said.  It fell to then Father Bruguès, a young priest with a doctorate in morality, to take up these courses.

The prelate recalled that his spiritual assistant, Father Michel Labourdette, tried to encourage him with these words: “You are concerned with a subject that today is disparaged, but have patience: The day will come when it will be envied by others.”

Indeed, Archbishop Bruguès noted, by the beginning of the 80s, many issues referring to ecology and the development of medical techniques began to be at the center of attention of bioethics.

“So, from one day to another, ethicists — that dreadful neologism coined to avoid saying ‘moralist,’ as the word ‘morality’ still caused fear — were in demand everywhere,” he said. “My professor had understood [the situation] well. Moral theology was becoming the most appreciated subject, the only branch of theology that was really taken into account in a secularized society.”

Archbishop Bruguès pointed out that in the 60s students were characterized by an essentially critical mentality.

“The very idea of making reference to the masters of Tradition stirred in them allergic reactions,” he quipped. “It was impossible even to mention the name of Thomas Aquinas: One ran the risk of having people plug their ears.”

Father Labourdette also offered advice in this regard, the Vatican official remembered, encouraging him to “always teach [Aquinas] but without mentioning his name.”

“Hence, for years I practiced so to speak an ‘amphibious Thomism,” recalled the archbishop, until “finally, one day […] they asked me for classes on the moral theology of St. Thomas: The time of ‘clandestine’ Thomism had ended.”

Archbishop Bruguès commented that “the generation of May ‘68, which described itself as critical, rejected the transmission of Christian culture and tradition. The following generation was practically deprived of any Christian culture — it knew that it didn’t know. This led to not sharing the prejudices of their predecessors; now we can start again and share the great masters.”

The prelate proposed the Catechism of the Catholic Church as the text that best reflects this change.

The “Catechism is based on a conviction that further reflection is necessary: The great institutions of St. Thomas’ morality are the best instrument of critical dialogue with modernity,” continued the secretary of the Congregation for Catholic Education. 

“The theory of virtue will stimulate a renewal of moral theology,” he affirmed, and thus “the teaching of moral theology stemming from the great institutions of Thomism, still has a luminous future before it.”

As I noted in an earlier post, Pope Benedict XVI’s September trip to France received little attention here in the States.  Again, that’s too bad, because many of the talks he delivered in Paris and Lourdes possessed a universal relevance.  Though given months ago, they continue to merit our careful study.  The Pope’s lecture at the Collège des Bernardins remains particular in this regard.  In what was billed as a “Meeting with Representatives from the World of Culture,” the Holy Father reflected for his audience on “The Origins of Western Theology and the Roots of European Culture.”  I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that this address might be justly nicknamed “Regensburg II.”

If at Regensburg Pope Benedict outlined the decline of Western thought and signaled a way toward its restoration, then in Paris he elaborated on this theme by describing the culture necessary to produce the full flowering of the Western mind.  The hellenization of the Gospel that grounds the Western tradition, the Pope explained, took deep root and bore abundant fruit for Europe–and the world–in the monastery. Behind the cloister walls, among men dedicated to prayer, study, and communal living, the Western tradition took shape and produced the institutions and disciplines we continue to support today.

Drawing heavily from Jean Leclercq’s famous study of monasticism, Pope Benedict offers a fascinating history of Western culture in which the Dominican can certainly find himself.  The whole text is worth reading, but below I include the paragraphs most relevant to Dominican life.

On study:

The longing for God, the désir de Dieu, includes amour des lettres, love of the word, exploration of all its dimensions.  Because in the biblical word God comes towards us and we towards him, we must learn to penetrate the secret of language, to understand it in its construction and in the manner of its expression.  Thus it is through the search for God that the secular sciences take on their importance, sciences which show us the path towards language.  Because the search for God required the culture of the word, it was appropriate that the monastery should have a library, pointing out pathways to the word.  It was also appropriate to have a school, in which these pathways could be opened up.  Benedict calls the monastery a dominici servitii schola.  The monastery serves eruditio, the formation and education of man – a formation whose ultimate aim is that man should learn how to serve God.  But it also includes the formation of reason – education – through which man learns to perceive, in the midst of words, the Word itself.

