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In this Holy Week in a time of separation from our friends, we prepare ourselves for the celebration of our Lord’s Resurrection. This year, most of us will witness via video feed—rather than participate in—the Easter Vigil when the celebrant processes into a darkened sanctuary with the Paschal candle and chants: “Lumen Christi. Deo Gratias.” “The Light of Christ. Thanks be to God.” At the Lumen Christi Institute, as we anticipate Easter and pray for the medical professionals and scientists who seek to protect us from pandemic, we are mindful of the 5^th anniversary of the death of Archbishop Francis Cardinal George, O.M.I. and are thankful for his witness to the light of the Gospel.

After drafting the prospectus for the Lumen Christi Institute, we met with Archbishop Francis George in June 1997 not long after his appointment to head the Church of Chicago on April 8, 1997—23 years ago today. A few weeks after meeting with the Cardinal in June 1997, we met with—and recruited as a member of our Board of Advisors—an old friend of the Cardinal, Fr. Benedict Ashley, O.P. Ashley provided a special link to the history of the University of Chicago, for had become a believer and converted to Catholicism as an undergraduate in the honors Great Books seminar of Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler at the University of Chicago. Keeping in mind my reflections from last week, I remember how Ashley urged us to make the conversation between science and religion central to our mission.
 

In the Spring of 1999—a year and a half after the Institute was incorporated—Fr. Ashley spent a term with us as a visiting fellow and offered a credit course on “God and Creation in Thomas Aquinas and Modern Science.” In April of that Spring, haning taken up Ashley’s challenge, we hosted the philosopher of science Joseph Zycinski, a protégé of Pope John Paul II, who was appointed by his mentor to be Archbishop of Lublin.
 

Zycinski gave a brilliant lecture on “The Dialogue Between Religion and Science in John Paul II’s Vision of Interdisciplinary Research.” He also gave the keynote address for a symposium on John Paul’s encyclical on faith and reason, Fides et Ratio.  Science and religion has remained a key focus of our programming. More recently in 2017, we worked with physicist Stephen Barr to organize and co-sponsor the first conference of the Society of Catholic Scientists, which he founded.  In 2019, we received a grant from the Templeton Foundation to develop our Program in Science and Religion, taking Zycinski’s statement of John Paul II’s vision of a “dialogue between science and religion” as an organizing principle.
 

The Institute’s collaboration with Stephen Barr began when he attended a national meeting we organized on science and religion in May of 2007. The meeting opened with a public lecture at the University of Chicago by Leon Kass on “Science, Religion, and the Human Future.” It was the first occasion—since his move to Washington, DC to Chair the President’s Council on Bioethics—that Kass had returned to speak at the University of Chicago, where he had been Professor in the Committee on Social Thought.
 

Looking at photos of the event, I was reminded that Cardinal George attended Leon Kass’s lecture. Looking through old emails, I found this note from Kass: “I was deeply touched by your generous remarks about my work with the Council. Thank you too for creating the climate for a fine dinner conversation and, most especially, for the privilege and honor of being seated with Cardinal George, a man I admire enormously.”
 

When Francis George was first appointed archbishop of Chicago 23 years ago today, like most of the rest of Chicago, we thought: “who is this guy?” Few had anticipated his appointment, least of all himself.  When we learned that, like our colleague University of Chicago philosopher Jean-Luc Marion, Francis George had been a member of the board of the international theological journal Communio (co-founded by Fr. Joseph Ratzinger) and that Francis George had written his doctoral dissertation on the pragmatist University of Chicago philosopher George Herbert Mead, we knew that we had special reason to give thanks: the Pope had appointed a “University of Chicago” intellectual as archbishop.
 

(We soon learned that he never lost the common touch coming from his working-class upbringing as a Cubs fan in St. Pascal’s parish on Chicago’s North Side. I remember saying in jest to Fr. Willard Jabusch—Calvert House Chaplain and native of Beverly on Chicago’s far south side: “Sure, Cardinal George is very supportive of our work. But can we really trust him? Remember! He’s from the North Side!”)
 

