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President Dillon’s Introduction Born in 1945 and reared in the Episcopal tradition in New York, Fr. George Rutler was an Episcopal priest for nine years. He was received into the Catholic Church in 1979, and ordained in 1981 to the priesthood in St. Patrick’s Cathedral by His Eminence Terence Cardinal Cooke. In the years since, Fr. Rutler has served at St. Joseph’s Parish in Bronxville, Our Lady of Victory in the Wall Street area, and St. Agnes in Manhattan. He has been pastor now of the Church of Our Saviour since 2001. Father Rutler is a graduate of Dartmouth and holds advanced degrees from the John Hopkins University and the General Theological Seminary as well as from the Gregorian and Angelicum Universities in Rome. A past national chaplain of Legatus, Fr. Rutler is a board member of several schools and colleges, and the chaplain of the New York Guild of Catholic Lawyers. In addition, he has long been associated with the Missionaries of Charity and other religious orders as a retreat master. Since 1988, Fr. Rutler’s weekly television program has been broadcast worldwide on EWTN, and he has lectured and given retreats in many nations, frequently in Ireland and Australia. He contributes to numerous scholarly and popular journals, and has published 14 books on theology, history, cultural issues, and the lives of the saints. A gifted speaker, he was the 2001 Bacclaureate Mass homilist at Thomas Aquinas College. He also recently penned an introduction to the second printing of Escape from Scepticism, a reflection on Catholic higher education by Christopher Derrick, a student of C.S. Lewis, which was inspired by a visit to Thomas Aquinas College in the early 1970s. Fr. Rutler’s Remarks It is a great honor for me to have anything to do with Thomas Aquinas College. When I go to California, people assume that I’m a provincial New Yorker, but I do travel to other places and I would move to the College tomorrow if it were only accessible by the IRT. When I speak of schools, I think of my parents. They were my first school, and, really, the best school. That’s how God designed things. In that nice introduction, it was mentioned that I was born in 1945. My sainted father’s name was Adolph, and I was to be named for him, except in 1945 my parents thought that unwise . . . since it was also the name of the publisher of The New York Times. Every priest is a father and rejoices in having had a father, and every school is a mother—alma mater. That is not a mere figure of speech, although in some places it would seem so. The beautiful new chapel of Thomas Aquinas College is a place where God the Father is to be worshipped, but it’s Holy Mother Church we’re worshipping. Both are under attack. The Fatherhood of God and the Motherhood of the Church have been the primary targets of barbarians in every generation. Hilaire Belloc writes this: “The barbarian hopes—and that is the mark of him—that he can have his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being. Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is ever marveling that civilization should have offended him with priests and soldiers.... In a word, the barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this, that he cannot make: that he can befog and destroy, but that he cannot sustain; and of every barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilization exactly that has been true.” There are some writers I read and wish I could meet in person rather then just read them. From what I know of Belloc, I think I would rather read him than to have met him in person, but he was a great prophet. And he was speaking of the kind of people we meet every day and that we’re tempted to become. The barbarian does not bang down the gates of our city wearing animal hides and brandishing spears. This barbarian is in the cocktail lounge; the barbarian is on the TV talk show; and the barbarian is in the classroom. Belloc visited the ruins of Timgad, and as he sat in the solitude of the Sahara, watching the sand blow round the remnant marble pillars of the Greek city, he said: “We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him. In the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his reverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us: we laugh. But as we laugh, we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond. And on these faces, there is no smile.” Barbarians come and go, and it is very hard to know what will happen to the barbarian. Many great barbarians will be converted; whole empires have proven that what had been barbaric can be civilized. We don’t know the consequences yet. The fall of the Communist empire was quite astonishing. To read an account today of Mr. Putin, who has a rather questionable background himself, making a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Nicholas in Bari and taking out a handkerchief, wiping some of the oil of the body, and leaving as a gift a silver candelabra—that is a very radical change in the way the world has been. What will come of it, we do not fully know. Russia is endangered in many ways, principally, really, by the same threat that has always threatened empires, and that is religion. For demographically, Russia now is being slowly invaded by the cradle—the cradle of Islam. And so, all Europe. But the barbarians have always been at the gates, and they’ve also fooled us by coming into the home and hearth. This is not only a prelude to St. Patrick’s Day, but by happenstance, this is also the day we mark the