Yet in order to have a full vision of the culture of the word, which essentially pertains to the search for God, we must take a further step.  The Word which opens the path of that search, and is to be identified with this path, is a shared word.  True, it pierces every individual to the heart (cf. Acts 2:37).  Gregory the Great describes this a sharp stabbing pain, which tears open our sleeping soul and awakens us, making us attentive to the essential reality, to God (cf. Leclercq, p. 35).  But in the process, it also makes us attentive to one another.  The word does not lead to a purely individual path of mystical immersion, but to the pilgrim fellowship of faith.  And so this word must not only be pondered, but also correctly read.  As in the rabbinic schools, so too with the monks, reading by the individual is at the same time a corporate activity.

On the choral office:

We ourselves are brought into conversation with God by the word of God.  The God who speaks in the Bible teaches us how to speak with him ourselves.  Particularly in the book of Psalms, he gives us the words with which we can address him, with which we can bring our life, with all its highpoints and lowpoints, into conversation with him, so that life itself thereby becomes a movement towards him.  The psalms also contain frequent instructions about how they should be sung and accompanied by instruments.  For prayer that issues from the word of God, speech is not enough: music is required.  Two chants from the Christian liturgy come from biblical texts in which they are placed on the lips of angels:  the Gloria, which is sung by the angels at the birth of Jesus, and the Sanctus, which according to Isaiah 6 is the cry of the seraphim who stand directly before God.  Christian worship is therefore an invitation to sing with the angels, and thus to lead the word to its highest destination.  

[. . .]

For Benedict, the words of the Psalm: coram angelis psallam Tibi, Domine – in the presence of the angels, I will sing your praise (cf. 138:1) – are the decisive rule governing the prayer and chant of the monks.  What this expresses is the awareness that in communal prayer one is singing in the presence of the entire heavenly court, and is thereby measured according to the very highest standards:  that one is praying and singing in such a way as to harmonize with the music of the noble spirits who were considered the originators of the harmony of the cosmos, the music of the spheres.  From this perspective one can understand the seriousness of a remark by Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, who used an expression from the Platonic tradition handed down by Augustine, to pass judgement on the poor singing of monks, which for him was evidently very far from being a mishap of only minor importance.  He describes the confusion resulting from a poorly executed chant as a falling into the “zone of dissimilarity” – the regio dissimilitudinis.  Augustine had borrowed this phrase from Platonic philosophy, in order to designate his condition prior to conversion (cf. Confessions, VII, 10.16):  man, who is created in God’s likeness, falls in his godforsakenness into the “zone of dissimilarity” – into a remoteness from God, in which he no longer reflects him, and so has become dissimilar not only to God, but to himself, to what being human truly is.  Bernard is certainly putting it strongly when he uses this phrase, which indicates man’s falling away from himself, to describe bad singing by monks.  But it shows how seriously he viewed the matter.  It shows that the culture of singing is also the culture of being, and that the monks have to pray and sing in a manner commensurate with the grandeur of the word handed down to them, with its claim on true beauty.  This intrinsic requirement of speaking with God and singing of him with words he himself has given, is what gave rise to the great tradition of Western music.  It was not a form of private “creativity”, in which the individual leaves a memorial to himself and makes self-representation his essential criterion.  Rather it is about vigilantly recognizing with the “ears of the heart” the inner laws of the music of creation, the archetypes of music that the Creator built into his world and into men, and thus discovering music that is worthy of God, and at the same time truly worthy of man, music whose worthiness resounds in purity.

On theologizing in community:

Scripture requires exegesis, and it requires the context of the community in which it came to birth and in which it is lived.  This is where its unity is to be found, and here too its unifying meaning is opened up.  To put it yet another way: there are dimensions of meaning in the word and in words which only come to light within the living community of this history-generating word.  Through the growing realization of the different layers of meaning, the word is not devalued, but in fact appears in its full grandeur and dignity.  Therefore the Catechism of the Catholic Church can rightly say that Christianity does not simply represent a religion of the book in the classical sense (cf. par. 108).  It perceives in the words the Word, the Logos itself, which spreads its mystery through this multiplicity and the reality of a human history.  This particular structure of the Bible issues a constantly new challenge to every generation.  It excludes by its nature everything that today is known as fundamentalism.  In effect, the word of God can never simply be equated with the letter of the text.  To attain to it involves a transcending and a process of understanding, led by the inner movement of the whole and hence it also has to become a process of living.  Only within the dynamic unity of the whole are the many books one book.  The Word of God and his action in the world are revealed only in the word and history of human beings.