Kidding aside, Cardinal George’s presence at the lecture of Leon Kass was a sign not only of his esteem for Kass’s intellect and integrity, it was also a sign of the role the Lumen Christi Institute played in organizing some of the Cardinal’s recreational outings. For other bishops, breaks from the pressure of committee meetings and official business might come in golf outings; for Cardinal George—survivor of an earlier epidemic of polio and no longer able to play sports—a Lumen Christi event was a welcome opportunity to knock around—not golf balls—but ideas.

While the first time we hosted Cardinal George at the University of Chicago was for a symposium on the “The Catholic Scholar and the Secular University” organized with the Catholic Common Ground Project founded by Cardinal Bernardin, it was his participation in the symposium on Fides et Ratio noted above that revealed to us the Cardinal’s gifts as a thinker. The two prior respondents were the chair of the University of Chicago’s Department of Philosophy, Daniel Garber, and philosopher Jean-Luc Marion. Unfortunately, this event took place before we taped events. From my recollection, Cardinal George was able to briefly state the crux of the argument of the encyclical, relate it to the situation of philosophy and American culture today, and respond to the issues raised by earlier speakers. He demonstrated a remarkable ability to think on his feet.
 

A passage from the first book he published with the assistance of the Lumen Christi Institute offers an indication of how he expressed himself that day in speaking of how in making the case for Catholic belief one needs both faith and reason.

Doubt that human reason can understand the truth of things as they are is the result of a rationalism that separates human thought from any relationship to the data of God’s self-revelation. In such a cultural milieu, the new apologetics must therefore be grounded in a philosophy that grants the sciences their rightful autonomy but not a hegemony; it must make use of a philosophy that is open to contemporary concepts, especially those that promote an appreciation for human subjectivity and for the centrality of human freedom in our experience. In an effective apologetics, reason finds itself strengthened in its dialogue with faith, and vice versa.

The Difference God Makes, p. 71
 

This Fall Dr. John Haas—former President of The National Catholic Bioethics Center—mentioned to me a comment made to him in November 2014 by Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI in a conversation in his retirement residence at the Vatican. Pope Benedict said that Cardinal George was “one of the most brilliant men he had ever known, and that it was a blessing to have known him.” Many of us would say the same thing.  Just remember that he was from the North Side.

-Thomas Levergood, Executive Director

The Lumen Christi Institute has been awarded a $30,000 grant from the OSV Institute for a program that will introduce teens in Chicagoland to the Catholic vision of intellectual life, culture, and liturgy. The program will be run by Lumen Christi’s Newman Forum for High School Students.
 

“We at Lumen Christi are deeply grateful to the OSV Institute for once again partnering with us to broaden the reach and exposure to Catholic intellectual tradition,” said Thomas Levergood, executive director of the Lumen Christi Institute. “We are confident that this project will bear fruit for the Church as she witnesses significant cultural developments in the 21st century.”

Very few teens in the region have exposure to the Church’s intellectual tradition, but the high school years are exactly when students begin to ask questions about the rationality of the faith, the relationship between science and religion, and the truth of the doctrines. By waiting until college to address these questions, Catholic ministries have by default ceded teenage intellectual formation to a secular culture. Moreover, since 90 percent of Catholic teens will attend non-Catholic colleges and universities, most young Catholics are deprived of any contact with the intellectual and spiritual resources of the faith.

To address this need, the Lumen Christi Institute, in partnership with Mundelein Seminary and the Archdiocese of Chicago Vocation Office, launched the Newman Forum for High School Students. Newman Forum events cover a range of topics from the Catholic intellectual tradition and respond to particular obstacles to the faith, lead students more deeply into the faith tradition, and correct common historical or cultural misunderstandings.

As part of its regular programming for 2019-2020, the Newman Forum hosted more than forty students and their parents for a daylong seminar on St. John Henry Newman at the University of Chicago Oct. 19. A second event that investigated creation from the perspectives of physics and aesthetics drew more than 110 students, parents, and teachers to the University of Chicago Feb. 15.

Two events for smaller groups were organized. The first, “How NOT to get away with murder,” which was a close reading of Genesis 3 and 4, drew ten students to St. John Cantius Church Jan. 21. The date for the second event, “Answering your atheist philosophy professor: reading and responding to a New York Times editorial,” is yet to be determined.

The Newman Forum has also launched online programming. Its first event, held on April 2, was a reprise of “How NOT to get away with murder.”

