The next lunchtime talk will be delivered by Peter Slodowy (Missionary of the Holy Face) on The Turin Shroud in the 21st Century. The talk will be in the Library on Wednesday 28th June at 1pm. Donations are welcome and no reservations are required.

Pope John Paul II on a pastoral visit to Turin in 1998 said, "The Shroud is a challenge to our intelligence. It first of all requires of every person, particularly the researcher, that he humbly grasp the profound message it sends to his reason and his life. The mysterious fascination of the Shroud forces questions to be raised about the sacred Linen and the historical life of Jesus. Since it is not a matter of faith, the Church has no specific competence to pronounce on these questions. She entrusts to scientists the task of continuing to investigate, so that satisfactory answers may be found to the questions connected with this Sheet, which, according to tradition, wrapped the body of our Redeemer after he had been taken down from the cross. The Church urges that the Shroud be studied without pre-established positions that take for granted results that are not such; she invites them to act with interior freedom and attentive respect for both scientific methodology and the sensibilities of believers.

For the believer, what counts above all is that the Shroud is a mirror of the Gospel. In fact, if we reflect on the sacred Linen, we cannot escape the idea that the image it presents has such a profound relationship with what the Gospels tell of Jesus' passion and death, that every sensitive person feels inwardly touched and moved at beholding it. Whoever approaches it is also aware that the Shroud does not hold people's hearts to itself, but turns them to him, at whose service the Father's loving providence has put it. Therefore, it is right to foster an awareness of the precious value of this image, which everyone sees and no one at present can explain. For every thoughtful person it is a reason for deep reflection, which can even involve one's life. The Shroud is thus a truly unique sign that points to Jesus, the true Word of the Father, and invites us to pattern our lives on the life of the One who gave himself for us."

So to all readers the Library invites you to spend an hour considering the evidence and significance of the Shroud.

A reminder to readers of Fr. David Cartwright's talk on Catholic Devotions on Wednesday 28th May at 1pm in the Library. Fr. Cartwright is presently parish priest of St. Fidelis', Moreland, and in his talk will be giving special emphasis on Marian devotions, their theological foundation and spiritual development. For all those curious about this important expression of the Catholic faith or desiring to place their own devotions on a more solid foundation, this talk will hopefully provide you with the answers.

The Library would like to thank all those who made the launch of RJ Stove’s book and the first Bookmarks talk such a success, in particular Mr. Hugh Henry for his introduction to the book and to Rob himself for accepting the invitation to host the event at the Library.

The talk itself was well-attended, with more than thirty music-lovers filling the meeting room to hear stories of the great composers, with a dash of politics and religion to go with them. Perhaps all that was missing was a performance of Rob’s works.

So thank you again to those who came, some photos will follow, and we look forward to seeing the rest of you at the next talk.

Public Talk by Sen. Barnaby Joyce

The Catholic Media Group will be hosting a public talk by Senator Barnaby Joyce on "Philosophies and Ethics in Politics" on Monday 19th May 2008 at 6pm in the Library. The talk will be followed by a light supper and drinks.

The cost of the evening will be $10 and those intending attending should RSVP by Sunday 16th May to cclibrarybookmarks@gmail.com

The Catholic Media Group is an informal network of journalists established in April 2007 to provide a forum to discuss ethical and work-related issues, and create a network of Catholic professionals in the journalistic field. Though it exists to serve its members, talks held by the Group are open to general public and all members of the Library are most welcome to attend.

2008 Cardinal Knox Lecture

Professor Greg Craven, Vice-Chancellor of Australian Catholic University, will be delivering the 2008 Cardinal Knox Lecture on The Catholic Intellectual: An Extinct Species on Wednesday 14th May at 7:30 pm. The venue for the lecture will be the Knox Room at Catholic Theological College.

Professor Craven is a columnist for several national papers, and authority on constitutional and public law.

As the Library play an important role in the intellectual development of Catholics this will be of particular interest to our members, so please do attend.

