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Congratulations, Friar Rich!
Left to Right: Fr. Jacob Carazo (a friar of St. Joseph Cupertino Province who serves as Assistant Formation Director), Fr. Michael Heine, OFM Conv. (Minister Provincial), Friar Rich Rome, OFM Conv., and Fr. Michael Zielke, OFM Conv. (Guardian and Director of our St. Bonaventure Friary – Post Novitiate.
November 1, 2022: During the Evening Liturgy in the chapel of our St. Bonaventure Friary [Post Novitiate], in Silver Spring, MD, Friar Richard Rome, OFM Conv. was received into the minor orders of Lector and Acolyte, as a gift in his Franciscan and priestly vocation. A lector is the reader and bearer of God’s Word who is given responsibility in the service of our Faith, which is rooted in the Word of God, proclaiming God’s Word during the Liturgy, helping others come to believe in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, all while accepting the Word in obedience, meditating on the Word in order to grow in a deeper love of God’s Scriptures, so as to reveal Jesus Christ, the Word made Flesh, to our world. The chief offices of an acolyte are to light the candles on the altar and carry them in procession, to prepare wine and water for the sacrifice of the Mass, and to assist the sacred ministers at the Mass and other public services of the Church. (Can. 1035 §1. Before anyone is promoted to the permanent or transitional diaconate, he is required to have received the ministries of lector and acolyte and to have exercised them for a suitable period of time.) Friar Rich is a solemnly professed student friar of our province who is in continued studies at The Catholic University of America.
For more information on adding the life as a Franciscan Friar Conventual of our province to your discernment journey, email our Province Vocation Directors, Br. Nick Romeo, OFM Conv. and Fr. Manny Vasconcelos, OFM Conv. at vocations@olaprovince.org. For general information, visit FranciscanVoice.org. For information on the life of our Order’s friars around the world, visit our Curia’s website (ofmconv.net).
Provincial’s Fraternal Visit ~ NC Friaries
Our Lady of the Angels Province’s Minister Provincial, Fr. Michael Heine, OFM Conv. traveled to Pittsboro to visit with our eight friars living in and serving from the Our Lady of Guadalupe Friary. While there, he was able to concelebrate Masses at St. Julia Catholic Community (Siler City, NC), on Sunday, November 6, 2022, with Fr. Julio Martinez, OFM Conv. (at right above – Pastor of St. Julia Parish and Guardian of the Our Lady of Guadalupe Friary), and Fr. Luis Palacios Rodríguez, OFM Conv. (at left above – Parochial Vicar of St. Julia Parish). [More Photos] [Even More Photos]
The second pastoral ministry served by this friary is the Newman Catholic Student Center Parish, at UNC at Chapel Hill, under the pastoral leadership of Fr. Timothy Kulbicki, OFM Conv., who serves as Pastor & Campus Minister there. Our Lady of Guadalupe Friary is also home to our Province Treasurer, Br. Raymond Sobocinski, OFM Conv. and four more of our senior friars in residence.
The next day, Friar Michael traveled to Burlington, NC to visit with the four friars living in and serving from our Blessed Sacrament Friary. Three friars of this friary serve in pastoral ministry at Blessed Sacrament Catholic Community, in Burlington, NC: Fr. Vincent Rubino, OFM Conv. (Pastor), Fr. Piotr Tymko, OFM Conv. (Parochial Vicar) and Fr. Timothy Lyons, OFM Conv. The fourth friar, Fr. Peter Tremblay, OFM Conv., serves as Associate Chaplain for Catholic Life and Catholic Campus Minister, at Elon University.
Reflection by Fr. Ed Ondrako, OFM Conv.
CAN I KNOW TRUTH?
(Part Eleven: THE BRAVE NEW WORLD AND CONTINUATION OF CHRISTIANITY)
12 Days on Pilgrimage in August
“I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (Jn. 14:6).