On preaching:

We set out from the premise that the basic attitude of monks in the face of the collapse of the old order and its certainties was quaerere Deum – setting out in search of God.  We could describe this as the truly philosophical attitude: looking beyond the penultimate, and setting out in search of the ultimate and the true.  By becoming a monk, a man set out on a broad and noble path, but he had already found the direction he needed:  the word of the Bible, in which he heard God himself speaking.  Now he had to try to understand him, so as to be able to approach him.  So the monastic journey is indeed a journey into the inner world of the received word, even if an infinite distance is involved.  Within the monks’ seeking there is already contained, in some respects, a finding.  Therefore, if such seeking is to be possible at all, there has to be an initial spur, which not only arouses the will to seek, but also makes it possible to believe that the way is concealed within this word, or rather: that in this word, God himself has set out towards men, and hence men can come to God through it.  To put it another way: there must be proclamation, which speaks to man and so creates conviction, which in turn can become life.  If a way is to be opened up into the heart of the biblical word as God’s word, this word must first of all be proclaimed outwardly.  The classic formulation of the Christian faith’s intrinsic need to make itself communicable to others, is a phrase from the First Letter of Peter, which in medieval theology was regarded as the biblical basis for the work of theologians:  “Always have your answer ready for people who ask you the reason (the logos) for the hope that you all have” (3:15).  (The Logos, the reason for hope must become apo-logía; it must become a response).  In fact, Christians of the nascent Church did not regard their missionary proclamation as propaganda, designed to enlarge their particular group, but as an inner necessity, consequent upon the nature of their faith:  the God in whom they believed was the God of all people, the one, true God, who had revealed himself in the history of Israel and ultimately in his Son, thereby supplying the answer which was of concern to everyone and for which all people, in their innermost hearts, are waiting.  The universality of God, and of reason open towards him, is what gave them the motivation—indeed, the obligation—to proclaim the message.  They saw their faith as belonging, not to cultural custom that differs from one people to another, but to the domain of truth, which concerns all people equally.

The fundamental structure of Christian proclamation “outwards” – towards searching and questioning mankind – is seen in Saint Paul’s address at the Areopagus.  We should remember that the Areopagus was not a form of academy at which the most illustrious minds would meet for discussion of lofty matters, but a court of justice, which was competent in matters of religion and ought to have opposed the import of foreign religions.  This is exactly what Paul is reproached for:  “he seems to be a preacher of foreign divinities” (Acts 17:18).  To this, Paul responds:  I have found an altar of yours with this inscription:  ‘to an unknown god’.  What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you (17:23).  Paul is not proclaiming unknown gods.  He is proclaiming him whom men do not know and yet do know – the unknown-known; the one they are seeking, whom ultimately they know already, and who yet remains the unknown and unrecognizable.  The deepest layer of human thinking and feeling somehow knows that he must exist, that at the beginning of all things, there must be not irrationality, but creative Reason – not blind chance, but freedom.  Yet even though all men somehow know this, as Paul expressly says in the Letter to the Romans (1:21), this knowledge remains unreal:  a God who is merely imagined and invented is not God at all.  If he does not reveal himself, we cannot gain access to him.  The novelty of Christian proclamation is that it can now say to all peoples: he has revealed himself.  He personally.  And now the way to him is open.  The novelty of Christian proclamation does not consist in a thought, but in a deed: God has revealed himself.  Yet this is no blind deed, but one which is itself Logos – the presence of eternal reason in our flesh.  Verbum caro factum est (Jn 1:14): just so, amid what is made (factum) there is now Logos, Logos is among us.  Creation (factum) is rational.  Naturally, the humility of reason is always needed, in order to accept it:  man’s humility, which responds to God’s humility.

Fr. Thomas Joseph White, O.P. preached the following homily during Mass for Thanksgiving Day:

In 1630, standing on the deck of a small wooden ship called the Arbella, John Winthrop, a student of Reformed divinity, uttered words now famous to his confreres with whom he was about to embark in the new world of North America: “For we must consider, he said, that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken… we shall be made a story and a by-word throughout the world. We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God… We shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us until we be consumed out of the good land whither we are a-going.” A good land, a city on the hill, a place of new covenant with God on a new continent, and a land for which we should give thanks. The puritan’s remarks are in one sense too theologically exaggerated, both in their optimism and pessimism concerning the importance of the fledgling colony. But they are also a great word that we turn back to repeatedly in American self-definition and idealization. A city built on a hill.

