News Update from Fr. Hilary Martin, OP

This past October I attended made a pilgrimage from Arltunga to Santa Teresa in Central Australia. I made this pilgrimage with about 20 members of the Aboriginal Commission of the Archdiocese of Melbourne. There was a social justice theme to this pilgrimage. It began with a smoking service for us and we were blessed and given permisson to visit Arltunga site, now abandoned. During WWII (when the Northern Territory was under martial law) the aboriginal community of Alice Springs was ejected, houses, chattels and all, and sent to this desert location at a moments notice. (To be fair to the government this was instigated by the threat of meningitis.) The aboriginal community was forced to live at Arltunga for about 10 years under difficult desert conditions. The location was on an abandoned gold mine and the ground water had become toxic. There were many early deaths. Fortunately, the bishop was able to buy a place at Santa Teresa outside Alice Springs, a good place, where the community now lives today. They have wonderful aboriginal artists living there and it was a joy to be with them at the end of the journey. There were welcoming ceremonies, a smoking service with a spiritual advisor and visits to sacred places in the area.

At the end of the pilgrimage I attended the triennial meeting of Catholic Aboriginal leaders from all over Australia -- about 600 people in all with about 8 bishops, and with some whites as guests. I attended as a delegate from the state of Victoria. The meeting was an excellent opportunity for me to meet long-term aboriginal friends from the NT, especially from Wadeye, which I visit frequently. The meeting at Alice Springs was to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Pope John Paul IIs visit there. He had made a powerful statement in 1996 in favour of indigenous cultures, especially powerful in Australia. The aboriginal community was saying, I suspect, that the Pope's message was being lost or forgotten.

I returned to the United States from Australia in December to teach the History of Medieval Thought and Culture once again, and a graduate course doing a close reading in a key text of Thomas Aquinas, the Disputed Question, the De Veritate. In March I read a paper at the annual Medieval Association of the Pacific, which met this year at UCLA (my old Alma Mater). This is an academic society of professors of medieval studies in universities and colleges on the West Coast. My paper, Money in Transition, was about the development of money in the 14th century and the work of Nicole Oresme.

I had to put on hold my plans to conduct a course on aboriginal land and religion until I could find sufficient grant money to help my student defray costs for a flight to Australia. This course was, and is, to be conducted in conjunction with the Centre for Religion and Education at the GTU.

2007 Aquinas Lecture

This year's Aquinas Lecture was given on March 13 by Thomas S. Hibbs, Distinguished Professor of Ethics & Culture and Dean of the Honors College at Baylor University. His lecture, entitled "Everything that Rises Must Converge: Aquinas's Theological Re-formation of the Cardinal Virtues," focused on the theological reformation of these virtues, specifically looking at the examples of courage and prudence, and the connection of the virtues with the good life, as found in the incarnation and the example of Christ's sacrifice. Hibbs spoke most during his lecture and was questioned most about the virtue of courage and the changes in Aquinas's interpretation of this virtue from its roots in ancient philosophy. Aquinas emphasizes courage as an endurance, more than as an "attack," so the exemplar of courage is not the warrior, but the martyr whose patient witness patterns the life of Christ and gives witness to the highest truths about God and faith.

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The Aquinas Lecture is a yearly academic event in which the DSPT faculty nominate a distinguished scholar to give a presentation applying the teaching and methodology of Thomas Aquinas to issues of contemporary significance.

The Dumb Ox: The Practice of Fasting

On March 6, 2007, the Dumb Ox series hosted a talk, entitled "The Practice of Fasting: Can Catholicism Learn from Islam?" The speaker was Elissa McCormack, a M.A. Theology student at DSPT, who spoke about the practice of fasting both in Catholicism and Islam based on research that she had done for Sr. Marianne Farina's "Understanding Islam" class.

Her thesis is that with the changes in the practices of fasting and abstinence from meat that occurred after Vatican II, there also came a certain amount of confusion over what the new teaching of the Church was. She pointed out that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops was calling the faithful to continue to abstain from meat on all Fridays, but was allowing Catholics to have the option to instead substitute acts of charity or piety for this practice. The problem is that most Catholics understood that the requirements for abstaining from meat and fasting were being taken away, but they did not, and still do not today, understand that something else was put into place. Additionally, everyday Catholics are not being taught about the history of fasting in the Catholic Church, and its important connection to the themes of penance, self-discipline, prayer, and works of charity or almsgiving.

The practice of fasting during the month of Ramadan in Islam can be contrasted with how fasting is practiced in the Catholic Church today. First, the practice in Islam is much more rigorous: abstaining from eating, drinking, smoking, sexual activity, and even sinful thoughts from dawn to sunset each day. This can be contrasted with the Catholic instructions on fasting which allow one large meal and two small meals during the day, which looks to most people not like fasting, but breakfast, lunch, and dinner! Fasting during Ramadan is also connected closely to taqwa, or God-consciousness, and Ramadan is considered to be a time when closeness to God is most possible.

Elissa claimed that Catholics should look to the example of Islam both to understand more about the connection between fasting and spiritual life and to have an example of the possibility of practicing a more rigorous form of fasting. The lively discussion following her talk began by questioning what it is about Islam that makes this practice so much more understood by the average Muslim compared to Catholicism. The issue that was finally raised, however, is that of the role of teaching in the Catholic Church: Who, ultimately, is responsible for instructing Catholics in their religion? Parents? Priests? Teachers? The only thing that was lacking from the discussion was the presence of the Dominican brothers so that we might have understood the role of teaching in the Church from the perspective of those who will be taking a major role in it.

The Dumb Ox is an amateur theology forum sponsored by the students of DSPT. The name is based on the description of St. Thomas Aquinas that is attributed to St. Albert the Great. He said, "You call him a Dumb Ox. I tell you that the Dumb Ox will bellow so loud that his bellowing will fill the world." The next Dumb Ox event will be held on Tuesday, March 20 at 7:30pm at DSPT.