Planning for the Newman Forum’s 2020 Summer Institute at Mundelein Seminary, July 28-Aug. 1, is underway and applications are open. The program will offer forty-five students an introduction to college-level Catholic theology and philosophy, and opportunities for service projects.

Questions about the Newman Forum can be directed to Lumen Christi Assistant Director Austin Walker.

All societies on earth today face the threat of the novel coronavirus, COVID-19. Nothing more need be said. We consume the same news, and many—virtually all—of us have had our lives disrupted, our economies paralyzed, and, most serious of all, public worship canceled. Our lives, our selves are undone.
 

As noted in my message to you last week, Cardinal Francis George, O.M.I., the late archbishop of Chicago, recognized the importance of relationships. “We come to know and to be ourselves in relationship to others and to God,” he said.
 

Our core relationships have also been affected the current health crisis, mediated by electronic media via telephone or internet. The exception is our relationship to God in our private prayer and in our spiritually communion in the Mass as our priests offer—behind locked doors—the Eucharist, which Cardinal George described as “a perpetuation of the Incarnation…the great sacrament of unity.”

It is scientists to whom we turn as authorities to guide us in practices that will stem the pandemic and as those who will deliver us with treatments and a hoped-for vaccine. The Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci—a practicing Catholic educated at Jesuit institutions, Regis High School and College of the Holy Cross—has earned our trust and a moral authority rare today among public figures. Emily Landon an epidemiologist at the University of Chicago gave remarks at a press conference with Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker that drew the attention of the nation: “This virus is unforgiving. It spreads before you even know you’ve caught it. And it tricks you into believing that it’s nothing more than a little influenza.”
 

From the Enlightenment to the 19^th century, there was a tendency to think that science and technology would provide all the answers. After the Manhattan Project—conducted by Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago,—and after the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan seventy-five years ago this August, science and technology came to be seen more ambiguously. There is even a risk today to delegitimize science or to adapt it to fit one’s ideology.
 

In his book The Difference God Makes, Cardinal George addressed the question in another way:

We live with a crisis of relationships, and also with a crisis of intelligence. Pope John Paul II addressed this latter crisis in Fides et ratio, explaining that the twin crises of atheism and moral relativism stem from a lack of confidence in human reason’s ability to arrive at the truth. It is not that we dismiss faith because we are so sure we have the truth; it is rather that we dismiss faith as a source of truth because nothing can give us the full truth. There is no absolute truth. In this view, even science, a construct that enables us to work in a pragmatic way to manipulate nature to our own purposes, is not true in a necessary way. The human intellect has lost confidence in its ability to know unchangeable truth. In the face of triumphant human reason at the end of the nineteenth century, the First Vatican Council taught that faith is not irrational. Ironically, at the end of the twentieth century, the Church is saying that faith must rescue reason from its own self-inflicted wound of skepticism.  (p. 71)
 

From the beginning of The Lumen Christi Institute, we have devoted attention to the dialogue between science and religion fostered by Pope John Paul II, Cardinal Francis George, and—more recently—Pope Francis, who himself studied science in university. You can watch lectures of our recent events on science and religion here.

-Thomas Levergood, Executive Director

In these days, The Lumen Christi Institute has seen dispersed the community of scholars we bring together regularly for conversation and dialogue. We are separated from the communion of physical presence and interaction with our friends.
 

Communio, communion, was central to the vision of Cardinal Francis George, OMI, who blessed the founding of the Lumen Christi Institute in 1997. On April 17, we will observe the fifth anniversary of his death. The idea of communion united the three books he published with the assistance of the institute: The Difference God Makes, God in Action, and A Godly Humanism. To put his thought into one phrase: We come to know and to be ourselves in relationship to others and to God.
 

Today, when Masses are celebrated without a congregation, we are encouraged to make acts of spiritual communion. Our communion with friends is via the phone or the internet. By faith, we know that spiritual communion in the Eucharist is more real than the innovative technological forms of communication we employ. Cardinal George would remind us that the communion we have both with God and the friendship we enjoy with the saints are also more real.
 

As part of the communion of the saints, today we remember St. Oscar Romero, former archbishop of San Salvador, who was martyred on this day 40 years ago. In his fidelity to Christ, he challenged violence against the innocent and the injustice of a corrupt social order. He sacrificed his life as a witness to the love of God in Christ and in solidarity with the poor.