To reserve a seat please contact Catholic Theological College by email at ctc@ctc.edu.au or phone on 94123314 by Friday 9th May.

The Age reports the State Government has invested $10.4 million towards raising the profile of Melbourne as a home for writers and writing, A third of the funds will be directed towards a new Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas based at the State Library of Victoria, as part of a bid to become only the second UNESCO City of Literature. The remaining funds will be for a program of public events at the Centre. This is in addition to $9 million which the Government has already invested for repairs to the State Library and support of the Melbourne Writer's Festival.

In the same paper, the Entertainment section includes a review of a cabaret-comedy show performed by a Darwin-based librarian. In Librarian Idol Andrew Finegan attempts to challenge the sterotype of librarians as awkward, introverted, myopic and just plain boring. While doubtful as to the success of his performance, Finegan does at least manage to convey the idea that libraries are not just for scholars and students, nor are they mere repositories of knowledge. Rather they are spaces where anyone, especially the homeless and mentally ill, can find comfort, convervation and above all, a sense of their human dignity.

Bookmarks 1

This year the Library will commence a series of evening book launches and talks entitled Bookmarks, which will highlight the literary achievements of a number of our members.

For our first Bookmark, the Library is pleased to host the launch of Rob Stove's A Student's Guide to Music History (published by Intercollegiate Studies Institue) on Thursday May 8th at 6:00 pm.

Rob is an accomplished composer and organist, as well as an contributing editor at the American Conservative and writer of two other books: Prince of Music: Palestrina and His World and The Unsleeping Eye: Secret Police and Their Victims. Rob's articles have appeared in The New Criterion, Chronicles Magazine, National Observer, Oriens and Annals Australasia. He is a graduate of the NSW Conservatorium High School and University of Sydney, with majors in History and Italian.

With the musical theme in mind, let us read what Pope Benedict XVI writes in Feast of Faith on its religious siginificance:

[St] Thomas says that through the praise of God man ascends to God. Praise itself is a movement, a path; it is more than understanding, knowing, and doing - it is an "ascent", a way of reaching him who dwells amid the praises of the angels. Thomas mentioned another factor: this ascent draws man away from what is opposed to God. Anyone who has ever experienced the transforming power of great liturgy, great art, great music, will know this. Thomas adds that the sound of musical praise leads us and others to a sense of reverence. It awakens the inner man, as [St] Augustine had discovered in Milan. With Augustine the academic, a man who had come to appreciate Christianity as a philosophy but was uneasy about the Church herself, which seemed to have a lot of vulgarity about her, it was the singing Church which gave him a shattering experience, penetrating the whole man, and which led him forward on the way to the Church. From this point of view, the other, pedagogical aspect, the "stimulating of others to praise God" becomes meaningful and intelligble, particularly when we recall that "pedagogy" meant for the ancients, namely, a leading to one's real nature, a process of redemption and liberation.

Attention Chestertonians

The Australian Chesterton Society and the G.K. Chesterton Institute for Faith & Culture will be jointly sponsoring a conference with the theme Redeeming the Culture: The Reforming Vision of G.K. Chesterton. The conference will focus on the enduring value of Chesterton's thought, especially in light of the centenary of publication of Orthodoxy and The Man Who Was Thursday.

The conference will be on the weekend of June 30 - July 2 at Campion College and will be an excellent opportunity for younger Catholics to discover this giant of Catholicism as they prepare for World Youth Day. Speakers include Sheridan Gilley (Emeritus Reader in Theology, Durham University), Thomas Storck (Board Member of the Chesterton Review) and Karl Schmude (President of the Chesterton Society and guest speaker at the Library's own conference in 2006).

For further information please contact Karl by email on kschmude@northnet.com.au or phone on 0407721458.