Why is “interiority” such a high stake for St. John Henry Newman? His fundamental redress of the modern picture of interiority is because he thinks the modern picture of interiority is devastating to the prospects of authentic Christianity. Cyril O’Regan calls it “the affliction of interiority.” [1] The root is in John Locke’s philosophy written in the 1690’s. His influence remains massive today, which is why the diagnosis of the affliction of modernity is spot on. It is a fact that many are not aware that they are Lockeans. The affliction of interiority lies in the weight of responsibility the subject bears to practice the ethics of belief. In religious matters a person is free to act according to the evidence and adjust the tone of one’s claims. If demonstration is ruled out from the beginning, as it is at the very core of Lockean thought, we operate in a universe of probabilities. Various grades of conviction are permissible. The high stake for Newman was his full recognition of Lockean inspired intent at Oxford to instill a more or less universal convictionless manner of holding religious beliefs. The intent of our Marian Franciscan pilgrimage aligned with Newman.
Newman diagnosed the affliction of modernity as something wholly different from Locke. Interiority to Newman as the indelible mark of a human being is a fact rather than a responsibility that a finite person bears towards the world. Newman and Pope Emeritus Benedict have a deep sense of the congeniality of interiority and the world. O’Regan’s diagnosis: “interiority is afflicted because it is receptive: it receives or suffers the influences of the world, others, and above all else God. Its affliction is its richness as well as its poverty and is the index of the intrinsic relationship that ironically Locke’s rationalist impersonalism does not allow, since the common rationality operative in his procedural logic seems itself to be no more than the means of repair of an atomistic individualism ….”[2]
The problem of the evacuation of doctrines and practices effected by the secular modern age and the drift of the Church towards the secular is my central concern. Retrieval of a direction for the Church’s further journey is so necessary. By that I mean that if I speak in the language of tradition, in a Marian Franciscan mode, I am speaking of the gift that is handed down and exceeds what the hander-on offered and sets the one who receives the gift a task of developing as well as elucidating what is intended and what is said.[3] As laity, parents, teachers, religious and priests, we have the gift of tradition handed down to develop and elucidate. The difficulty is the refusal to recognize the gift or to make any effort to understand the gift.
The indelible mark of a human being is “interiority.” To bleed human beings of interiority by insisting that human beings are fully explicable in rationalist or naturalist terms is a contagious problem. Interiority is sidelined by authorizing a hyperbolical interpretation of the will as free inquiry that seals a person’s subjective judgment as truth. At best, both demonstrate a tension in the relation with the naturalistic tendency in modern rational thought and, at worst, represent its contrary. When interiority is being evacuated by a particular form of rationalism, it inevitably becomes an incoherent position. [4] Evacuating the interioriority of the person takes place by imagining the mind to re-present the world, to function as calculator of probabilities, and to insist on the prerogatives of free inquiry and the rights of private judgment. What is lost is the integral part of the training and virtue of the person making the judgment.
The contemporary Catholic philosopher, Charles Taylor, identifies our time as “the social imaginary.”[5] There is continuity with St. Augustine and the epic effects of the sack of Rome in 410. In The City of God, he elucidated a “thick” argument on the subjectivity of the finite person, always seeking, always in dialogue with others, forever open to change, and forever counting on and being open to the radical transformation effected by grace. We may compare his thought to today where there is a brave new world, a hold of certain ideas, images, or fundamental principles across an entire society that argues from rather than towards. In such a context, the issue of the existence and nature of interiority is hugely important.
Thinking with the mark of a prophet, Newman “diagnoses and clarifies the crisis regarding the view of the human subject and laments the historical happening that has replaced an ecstatic and relational view of human interiority with a philosophical and Christian pretender that, for him, fails the tests of both reason and faith.”[6] His prophetic critique links with lamentation, in hope that in our day that is coming to terms with what is interpreted as a moribund and debunked Christian past, a more satisfying account of interiority will emerge, with thicker roots in the Christian philosophical and theological traditions.
