Brendan,

I am sure that you are here only because of God’s mercy. It is what you seek but it is also that which motivates you and has brought you to this point in your life, and our lives. What you are about to do is to make public your conversion. That which in most of us is a slow process of becoming aware of the God who is at work in each us. Making profession is making others aware of what has happened within you. Not for us a private, personal drawing closer to God, but today we all want the outward sign of the inward grace which has been nibbling away in you for some time. On your personal journey of faith you want to take others with you. You want to tell others the good news that you experience. So in a few moments you will make profession and vow obedience— two things.

Dominican profession is more than just making a vow, though it includes it. What is actually going on is more than the simple act of placing your hands in mine and taking an oath. In making profession you are taking steps in your conversion. These public steps are a preaching. You are publicly stating that you are converting away from at least three aspects of life to show the world that there is more to life than that which our senses perceive.

Inside the Palazzo Pubblico, the dignified Town Hall of Siena, is Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s cycle of frescoes of the Allegories and the Effects of Good and Bad Government painted between 1337 and 1339. The frescoes were commissioned by the Council of the Nine, a régime which retained power in Siena until 1355, after having preserved its peace and prosperity for some sixty years. A wise old man symbolizes the Common Good while a patchwork of neat fields, tame boar and busy hoers suggests order and prosperity. Bad Government is a desolate place, razed to the ground by a diabolical tyrant, the Sienese wolf at his feet. Lorenzetti’s civic masterpiece, Siena’s icon of the Common Good, documents the Catholic social tradition which recent papal teachings reaffirm in their critique of both Marxism and laissez-faire capitalism. Lorenzetti’s frescoes are not only decorative and celebratory, but they are also didactic; for this was the primary object of all medieval painting. The frescoes, a distillation of Augustinian and Thomist thought, are designed for the eyes of Siena’s ruling 61ite, for few, outside of that charmed group, ever penetrated to the innermost rooms of the Palazzo Pubblico. It is clearly the Nine who are addressed by the words which appear above the head of Justice in the fresco: “Love Justice, you who rule the earth.” The frescoes state the obligations of the governor to the governed, rather than the obligations of the governed to the governing.

The Confessions of Saint Augustine’ have been esteemed throughout the centuries for the literary elegance with which their author integrates self-disclosure, compunction, and analysis of the human and redeemed condition. For all the claims made for this classic, however, rarely has it been noted that prime among Augustine’s intentions in writing was to convey a definitive point of view regarding the orthopraxy of the Church. This article maintains that central to the Confessions is an unequivocal instruction regarding the reading and interpretation of texts. Written between 397 and 401, only a few years following Augustine’s succession in 395 to the see of Hippo, the Confessions are a study of the place of texts in the community. Furthermore, they are an explicit defence of the bishop’s primacy in the governance of a community’s texts.

No matter what his topic at any given moment, Augustine’s attention throughout the Confessions scarcely deviates from the issues of speech, language, poetics, and, ultimately, scripture. Augustine plumbs their meaning throughout, returning repeatedly to how all these function for ill or good within community. Cognizant of the extent to which language and texts can abet fallen human nature and lead towards its worst proclivities, Augustine admonishes readers ever to beware of the potential of texts to deceive, endanger, and enslave. To note only this, however, would be to remain ignorant of the author’s far more important conviction. If some words can entrap, cannot different words liberate? The scriptural Word of the psalms, which Augustine quotes so profligately that his own voice

The two paths led Georges Lemaitre (1894-1966), the Belgian priest who became a founding father of modem cosmology, to the farthest reaches of the universe. The centenary of his birth fell on 17 July; his face, accompanied by the “primeval atom”, is currently featured on Belgium’s stamps.

Born in Charleroi, in the heart of French-speaking Belgium, he planned to become an engineer. But service in the First World War turned his thoughts to the priesthood, and he was ordained by Cardinal Mercier in 1923. After further mathematical studies in Cambridge and in the USA he returned to Louvain in 1927 as Professor of Astronomy, and remained there (apart from frequent travels) for the rest of his career.

The 1920’s were exciting years in astronomy. In 1919, the team led by Arthur (later Sir Arthur) Eddington, Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge, to the island of Principe had observed the bending of light near the sun that provided the first proof of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. In 1925, Hubble’s observations yielded the first evidence that the distant nebulae are separate galaxies, and that they are receding from us.

Lemaitre's achievement in those years was to show, in a famous paper of 1927, that the Einstein model of the universe could not be static: it must either expand or contract.

W.E.B. Dubois, speaking of his experience of being a black man in North America in 1903, wrote:

For Dubois, the greatest injustice that African-Americans faced was not the outright malevolence of the ignorant, but the general tendency of even the enlightened to assume that blacks, by virtue of their being physically different from the majority of those in the dominant ethos, posed some kind of problem that needed to be addressed. Even those who “accepted” Dubois and treated him respectfully caused him to wonder why he needed to be “accepted” in the first place, and why he could not assume the respect of others. Dubois realized that the oppression and injustice he experienced was deeply rooted in the very presumption that his physical distinctiveness outweighed the immense commonality he shared with others and called into question his status not only in this culture but in the human community.