Off the Shelves 8

For our next extract we are pleased to introduce Hilda Graef (1907-1970), best known for her translations of the Church Father and works on Christian mysticism. In Modern Gloom and Christian Hope (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1959) she examines the literature of those who "portray the dark sides of life and stress the meaninglessness of existence" such as Kierkegaard, de Beauvoir, Osborne and Mauriac. This extract is taken from the final chapter, contains some thought provoking lines on reason and human existence.

We are living in an age of wars and rumours of wars, under the threat of H-bombs, horrifying dictatorships, and general uncertainty. Yet, except for the wider technical powers for destruction, is our time so very much more insecure than other ages, do we have more reason for gloom and despair that former generations? There have always been wars, and they have by no means always been restricted only to the actual combatants- rape and arosn, murder of women and children, famine and disease have always been their horrible accompaniments. Even in he Europ of the Middle Ages, so often regarded as a paradise of Christian life and virtue, the daily life of the citizen was most insecure, the traveling merchant was always in dagner of being robbed and murdered, and the absence of medical knowledge made epidemics far more dangerous and widespread than they are now: In the midst of life we are surrounde by death," says the author of a medieval hymn. So it has always been and so it wil remain to the Last Day.

It is not therefore the greater insecurity of modern life that produces the pessimistic outlook of contemporary thinkers- and we must remember that the "Father" of existentialism and all its melancholy offspring lived in the extraordinarily secure atmosphere of nineteenth century Denmark. No. Political circumstances have little to do with it, and not even personal material circumstances- for nearly all the outstanding exponents of gloom are highly successful authors. The spiritual situation of these writers is similar to that of the ancient pagans before their conversion to Christianity, of whom St. Paul says in his Letter to the Ephesians that they had no hope and were without God in the world. For hope is inseperable from God; if we have lost belief in God, there is nothing left to sustain us in the trials and difficulties of our life. Yet it is true that there have at all times been many unbelievers who have not held the utterly black, despairing view of life which is prevalent in our own times, and, on the other hand, some of the pessimistic authors analyzed in thes epages such as Kierkegaard, Mauriac, Graham Greene, are believing Christians. There must be something that custs across even the demarcation line that separates believers from unbelievers. Here, too, we can trace the roots of "modern" pessimism back to Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard had been disappointed in reason, which he more or less equated with the system of Hegel, and he had also been disappoined in love, in his broken engagement with Regine Olsen. Besides, his relationship with his stern, unbending father had had a very unhappy influence on his own life. That is to say the principal factors in human existence had gone wrong for him. Human Fatherhood is a reflection of the divine Fatherhood, human reason the created image of the Word of God, the Logos, Himself the image of the Father, and human love the earthly image of the Holy Spirit, the divine Person who is the bond of love between the Father and the Son. If all these become distorted in one way or another, the human mirror which was meant to reflect the divine life is broken, and what it reflects is not an image, but a caricature.

Perhaps the most serious distortion was brough about by Kierkegaard's depreciation of reason. Man is traditionally defined as the "rational animal", for his reason is the trait that distinguishes him most radically from all other living things. True, reason can be overestimated, as was done in the so-called Enlightenment of the eighteenth century which resulted in the dethronement of the "goddess reason" in the French Revolution of 1789. In this case God will be denied, because He can never be fully comprehended by reason. But the human being will still be respected and the world will be seen as subject to man, this part of the creation account in Genesis will at least still appear to be valid. Nevertheless, rationalism carries the germ of its own destruction, because this is a fallen world, its subjection to man is no longer complete, and man himself is subject to death and suffering. This is why existentialism is so horribly plausible to our contemporaries, especially as the fallacy of an optimistic rationalism stands out very forcefully against a background of suffering and irrational destruction brought about by the social and political upheavals of our time. For, as Camus and Sartre have rightly seen, man's reason revolts against death and suffering, and as life necessarily ends in one, and contains a goodly amount of the other, they feel that it is governed by absurdity- as indeed is only to be expected if human existence is a "being thrown" from nought to nought, as Heidegger has it.