Ides of March (which is why I’m speaking to you with my back against the wall). The words of Caesar are put on his lips by Shakespeare, “Let me have men about me that are fat, sleek-headed men and such as sleep at nights. Beyond, Cassius has a lean and hungry look. He thinks too much, and such men are dangerous.” Such men are always dangerous to the barbarian. Not that Julius Caesar was a barbarian; I have him in my pantheon of great noble pagans. But men who think are dangerous; they always have been because, while Sir Francis Bacon said, “Knowledge is power,” it is also the case that power itself is morally indifferent. Only wisdom is right power. So, when we undertake a great enterprise, like starting a college, that has to be our focus. We are all familiar with this quotation, “You see things and you say: Why? But I dream things that never were and I say: Why not?” Those were famously quoted by a former New York senator, but he quoted them backwards. The words he got right, but the source he got wrong. We know, of course, that those words are the words of the serpent to Eve, and George Bernard Shaw’s words in Back to Methuselah. “You see things and you say: Why? But I dream things that never were and I say: Why not?” Satan wants us to live in illusion. The words sound great; they sound noble; they sounded that great to Adam and Eve. Why did God forbid the partaking of the fruit of the knowledge of the tree of good and evil? It’s not that He wanted them to stay stupid. Precisely the opposite. He did not want them to be stupid. There’s this difference between being stupid and ignorant. To partake of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is to redefine reality. To say black is white, up is down, to say I feel instead of I think—that, of course, has been the affliction of the past century at least, and that is why we need a place like Thomas Aquinas College. I can say that I have sat through at least seven commencement addresses receiving degrees, and I cannot remember a single one. But I do very much remember a lecture I heard, I have to say it was in Cambridge University, 19 years ago. I can almost quote parts of it verbatim. The speaker was talking about relativism, the illusion of modernism, and he recalled how he had visited the wife of the philosopher Ernst Bloch, a basic materialist atheist. And he told Mrs. Bloch that in the university today, the biggest problem was drugs. She covered her ears; she did not want to hear it because in this brave new world people were supposed to be embracing reality. Religion was the opiate of the masses. That lecturer gave a lecture more recently which got far more attention. He gave it in Regensburg. No longer “Professor Ratzinger” or “Cardinal Ratzinger,” he has assumed another tenured position, a chair, but this is the Chair of Peter. When he had spoken at Cambridge, I remember it was a rainy night, it was a large hall, and students were standing in the rain to hear him. The Regius Professor of Divinity looked as though he had just been weaned on a pickle, and he was not given a very warm reception by the faculty. But he was cheered by the students. Maybe some of them were on drugs, I don’t know. The school paper, a few days later, said it seems medievalism is the fad, the undergraduate fad of the day. But it is no fad, and he always continues to be heard. When he spoke recently again at Regensburg, he spoke of reason versus voluntarism, the misuse of our free will. For God has given us a free will to choose; the soul is reason and will. The reason misused is rationalizing all the time; the will misused becomes selfish, willful misuse of power. An indomitable will does not guarantee heaven. It can secure hell. Our Holy Father is telling us that we must wake up to reality. The horrors of our day, all the social engineering of our day, the moral collapse of our day, and the genuine loss of the intellectual life—we’ve lost the mind of our day because we’ve lost a will to embrace reality. But things are real whether or not we acknowledge them. We pay a price if we ignore them. And so, Allan Bloom, in The Closing of the American Mind, spoke of the civilized re-animalization of man. He saw it in the University of Chicago; it is epidemic in all the campuses of Western civilization. Shakespeare, in The Merchant of Venice, speaks of “the wealthy curled darlings”; I guess they were yuppies then, or whatever the new term is now, with all the accoutrements of civilization, but with the soul of the beast. They’re not stupid people, but ignorant people. Read Newman’s Idea of a University, and in it you see the definition of a gentleman. It is good for as far as it goes, but a point that many people miss is that the gentleman is not a gentleman merely by manners. Newman, in a wonderful line, says that the gentleman is merciful to the absurd, but he knows what the absurd is. Generations feed off each generation, and we learn from each generation, but one thing we know is that the truth is eternal. I had the great privilege once of doing a documentary film in the Cistercian Abbey of Fossanova where Thomas Aquinas died. And it was very moving to read the very words, the Song of Songs, that he recited as he was dying. It was a love song, and that is how he died. He was in love with the truth and God is Truth. He was in love with God. So having been where Aquinas died, I count it an even greater honor to also have visited Santa Paula, California, where Thomas Aquinas lives. -- Qtrly Newsletter, Spring 2007 |
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