Cardinal George would recognize the importance of solidarity with the poor in Christian discipleship; he had planned in his retirement to write a memoir that would reflect on his experience of being with the poor as he traveled worldwide to support communities of missionaries as the vicar general of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate.
 

HERE is a video of a presentation that Professor Michael Lee gave at Lumen Christi last year in honor of Oscar Romero’s canonization. Prof. Lee considers how Romero’s witness challenges Christians in the United States to reimagine a robust Christian spirituality that is at once a mystical encounter with God and a prophetic engagement in the struggle for justice. He also reflects on the implications of the archbishop’s recognition as a martyr and on the model of holiness he offers for the wider Church today.
 

HERE is never-before released audio from a conversation that the great Latin American theologian Father Gustavo Gutierrez, OP, held with University of Chicago students in November 2015 on the topic of Oscar Romero and Pope Francis. 
 

St. Oscar Romero, in your life we see the difference God makes. We are afraid, physically threatened, and separated from our friends. May we who are spiritually poor come to know and to be ourselves in relationship to the poor and to the God who loves them. In your life, we see God in action. St. Oscar Romero, pray for us.
 

– Thomas Levergood, Executive Director

Eighty high school students and a handful of eager eighth graders gathered at Swift Hall of the University of Chicago Divinity School to participate in the Newman Forum’s third daylong conference Feb. 15. 

Lumen Christi’s Newman Forum is designed to introduce, familiarize, and enthrall Chicagoland teens with the Catholic intellectual tradition, supplementing and supporting their religious and theological formation. Hailing from public, private, and home schools, students alongside their teachers and parents were greeted warmly by Lumen Christi’s eight graduate student leaders, all current students or affiliates of the University of Chicago.

The conference, titled “Creation: Artistic & Divine,” featured two presentations from premiere scholars in the fields of science and aesthetics.

Professor Stephen M. Barr of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Delaware and president of the Society of Catholic Scientists spoke to the teens on the order of creation and about how this order—much like a well-crafted story—denotes a Creator/Author. Professor Barr did not shy away from the complexities of physics, guiding students through the history of scientific theory, from Kepler’s Laws to Superstring Theory. 

Student William S. of St. John Cantius Parish summarized Professor Barr’s presentation: “You can’t find God through an experiment. You can’t detect him in a particle accelerator or what have you, because he is outside of all of that. He created it all.” 

Professor Jennifer Newsome Martin is assistant professor in the Program of Liberal Studies at the University of Notre Dame. She spoke of the encounter people have with what is beautiful, and how its contemplation can leave people in flux, somewhere between the subjective and the objective. She encouraged students to consider their own experiences with beauty, how it struck them, and how those feelings can lead to God, who is Beauty, and who invites us to sit in that in-between space. Immediately following both talks, the teens asked the speakers questions. 

Students then gathered in small groups for lunch. Each group was guided by a graduate student leader in a seminar-style discussion, the hallmark of a comprehensive liberal arts education in the Catholic tradition. Some teens expressed appreciation for this discussion style, which they do not commonly experience at school.

“Giving an open space for students, rather than asking specific questions, can feel (like) more of a collaboration than something that’s set up,” said Harlem H. from Gary Comer College Prep.

Grace L. of Father Gabriel Richard High School said the Newman Forum events have led her to “realize that there are opportunities for a pretty high level of intellectual discussion among younger people.” 

Eucharistic Adoration in the Bond Chapel followed after lunch. Father Tim Anastos, associate pastor at Mary, Seat of Wisdom Parish, gave a brief instruction on Adoration and encouraged the teens to bring everything they had learned during the day to God in prayer. 

“What a gift it is that we can know the Lord not just with our hearts, but with our minds,” he said. 

Following Adoration, students had another opportunity to dialogue with our presenters during the concluding 45-minute Q&A. However, more than twenty students lingered far past the conference’s designated ending time to discuss their ideas with Professors Barr and Martin.

Preparations are underway for the Newman Forum’s Summer Institute for high school students at Mundelein Seminary, July 28-Aug. 1. 

The Newman Forum’s essay-writing context is also underway. Get details here.

For more information, visit the Newman Forum page.