But man cannot deny reason with impunity. When he drives it out by the front door, it will return by the backdoor and play havoc with his most cherished beliefs- or unbeliefs. For the Genesis story about Adam, who was told by God to give names to the animals He had created, contains a profound truth. The earth was made for man, man can understand and use it, because he has been given reason; if he could not do so, if the world were wholly absurd and closed to all reasoning, man would long have perished, for he could never have subjected it as he has actually done. But there is, indeed, an irrational element in the world, there are powers that play havoc with man's labours, though far less so than our professional pessmists would have us believe. Christianity has never denied this- quite the contrary. The reason for this element of "absurdity", for man's very incomplete mastery of nature, for suffering and death, is Original Sin; that is man's failure to submit to God. Ma's revolt is the cause of nature's revolt and of death itself, of all the "dread " which henceforth is part and parcel of human life; precisely because man was not originally made for death and decay, but for eternal happiness.

The Christian is far from denying thes enegative elements in human existence; they are there, and they have their own part to play. But this does not invalidte reason nor does it permit us to consider human life and the world in which it is lived as absurd. And if the existentialists call for engagement, if they try to better the lot of the human race- however mistaken the means they may often adopt towards this end- does not just this make nonsense of all their assumptions? Sartre says "Hell is the others" (L'enfer, c'est les autres), and proceeds straighaway to join the communist party which has no room for the self-sufficient isolation expressed in this dictum. The old pagans, who, in St. Paul's words, knoew not God and were without hope in the world, would not have dreamt of engagement, and devotion to the betterment of the human lot. For how can despair and the belief in total absurdity lead to such an engagement, except to prove that the cult of the absurd is itself absurd; that man simply cannot live without a meaning to his life? We can deny reason on paper, in "clever" books and novels and plays- we cannot deny it in our own lives. Reason belongs inescapably to our human existence.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born of Jewish and Protestant ancestry, she abandoned her faith as a child and became immersed in the political and social upheaval of her native Germany. At seventeen she visited a Catholic church, where she felt an immediate attraction to its ceremonies and devotions but she was still very much an unbeliever. After finishing school she studied English and religion at the University of Berlin, with hopes of becoming a fashion journalist, but her mother did not approve and she settled on becoming a teacher. The ascendancy of the Nazi party forced her to emigrate to England, where she was employed at a private school until offered a bursary to study Anglican theology. In her second year while studying the teachings of the Church Fathers she discovered the reasonableness of Christianity and absurdity of her German Lutheran teachers.

Taking her examination in 1940, she graduated with a first class degree, conferred by the Archbishop of Canterbury himself, but owing to her nationality could not find any work. Forced to live off charity, she found plenty of time to immersed herself in the works of St. Thomas Aquinas, St. John of the Cross, GK Chesterton and RH Benson, interspersed with the Spiritual Exercises. Naturally such reading led her to accept the Catholic faith and she was received into the Church in 1941. To support herself she began writing articles on mysticism in Blackfriars and on German affairs in The Tablet. Her knowledge of Greek also led to an appointment as assistant to the editor of a lexicon of Patristic Greek.

Approached by Mercier Press to submit a manuscript for publication, she edited and expanded her articles in Blackfriars, which was published as The Way of the Mystics. This was followed by yet another request to write on the stigmatist, Therese Neumann, who had recently been in the news. At first sceptial about Neumann, she agredd to the work and to assist in her research made a trip to Konnersreuth. There she interviewed her but was unable to observe the stigmata owing to the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Returning to Oxford she worked on her first translation from the Church Fathers, St. Gregory of Nyssa's sermons on the Beatitudes and Lord's prayer. While working on the translation she received two letters, one from a Dominican nun, the other a Capuchin priest, enquiring if she knew of Edith Stein. This led to yet another pilgrimage to places associated with the future saint and the result was The Scholar and the Cross.

At the prompting of her mother, who had joined her in England, she wrote her autobiography, From Fashions to the Fathers, and a few years later her monumental two volume history of Marian doctrine and devotion. However her greatest interest continued to be mysticism and she explored it in greater depth in her works Mystics of Our Times, The Light and the Rainbow, and The Story of Mysticism.