Newman recognized each person’s view on the world as unique and indivisible, for he or she is the judger. The interiority that Newman puts forward is in the first person. The judge judges according to the standard of truth that is a check of will and self-interest. It checks the arbitrariness of those who follow Locke and advocate private judgment, meaning that the person has the right to exercise his or her preferences without reference to a standard of the good, either internal or external. Newman’s subject is individuated and beyond Locke’s imagining, while being open to influence from the past and communities of belief. Crucial is Newman’s claim that the human being has immediate access to God in and through conscience. [7]
Fr. Ed Ondrako, OFM Conv., Univ. of Notre Dame eondrako@alumni.nd.edu
_________________
[1] C. O’Regan, “Newman and the Affliction of Modernity.” Church Life Journal, McGrath Institute for Church Life, University of Notre Dame, 7 October 2022.
[2] “Newman and the Affliction of Modernity.”
[3] C. O’Regan inspires me to write and minister as a Franciscan priest by carrying forward what was opened up but not fully articulated in the Franciscan tradition by Fr. Peter Damian Fehlner, OFM Conv.
[4] I am more than tempted but refuse to accept the bait to apply to contemporary American politics that are bathed in Lockean thought, all-be-it, unwittingly. Every reader is capable of judging wisely.
[5] C. Taylor, The Secular Age, 2007. This move in recent modern philosophy is away from arguments.
[6] “Newman and the Affliction of Modernity.”
[7] J. H. Newman, Oxford University Sermons, A Grammar, Apologia, and Letter to the Duke of Norfolk.
Fr. Edward J. Ondrako, OFM Conventual
Research Fellow Pontifical Faculty of St. Bonaventure, Rome
Visiting Scholar, McGrath Institute for Church Life
University of Notre Dame
Feast Day of Bl. John Duns Scotus ~ November 8, 2022
November News ~ Novitiate
After their Evening Prayer on November 2nd, the friars of Saint Francis of Assisi Friary and Novitiate processed to the Friars’ Cemetery on the Novitiate grounds, to offer prayers to God for the repose of the souls of all our brothers and sisters in the Franciscan Order, relatives, friends, and benefactors, who have gone before us.
Special remembrance celebrations for the November 1st Solemnity of All Saints, and the November 2nd Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed ~ All Souls, at the Novitiate of the Order of Friars Minor Conventual – CFF, in Arroyo Grande, CA also included the arrival of the Blessed Carlo Acutis relics (above).
One of the Novices of our Province, friar Connor J. Ouly, OFM Conv. working on one of the memorial garlands for the Grotto (top photo).
One of the Novices of the Province of Our Lady of Consolation, friar André Miller, OFM Conv. carefully placing the Grotto flowers and votives.
One of the Novices of the Province of Our Lady of Consolation, friar Colden Fell, OFM Conv. prayerfully placing flowers at the memorial stones just outside of the Grotto.
One of the Novices of the Province of Saint Bonaventure, friar Eric Rewa, OFM Conv. places more flowers on the memorial stones.
For more information on Vocations with our Province,
email Br. Nick Romeo, OFM Conv.
and Fr. Manny Vasconcelos, OFM Conv.,
at vocations@olaprovince.org.
All Souls Day Procession
More November 1st Photos
Our Lady of the Angels Province Delegation of St. Francis of Assisi Novice, friar Marvin Paul Fernandez, OFM Conv. with the Blessed Carlo Acutis relic
More November 2nd Photos
Provincial’s Fraternal Visit ~ Syracuse
Friar Mike, friar Joe, Friar Gerry, Friar Jim in front of the Hall of Languages on the way to the Dome
Our Lady of the Angels Province’s Minister Provincial, Fr. Michael Heine, OFM Conv. traveled to Syracuse and joined Br. Jim Moore, OFM Conv., friar Joe Krondon, OFM Conv. and Fr. Gerry Waterman, OFM Conv., on Saturday, October 29th for a pre-game marching band extravaganza, in front of Syracuse University’s (SU) Hendricks Chapel, prior to the football game, in the JMA Wireless Dome, against the University of Notre Dame (ND). Despite noble attempts at a victory, ND triumphed over SU, 41-24. After the game, there was a tailgate party on the back lawn of the Catholic Center, with Chicago donors Beth & Brian Saunders, and their son Sam. The friars were also visited by SU Chancellor Kent Syverud and his wife Dr. Ruth Chen. The post-game festivities more than made up for the difficult loss.