Without seeking to efface this image altogether, we ought also to note that the Scriptures we are given today (Rev. 18:1-2, 21-23; 191-3, 9a; Lk. 21:20-28) in this eschatological season also speak of a city, of two cities in fact. Of Jerusalem, the holy city, which has refused the time of her visitation, turning her back on Christ, and who will be trampled underfoot by the pagans. And the city of Babylon, the great city of the end times, of a humanity that has become godless in its soot and commerce, a city that will evaporate before the judgment of God, to be thrown down, and never found again.

And of course behind both of these cities, or above them, there is the city of God, the new and heavenly Jerusalem, A city in which there is “no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine upon it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb.” (Rev. 21:22-23)

The city on a hill that is America is of course, none of these. Or she is perhaps some mixture of the three: a mixture of noble aspirations toward God’s kingdom, of godless humanity, and of a sincere but in large part blind populace, that clings to its religious self-interpretation in seeming ignorance of the One who alone can deliver her. And America is all these things in a mix of freedom, and natural beauty, and creativity, and ordinary, happy plainness.

Presumably this city on a hill is not lifeless, but lively, and therefore communal, and so in this city there must be a meal, a communion meal, so to speak, that is also part of its primitive symbolism; According to the customary history, Thanskgiving began approximately 9 years before John Winthrop’s sermon, not with Puritans but with Pilgrims, and at Plymouth. Whatever its exact origins, this autumn harvest festival had already become a widespread custom throughout the colonies prior to the revolution, and took on an official form in 1777 when the newly formed continental congress declared a day of:

“Solemn Thanksgiving and Praise: That at one time and with one voice, the good people may express the grateful feelings of their hearts, and consecrate themselves to the service of their Divine Benefactor; and that, together with their sincere acknowledgments and offerings, they may join the penitent confession of their manifold Sins, whereby they had forfeited every favor; and their humble and earnest supplication that it may please God through the merits of Jesus Christ, mercifully to forgive and blot them out of remembrance; That it may please him graciously to afford his blessing on the governments of these States respectively, and prosper the public council of the whole.”

At the heart of Thanksgiving in 1777 was an act of the state commending to its citizens a consideration of the merits of Jesus Christ. Oh congress, far have you fallen.  In the end of course, the reparation of the public order is about getting your food straight. Freud was wrong. In the end it’s all about food. The true thanksgiving meal that unites the city in gratitude, must simultaneously hold the city on a hill before God, and allow the light of the Lamb to shine upon her, and even through her, that she will have no need of a lamp, or the sun, so that the Lord God will be her light, so that the merits of Jesus Christ can be her deepest and truest source of thanksgiving, and the truest and deepest beacon of hope that thrives in her members. So that all the earthly benefits of America, in her freedom, and natural beauty, and creativity and ordinary, happy plainness, can be consecrated to God, can be covered with the veil of holiness, with true contrition for sin, and with the beaming, authentic joy of grace.

Let us conclude with a bit of revisionist history, that we can consider typologically. Since history is on the side of the Catholic Church, we might as well appropriate it to ourselves. Some fifty five years before John Winthrop’s famous sermon, the first publically recorded harvest ceremony in America took place, not in the English colonies, but in the La Florida colony, under Spanish rule. On September 8, 1565, when 600 Spanish settlers, landed at what is now the city of St. Augustine. There they promptly held a Mass of Thanksgiving for their safe arrival in the New World; and this was succeeded by a feast and celebration. Perhaps as a qualification to the Puritan image of a city on a hill, we should also see St. Augustine as a worthy patron for America, a man who had dwelt in the city of man, but who also set out in grace for the city of God, a man who truly embodied thanksgiving, that is to say, supernatural gratitude for supernatural grace received, not because of his merits, but despite them. And so, however theologically aware the inhabitants of this first city in the new world were, they lived out under the patronage of Augustine this holy and sacramental gratitude that was the appropriate context for their civic thanksgiving. They got their food straight.

Oh America, if you would be truly great, give thanks to God, for the many good gifts of a fair and rich world of nature and human civilization, but give thanks above all for the blood of your Redeemer. Eat the flesh of the Lamb, who is the light of the city on a hill, and then do what you will.