Off the Shelves 7

Continuing with the theme of contemporary philosophers we present Fr. Stanley Jaki OSB.

Fr. Jaki is a Hungarian-born priest of the Benedictine Order, member of the Pontifical Academy for Science and receipient of the Templeton Prize in 1987. Holding doctorates in both physics and theology, his publications have covered such diverse subjects as the Bible, clerical celibacy, Pierre Duhem, John Henry Newman, papacy, history and philosophy of science. In Means to Message: A Treatise on Truth (Grand Rapids: William B Eerdmans, 1999) he provides a "rigorous, highly original presentation of the claim that any consistent philosophy must be steeped in a realist epistemology that is fully open to metaphysics." The folowing is from chapter 1.

A book with the subtitle, "a treatise on truth", must, from its inception on, convey its author's resolve to face up to the question: What is truth? The question evokes Pilate's skepticism as well as Francis Bacon's observation: "'What is truth? said jesting Pilate and would not stay for an answer.'" The reader is asked to stay for the length of a few paragraphs to see the first intimaitons of the answer to be unfolded in this treatise which is emphatically meant to be on truth and not on a set of opinions about it. Those who find ths dogmatic may very well reflect for a moment whether it is not the same dogmatism that motivates their reaction. An apparently detached but actually unswerving, that is, dogmatic adherence to this or that "opinion" or even to one's "considered view" should seem less commednable than an undisguised presentation of this or that statement of truth, even if this presses for dogmatism.

Opinions about truth are legion and invariably have a dogmatic touch to them. All the hundred and fifty or so dicta on truth in Mencken's New Dictionary of Quotations lay down something very definite. It is affirmed that th value of truth is priceless, that truth is universal, that ultimately truth would triumph, that children and fools are alike prompt with it, that truth and roses are equally endowed with thorns, that truth is naked as well as tough. AMong these dicta there is, however, only one that would qualify as an answer to the question, What is Truth? Even Shakespeare's answer, "Truth is truth, until the end of reckoning", is in part an apparent tautology and in part an assertion of truth's exacting nature. Shakespeare, to whom we owe many pithy statements, full of philosophical depth, could, of course, very well suggest that truth was tuth because it was irreducible to anything else and the reckoning merely separated truth from falsehood.

In Mencken's list, which is chronological, three scores of names are from antiquity, Tertullian being the last of them. The next in the list is Wyclif. The two are separated by twelve centuries, most of them medieval centuries, all apparently void of quotable remarks about truth. Yet to that age belongs a definition of truth which would certainly pass for a straight answer to the plain question, What is Truth. The answer, "adequatio rei ad intellectum", is Aquinas' definition of truth. It often turns up in modern reflections on philosophy in proof of the universally shared conviction that truth somehow be connected with reality. [1]

Instead of relaity it may be better to speak of objects. The immediate and pressing reason for speaking of objects rather than of reality, does not lie in the incredibly vast extent and variety of meanings that can and have been attached to the word truth. The reason relates to the title of this book, "means to message". Whenever a philosopher offers the kind of message which is philosophy, it must contain, at the very minimum, a justification of the means used to convey the message to beings no less real than the author himself. The means therefore is not a medium, or a tool contrived for the purpose of making the message indistinguishable from its packaging or even subordinate to it. Whereas Marshall McLuhan of "the medium is the message" fame helped focus on this widespread abuse in communications, he did not care to disentangle the means from the medium. As a result he unwittingly fueled an abuse already reaching crisis proportions in public discourse, where what counts is no longer the message but the manner in which it is perceived. This sinister trend has not spared discourse about philosophy. In the "publish or perish" syndrome the book counts more than its message, which, to make all this worse, hardly ever contains even a fleeting reflection of the truth of the book itself.

[1] "Adequatio rei ad intellectum" is translated "the conformity of what is conceived in the mind with what actually exists outside the mind."