Friar Mike, Friar Gerry, Dr. Ruth Chen, Chancellor Syverud, and the Saunders family
- Notes:
- Friar Jim Moore, OFM Conv. serves as Guardian of St. Francis Friary and as Chaplain of the Franciscan Place Chapel & Gift Shop at Destiny USA
- friar Joe Krondon, OFM Conv. is a simply professed student friar of our province, serving his Apostolic Year of Formation with our friars in Syracuse, serving Assumption Church
- Fr. Gerry Waterman, OFM Conv. serves as Campus Minister for the Syracuse University Catholic Campus Ministry
News From Brazil
October 21, 2022: Frei Fernando Pereira de Andrade Júnior, OFM Conv., a student friar of our Custódia Província Imaculada Conceição (Immaculate Conception Custody) in Brazil, renewed his Simple Vows of Poverty, Chastity and Obedience. He also received the Ministry of Acolyte, at the hands of our new Custódio Provincial, Frei Carlos Roberto de Oliveira Charles, OFM Conv.
Article on the Curia’s Website
Frei Marcelo dos Santos da Silva, OFM Conv., Frei Jesus Rodrigues do Amaral, OFM Conv., Frei Carlos Roberto de Oliveira Charles, OFM Conv., Frei Fernando Pereira de Andrade Júnior, OFM Conv., Frei Ricardo Elvis Arruda Bezerra, OFM Conv. and Frei Michel da Cruz Alves dos Santos, OFM Conv.
If you are a young man in Brazil
and would like more information on Vocations with our Custody there,
contact Friar Willian Gomes Mendonça, OFM Conv.,
at despertarfranciscano@gmail.com or sav.conv@hotmail.com
If you are a young man living on the East Coast of North America,
and you would like more information on life as a Franciscan Friar Conventual
of Our Lady of the Angels Province, email our Province Vocation Directors,
Fr. Manny Vasconcelos, OFM Conv. and Br. Nick Romeo, OFM Conv.
at vocations@olprovince.org.
Conventual Franciscan Federation (CFF) Leadership Assembly
During the October 17-21st CFF Leadership Assembly, our own Friar Michael Heine, OFM Conv. was elected President of the Federation and Friar Paul Langevin (Minister Provincial of the Province of St. Bonaventure) was elected Vice-President.
Catching Up with friar Joe!
Now approaching the halfway mark in his Fraternal-Apostolic Year of Formation (May 2022 – May 2023), where he has served at our pastoral ministry ~ Assumption Church, in Syracuse, NY, friar Joseph Krondon, OFM Conv., a simply professed student friar of our province, is continuing to live with our friars of St. Francis Friary, while interning as a pastoral minister at the parish’s Food Pantry & Soup Kitchen, and Franciscan Northside Ministries. He has also been serving the parish as sacristan, altar server coordinator, and hospitality minister.
