Interview met Father Romanus Cessario O.P.

Fr. Romanus Cessario, O.P. from Province of Saint Joseph on Vimeo.

Ressourcement Thomism

Middels onze vrienden Reinhard Hüter en Matthew Levering verkregen we inhoudstafel van een hoogst interessant boek, gepubliceerd bij gelegenheid van de 65ste verjaardag van Romanus Cessario O.P.
Ressourcement Thomism:
Sacred Doctrine, the Sacraments and the Moral Life
Essays in Honor of Romanus Cessario, OP
Ed. by Reinhard Hütter and Matthew Levering
Catholic University Press 2010
Hardback, 403 pp.
ISBN 978-0-8132-1785-7

Zoals hier uit de inhoud is op te maken, vormt dit werk een excellente illustratie van de vruchtbaarheid van het Thomisme 'old school'.

Father Cessario, Thomas van Aquino en het Priesterschap

In dit Jaar van de Priester heeft Romanus Cessario O.P. (klik hier voor meer info en publicaties van zijn hand) zonet in het tijdschrift Nova & Vetera een prachtige bijdrage geschreven over de roeping van het priesterschap in het licht van Thomas van Aquino, getiteld: 
Aquinas on the Priest: Sacramental Realism and the Indispensable and Irreplaceable Vocation of the Priest

Deze bijdrage is nu ook hier in zijn geheel te lezen.

Enkele fragmenten:

"Once the seminarian and priest begin to cherish the world, then they will discover the freedom to redeem the world. He will find the cause for Redemption in the lives that people live, that is, their sins, an invitation to preach to them the Good News of Jesus Christ. Above all, the priest will find new satisfaction in his vocation inasmuch as he will come to appreciate the indispensability of his Headship, his Shepherding, and his Bridal love in a world that mistakes power for authority, relativism for moral truth, and egoism for love. This noble vocation imposes grave responsibilities on those who aspire to it and who exercise what they have already received. Each must examine his conscience: does the responsible exercise of priestly authority suffer from my lack of fortitude? Does the charge to instruct in the moral life provide me with an excuse to tinker with moral truth? Finally, the tough one. Does my pledge to love as Christ loves suffer diminishment when I find myself unloved?"

"Preaching is not ordered firstly and foremostly to stirring up the sentiments of believers, making hearts strangely warmed. It is not ordered to supply ersatz psychological counseling on how to get along in life without too much chagrin. It certainly is not ordered to providing your hearers with an Everyman's guide to the academic exegesis of the text assigned to be proclaimed on a given day in the Church of Christ. Preaching is ordered to return creation to the Master. In its entirety. This challenge is more than daunting. Just think of all the things that go wrong. Think of the mistakes people make. Think of the errors that men try to validate. No wonder the priest can never go it alone. To return everything to the Master, the priest must remain united with the Church."

"Many things that the priest is counseled to observe reflect his unique, sacred, graced relationship to the temporal. Celibacy of course affords the best example. The priest removes himself from the rhythms of marriage, in all their complexity, so that Christ's people can encounter a man whose heart and mind are set exclusively on God, his Truth, his mysteries. People today do not talk much about celibacy for contemplation. The fact of the matter is that the Christian tradition considers it the principal reason for the Bishop and priest and monk to forego marriage. Marriage is a thing of this earth. Very much of this earth. Indeed, even the most sanctified of marriages remains of this earth. Married life is pleasurable, but it is also distracting from pondering those revealed truths that can only be received in the purity of faith. Clerical attire is another. The priest dresses differently. Black suits and collars. Cassocks. Sacred vestments. This apparel is not a uniform. What the priest wears provides external signs of his priestly consecration. Removing them without a clear and compelling reason creates ambiguity in the minds of the people and, in all likelihood, in the mind of the priest. Evangelical "simplicity" is another. The priest lives outside the ordinary attachments of the consumer society inasmuch as he knows that his real treasure resides in a place that only the Resurrection allows entry. Ecclesial obedience also reveals that the priest cherishes his privileged relationship with the local bishop."

Studeren om te leren bidden

De Dominicaanse theoloog Romanus Cessario, werkzaam aan het St. John's Seminary in Boston, hield voor de seminaristen op het feest van Sint-Thomas van Aquino een schitterende preek.
Hier zijn enkele uittreksels waar ook onze seminaristen hun voordeel mee kunnen doen. Voor de gehele tekst, klik hier.

"Why does St. Thomas find a place in our chapel among the Doctors of the Church? The answer is easy. He is the first teacher of Catholic doctrine after the patristic period to receive officially, in 1567, the title, Doctor of the Church. Pope St. Pius V, another Dominican, made this innovation. He of course had studied closely the works of Aquinas. Pope Pius knew that Aquinas was a carrier of the Tradition, and that the Protestants were wrong to reject him."

"Ordinarily on the feast of St. Thomas, one encourages seminarians to take study seriously. It is not an accident that the Church arranges seminary formation around the program of intellectual formation. Study is what the seminarian should spend most of his time doing. To make this claim is not to assert a partisan view about the so-called pillars of formation. Professors favor intellectual formation. What else is new? It is rather to reach back to the quite Thomist approach to contemplation and study that dominated the reform movement in the sixteenth century-the same period that witnesses Aquinas made a Doctor of the Church. It was a movement instigated at the Council of Trent, which, as Father Guy Bedouelle observes, "agreed to conjoin doctrine and discipline, theology and practice, contemplation and action, and perhaps-even if this seems paradoxical to some-the temporal and the spiritual." In short, a reform that took up the deeply Catholic intuitions that Aquinas enshrined in his large corpus of writing. No either-or approach for us. Faith or works? Scripture or Tradition? Grace or sacraments? The Catholic outlook on Christian life is always "both-and." The history of Catholic theology since the sixteenth century confirms that "both-and" theology is a difficult subject to master. But master it the priest must. To cite some examples: Forgiveness andand causes. Christ, God and man. The Church, human and divine. The priest, John, Joe, Jim and another Christ. The list goes on.  

Study for the Catholic priest remains a contemplative act. We do not read theology books to discover the knack of doing this or that, we do not ponder divine truth so that we can acquit ourselves of professional responsibilities, we do not undertake study even to develop the high-end skills of management or technology. We study so we can pray. The study of theology and the practice of contemplative prayer flow from the one and the same act of divine faith whereby we accept the Truth about God. For the priest, contemplative study provides the inexhaustible and irreplaceable source of everything that he does. No short cuts are available. No one is exempt. The Church developed a Latin adage to capture this basic truth of priestly formation. Nemo potest dare quod non habet. You can't give what you do not have."

"For the Catholic priest, especially the diocesan priest, the separation of study and prayer brings catastrophic results. No one more than the priest needs the experience of contemplative study. The reason is the Headship that the Church confides to the priest. The priest is not ordained to see about the practical details of programs and everyday activities. He is ordained to preach from the abundance of his heart. The only way that the priest's heart obtains the abundance of divine truth that the world needs so desperately is through the prayerful study of divine truth. He needs to absorb it, to penetrate it, to make it his own, like breathing in and breathing out. St. Thomas recognized that study does not come easy. Like every good action, study requires a virtuous formation to ensure that our study achieves the desired effect. In fact, St. Thomas took the time to give advice to a certain confrere, a Brother John, on how to study. The text has come down to us. The final admonitions are in Aquinas's own words: "Whatever you are doing and hearing try to understand. Resolve doubts, and put whatever you can in the storeroom of your mind, like someone wanting to fill a container. Do not spend time on things beyond your grasp." Let this brotherly advice from today's Doctor urge us all on to the study of the Highest Truth."