PRESIDENT'S INSTALLATION REMARKS
Fr. Michael Sweeney, OP - September 19, 2004
I have just taken an oath which is required of all who hold a teaching office in the Church. I have sworn to keep faith with the Church: in her worship, in her tradition, in her magisterium. I am reminded of one of my teachers, here at the Dominican school so many years ago, Father Kevin Wall, whose parting words to his students were, almost invariably “Michael, keep the faith!”
Keep the faith! Certainly, we are to keep faith with the Church. This means we are also to keep faith with the men and women who have gone before us, through whom we received that faith –the great ones who were our teachers. And, on this day, as we have invoked the Holy Spirit to inaugurate a new academic year, we might remember a further trust that we have received from them, the trust of this school and its mission.
What is the mission of our school? First, it is to prepare our students for leadership in the Church –as priests, as religious, as lay women and men. Hence, we are to keep faith with the Church, and to teach the Catholic faith with integrity. We are particularly referred to the Fathers and doctors of the Church, chief among whom is our brother, Thomas Aquinas. But we are also to keep faith with our students, and to probe together –and esteem—the unique contributions which the Church requires of her priests, her religious and her lay faithful for the sake of our common mission. We must teach the collaboration which the Church insists upon for the sake of her mission to the world: therefore we must be attentive to how the theological and evangelical enterprise is differently nuanced when seen from the perspective of the ordained, or of religious, or of the laity.
But our mission as a school is not merely to impart the tradition in order to prepare leaders for the sake of the Church. On October 10, 1966 Father Aniceto Fernandez, then Master General of the Order of Preachers offered an address upon the occasion of our entry into the Graduate Theological Union. He called the GTU “a venture which is worthy of praise” and he situated our mission as a school in the light of the GTU, and in the light of a further collaboration with the University of California.
He insisted that our mission as a Dominican school must be to give voice to the gospel in this culture. Cardinal George of Chicago, during his recent ad limina visit to the Holy See told Our holy Father, Pope John Paul II, that the Church in the U.S. has not yet found the voice to speak to this culture. This is the work to which we were assigned almost forty years ago; this was the reason that we entered the Graduate Theological Union; this was the reason that the Master of the Order urged us to collaborate with the University of California: find the voice to speak to this culture! Prepare leaders –priests, religious and lay, women and men—to speak to this culture!
Therefore, Father Aniceto insisted, we need a collaboration with the Graduate Theological Union. The first obstacle to our ability to speak to our culture is the division within the Christian community. Therefore, “…we must try to discover clearly what it is that separates us and what it is that makes us one. …For all of us, this will give rise to a more sincere and profound love of the truth. Insofar as we are Christians, it will cause us to love Jesus Christ more profoundly, for he is the truth for which we all look and which we all desire. There can be no doubt that this love, as it increases, is also the most secure path and the most efficacious means for bringing us to the cherished goal of unity.” If we are to speak to our culture, we must speak with one voice.
Again, if our mission is to find the voice to speak the Gospel to this culture, then we require a still another collaboration which reaches beyond the theological union itself, and penetrates all of secular society. Father Aniceto was insistent that we pay heed to the challenges facing society, and was therefore delighted that our school is situated in California: “California, it has often been said, is the society of the future. Here the changes which all society eventually will face are already taking place. And here the problems which the new social situation will create for everyone are already manifest. In the University of California at Berkeley, centers have already been set up for the most advanced study of these problems. It will be of great importance for our [school] to be near these centers and to maintain a dialogue with the experts working there, because in that way discoveries which have religious interest may become known to us and assimilated as quickly as they emerge.”
Keep the faith! Seek to be one in Christ! Collaborate with each other, and with your colleagues in the GTU. Dialogue with experts in all of the social and secular pursuits. Above all: find the voice to speak the Gospel to this culture! This was and is our mandate as the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology. No one of us can even dream of accomplishing such a task. But together, united under our Bishop, in collaboration with our colleagues in the Graduate Theological Union, committing ourselves to a genuine collaboration with each other, assisted by men and women of secular competence, what is unthinkable for any one of us becomes an adventure that we share in common. And, by the grace of God, a task which we can accomplish. It is an adventure and a task which I am honored and eager to take up with you!
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