Pictured at Assumption Food Pantry and Soup Kitchen with RaeAnn Kirk, one of our FrancisCorps volunteers, who serves as Assistant Director
In honor of the 10th Anniversary of the canonization Saint Marianne Cope [October 21, 2012], a special Mass was celebrated on Saturday, October 22, 2022, at our Syracuse, NY pastoral ministry ~ Assumption Church, with a reception to follow at the Saint Marianne Cope Shrine & Museum, a ministry of her Order ~ The Sisters of Saint Francis of the Neumann Communities. The Mass was celebrated by Bishop Douglas J. Lucia. Assumption Church is home to a small shrine honoring Saint Marianne Cope who once walked the streets of the Northside neighborhood providing care and love to all. “Mother Marianne” was a native of Syracuse, NY, who had strong ties to our friars, the people of Assumption Church and the greater community. She made Hawaii her final home and her remains were transported from Syracuse to the Cathedral Basilica of Our Lady of Peace, in Honolulu, in July of 2014. Her Feast Day is celebrated on January 23rd. During the October 22nd Mass, she was hailed as a “living Gospel” by Bishop Lucia who imparted the final blessing with a relic of St. Marianne (see below).
During the Mass in honor of St. Marianne Cope, friar Joe had the privilege of serving Bishop Lucia. He is pictured here as the Bishop blessed those present with a relic of this great saint. [Photo Cred: The Catholic Sun]
For more information on life as a Franciscan Friar Conventual,
contact our Province Vocation Directors,
Fr. Manny Vasconcelos, OFM Conv. and Br. Nick Romeo, OFM Conv.
at vocations@olaprovince.org
or visit FranciscanVoice.org.
Reflection by Fr. Ed Ondrako, OFM Conv.
CAN I KNOW TRUTH?
(Part Ten: INTERIORITY – THE INDELIBLE MARK OF A HUMAN BEING) [1]
12 Days on Pilgrimage in August
“I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (Jn. 14:6).
Interiority is a golden thread that is present from St. John Henry Newman’s Anglican years through his Catholic years. If it is true that he was an absent father at Vatican II, one undeniable reason is that the development of doctrine which characterized all of the serious discussions during the Council was anticipated by his yet unequaled historical study of seven notes, markers, or tests to discern true development of doctrine.[2] A second reason, his developing Mariology, needs retrieval, not for its apparent severity, but for its truth. (I have written about Newman, the development of doctrine and his Mariology.)[3] A third, Newman’s interiority, is the scope of this reflection, for in interiority he found the influences of his friends, the events of his past, and growth in intimacy with God.
By 1845, privileged with an Oxford education, erudite and a deeply committed Anglican, Newman diagnosed and lamented a new world of assumption that had already dispatched the old belief system and its impact on him and his reform-minded Tractarians. Newman and his Tractarians were critically diagnosing the problem of a particular form of using reason without faith[4] that was leading more and more to the incoherent position he met at Oxford.[5] Real concrete interiority as the indelible mark of a human being is a theme that spans Newman’s work. Interiority became the antinomy to enthusiastic and self-congratulatory modernity that was being driven by belief that it should be reproducing itself. The evacuation of the interiority of the person, a defining mark of rationalism, is the great difference between the rationalists and Newman.
Imagine if the mind were to re-present the world and function normatively as an impersonal calculator of probabilities. Newman’s argument for interiority is based on the convergence of probabilities. The difficulties that continue are the prerogatives of free inquiry and the rights of private judgment as interpreted by modernity as rising above the thinking person. If that person has a religious training about virtue, charity in justice, even holiness, Newman was concerned about the corrosive effect of John Locke’s arguments portraying the mind as static and passive and the person as intrinsically atomistic, a theory that is the opposite of holistic. At stake is the integral development of the whole person, which has implications regarding the responsibility of every person. Newman and his Tractarian friends were making the turn towards the concrete and integral form of interiority, while rationalism in general and rationalist forms of Christianity were advancing an abstract and atomistic version in modernity.