On May 23, 2007, nearly thirty Law School alumni gathered to honor one of their fellow classmates on one of the most momentous occasions of his life. Although it was an interest in the law that had first brought them together more than ten years earlier, the cause for this celebration was, surprisingly, not related to the world of law at all. On that spring day, with so many of his friends from Chicago present, Father Joseph Pius Pietrzyk, O.P., a 1997 graduate of the Law School, was ordained as a priest in the Catholic Church.

There are actually several Chicago alumni who have experienced a religious calling after graduation. For Father Pius, attending the Law School turned out to be a very important step in his path toward joining the priesthood. “At Chicago I met a lot of people who were very serious about their religious beliefs, which made a strong impression on me and inspired me to revisit my own faith,” Father Pius said. After graduating from the Law School, he went on to work as an associate at Sidley Austin in Chicago, where he served as counsel on a case involving GE that led him to Milwaukee. It was there, in a new city where he knew few people, that Father Pius experienced a further resurgence in his faith: “I spent a great deal of my free time in prayer, examining where I was in my own faith and with my vocation. Soon I realized that God was calling me to do something else.” Returning to Chicago in 2000, he entered a religious community on the west side of the city, an experience he recalls fondly, before pursuing his religious studies at Holy Apostles College & Seminary in Connecticut. Father Pius was drawn to the Dominican Order in particular because of its dedication to rigorous study and the life of the mind. While he would eventually like to pursue his doctorate and teach at a seminary school, his next step will bring him to Zanesville, Ohio, where he will become the parochial vicar of St. Thomas Aquinas Church this fall. Father Pius anticipates that his legal experience will serve him well in this new role, for “as a lawyer, you become comfortable with thinking on your feet, with understanding a subject so well that you can speak about it without notes.”

Reverend James B. Pratt, a 1989 graduate of the Law School, similarly found his experience as a lawyer to be of great relevance and value in his religious life. Like Father Pius, Reverend Pratt also worked as an attorney after graduation, for a mid-sized law firm in Boston. During this time he was active with his local parish, singing in the choir and serving as scout master, and soon it dawned on him that the work he was doing with his church in the evenings and on weekends was far more fulfilling than his work as a lawyer. Reverend Pratt went on to attend Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was one of three lawyers in his first-year class of twenty-five students. “Seminary was a cakewalk compared to the Law School,” he exclaimed, noting that Chicago’s analytical rigor and focus on critical thinking prepared him well for his religious training. Indeed, he describes his work leading two Bible study groups as one of the most gratifying aspects of his role as Rector of the Parish of Cow Head in Newfoundland, Canada, a position he has held for six years. “Seeing the light bulbs go off, watching such learning happening, and witnessing people putting what they’ve learned into practice in their daily lives is very rewarding,” he said.

Of the dozen or so Law School alumni currently active in religious life, many worked as attorneys before following a religious calling. Brother André Petty, ’98, known to his classmates as Neil, was a corporate tax attorney with Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom and also with Sachnoff & Weaver before realizing that his true calling was of a religious nature. He can still recall the exact moment he realized a legal career was not for him. “I woke up that morning and knew that this was not what I was supposed to be doing with my life,” he remembered. “Fortunately I had saved enough during my years working for law firms that I could quit my job and take about eighteen months to redirect my life.” For several years, Brother André had been attending a Presbyterian church in Chicago, but he felt a strong pull toward Catholicism. As he explored the Catholic faith, he found himself drawn specifically to the Franciscan Order, with its tradition of scholarship and dedication to service in the community. Indeed, as a brother with Sacred Heart Friary in Chicago, he has been able to pursue his greatest passions: helping others and rigorous study. “My work with the elderly and the sick, as a chaplain intern at Northwestern Hospital, is unbelievably rewarding,” he stated. He is also hoping to continue his studies in classical languages and literatures; he holds an M.A. in this subject from the U of C, and is currently investigating the possibility of completing his Ph.D. studies at the University.