Retrieval of the seventeenth century Anglican divines (Hooker, Bull, Lancelot Andrewes) by Newman and the Tractarians may have held the highest degree of conviction for Newman at that time, because they retain key elements of the pre-Reformation Christian period in England. Newman used all the resources of rhetoric to persuade his contemporaries and us later moderns to know how to critically engage and to call out counterfeits of Christianity. I am limiting this reflection to the claim that the indelible mark of a human being is real concrete interiority and taking for granted that the backdrop of modern ideological forces at work are known, even if not all. The counterfeit of Christianity asserts that human beings are fully explicable in rationalist or naturalist terms. To a Christian who believes in mystery, especially the gift of the Son of God (Jn 1:14) as Savior and Redeemer, the rationalist is eliminating mystery and replacing it with problem. The restrictions put on Christianity by the rationalistic mindset threaten its survival.
Newman’s interiority and Vatican II “call out” Christian counterfeits. Lumen Gentium, an engine driving Vatican II [n. 37], presents the responsibilities of laity with rights to receive in abundance from spiritual shepherds the goods of the Church, via the word of God and the sacraments. The laity help the shepherds without usurping their responsibilities. Another driving engine of Vatican II, The Pastoral Constitution on The Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes,[6] may be a metaphor for the interiority that animated Newman as Anglican and Catholic. “All of the faithful, whether clerics or laity, possess a lawful freedom of inquiry, freedom of thought and of expressing their mind with humility and fortitude in those matters on which they enjoy competence” [n. 62]. No free passes are given to criminal shepherds or to usurpers.
When Pope Saint John XXIII opened the Council in 1962, he began with his preference for the medicine of mercy rather than severity. “Holy Mother Church rejoices by the singular gift of Divine Providence and the help of the virgin Mother of God. The problem from the beginning of the Church remains: people are either with Him and His Church or not.” He knew that it will no longer do to trot out stale old arguments as if they could meet the challenges presented by the emergent secular world that finds them incomprehensible.[7] In 1849, Newman [8] lamented that the Reformers made a concerted effort to have Catholic doctrine on Mary forgotten. They plotted the overthrow of Christian faith in the sixteenth century and found that reviling and blaspheming the prerogatives of Mary would get the world to dishonor the Mother. Newman’s “call out” was to those who would enervate Christianity by dishonoring the Mother. They were missing the consequence that by dishonoring her, dishonoring of her Son would follow.[9] How prophetic! Surprise of surprises, Newman became the greatest Catholic Mariologist of the nineteenth century. “The truth enlightens man’s intelligence and shapes his freedom, leading him to know and love the Lord” (John Paul II, The Splendor of Truth).
Fr. Ed Ondrako, OFM Conv. Univ. of Notre Dame, eondrako@alumni.nd.edu
______________________
[1] C. O’Regan, “Newman and the Affliction of Modernity” in Church Life Journal, McGrath Institute for Church Life University of Notre Dame, (7 October 2022). See the contradictions claiming followers.
[2] The seven notes are: 1.) preservation of type; 2.) continuity of principles; 3.) the power of assimilation; 4.) logical sequence; 5.) anticipation of the future; 6.) conserving action upon its past; 7.) lasting vigor.
[3] E. Ondrako, Newman and Gladstone, 1994, Rebuild My Church, 2021, Remembering Forward, 2022.
[4] See Pope John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, Encyclical Letter, 1998, for his update of Newman’s worry.
[5] R. Whately was Newman’s mentor. By 1828, he was drifting dangerously in the direction of rationalism.
[6] See The Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, ch. 4, n. 37.
[7] C. O’Regan, “Newman and the Affliction of Modernity,” 2022.
[8] Fr. Fehlner is as direct about the hatred of the Reformers for the thought of Bl. John Duns Scotus.
[9] J. H. Newman, Discourses to Mixed Congregations (London: uniform edition, 1849), discourse 17, 18.
[10] S. Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 7, Preface.
Fr. Edward J. Ondrako, OFM Conventual
Research Fellow Pontifical Faculty of St. Bonaventure, Rome
Visiting Scholar, McGrath Institute for Church Life
University of Notre Dame
Feast Day of Saint Crispin & Saint Crispinian ~ October 25, 2022