Throughout history, the connections between religion and the law have been many and varied, as the Reverend John Johnson, ’69, observed: “So much of the theory of law, and the origins of the law, reside in the Old Testament. And so many of the great thinkers throughout history— Aquinas, Pascal, Descartes—were theologians.” Reverend Johnson actually did not practice law after leaving Chicago, choosing to enter the business world instead. He describes himself as a “left-brained minister,” one who earned a law degree because of his political aspirations, started his own company that integrated his love of physics and engineering, and who jokingly says he came to be a Presbyterian minister by accident—though it was, in all seriousness, by conviction. Somehow he ended up on the mailing list for the U of C’s Divinity School, and in 1995 he participated in one of the School’s academic conferences that tapped into his lifelong religious stirring. He went on to attend theMcCormick Theological Seminary in Hyde Park, and this October will mark the tenth anniversary of his ordination as a minister in the Presbyterian Church. Though he has recently retired from his position as pastor of Highlands Presbyterian Church in La Grange, Illinois, he remains actively committed to the church and to his religious calling and is currently working on two books.

Like Reverend Johnson, Elizabeth Dickey, ’91, will seek ordination within the Presbyterian Church upon graduating from the McCormick Theological Seminary, where she is currently pursuing her Master’s in Divinity degree. Ms. Dickey was working for the Cook County Public Defender’s Office in Chicago when she was commissioned by her home church to serve as a Stephen Minister, an individual trained to listen to people in the midst of a crisis. This experience inspired her to pursue the ministry full time; her work with the Public Defender’s Office also had an impact on her decision. Indeed, it was a desire to help others and to be a voice for the oppressed that inspired Ms. Dickey to attend law school in the first place. “I claimed one Bible verse as a motto,” she recalled. “Proverbs 31:8–9 says, ‘Open your mouth for the speechless, in the cause of all who are appointed to die. Open your mouth, judge righteously, and plead the cause of the poor and the needy.’” Though she is not certain yet what she is specifically being called to do, whether it is teaching or pastoral work, Ms. Dickey will continue to help those in greatest need.

The Reverend Doctor Jay K. Longacre also experienced a call to action within the community and the world at large. An avid long-distance runner, Reverend Longacre, ’59, had competed in marathons and scaled mountains around the world. In 1981, during a run around the Annapurnas, he and his son faced a life-and-death situation. “For seven hours, I prayed fervently for God to save us; and, if He would, I would turn my life over to Him. He did and I did,” he stated. Reverend Longacre went on to earn his M.Div. degree and anM.S. in social work and was ordained in the Presbyterian Church. While in the midst of his studies to earn a licentiate in systematic theology he discovered he was Catholic; during a visit to India in 1992, he met Mother Teresa for the first time, and it was through her counsel, and that of a priest friend, that Reverend Longacre realized that he, as a married Protestant minister, could stay married and become a priest. He was ordained on June 15, 2002, in the new cathedral in the Diocese of Rajkot in Gujarat in India and has gone on to do vital and rewarding work in India and many other countries. “I am president of a small 501(c)(3) tax-exempt foundation,” he explained, “and my wife Barbara and I have educated about 200 children in India, Nepal, Guatemala, and Sri Lanka.We have helped people start small businesses and helped develop new schools and a few libraries.We have financed a volunteer pharmacy and first-aid center and many other such projects.”

The call to religious duty is a deeply personal one, and no two paths are the same. For some alumni, the calling came later in life; for others, it came earlier. Yet the work of Law School alumni active in religious life involves a shared dedication to service, to critical thought, and to the community. And while the connection between a legal education and a religious calling may not be apparent at first glance, it is one that many alumni, from Father Pius to Reverend Pratt to Brother André, are quick to point out. As Reverend Longacre noted, “I believe that the Law School taught me to work with a great intensity for long hours and in the face of adversity.” A sentiment no doubt shared by the majority of Law School alumni, wherever their paths may have led them.

This picture, from the Zanesville Times Recorder, is taken at Holy Trinity Church in Somerset, OH. Somerset’s Holy Trinity Catholic School students try to honor all the saints in November. This year, since the parish has just had the pictures of the Dominican saints restored, the students recently dressed as Dominican saints and carried pictures of the saints they represented prior to Mass. Each student told the congregation a little information about his saint.

Somerset is the home of the first Catholic Church in Ohio (St. Joseph’s). And the Dominican Fathers serve both the Holy Trinity and St. Joseph’s. Currently, Fr. Steve Carmody, OP (pictured above), serves as a priest in Somerset.

Fr. Aquinas Guilbeau, OP, discusses the readings for the 33rd Sunday of Ordinary Time with Fr. Gabriel Gillen, OP, and Fr. James Cuddy, OP.