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Washington D.C., Jun 10, 2018 / 05:00 am (CNA).- A Thomistic philosopher, an evolutionary biologist, and a Harvard astronomy professor walk into a bar. Well, not a bar.

But they did walk into a Washington, D.C. symposium this week, at which graduate students, professors, religious sisters, and other curious Catholics discussed highly technical scientific questions over bourbon and pecan pie, late into the night.

The three-day conference, co-sponsored by the Thomistic Institute and the Society of Catholic Scientists, brought together nearly 70 professors and graduate students from Princeton, Harvard, Yale, MIT, the University of Chicago, and other universities across the country to examine the intersection of faith and science.

“The typical contemporary view assumes that there is going to be some deep tension between faith and science. From our perspective that’s an illusion. There is not really a conflict there, but it does require you to work carefully through some of these issues,” said Fr. Dominic Legge, OP, the Thomistic Institute’s director.

The idea behind the conference was to bring high-level scientists together with some very good philosophers and theologians to talk through questions about integrating specialized scientific research with a broadly grounded philosophical perspective, Legge told CNA.

Scholars presented lectures on neuroscience, physics, cosmology, biology, and philosophy. The Thomistic Institute plans to post lectures from the symposium on iTunes.

Dr. Karin Öberg teaches astrophysics at Harvard University, where she researches the interstellar medium and star formation. Öberg seeks to discover “how chemistry and physics interact during star and planet formation to shape the bulk and organic compositions of nascent planets.” She is also one of the founders of the Society of Catholic Scientists.

At the Thomistic symposium, Öberg lectured about exoplanets and the possibility of extraterrestrials.

“The big scientific development that has happened in the past 10-20 years is that we have found out that planets are very common around other stars. Basically, every star that you see in the sky is its own solar system, so that’s a change in the cosmology that we live in. This obviously for most people begs the question, ‘Are they also living systems like our earth?’”

Öberg told CNA that it would be “super cool” to discover even non-rational life because “it would teach us something about how you go from inanimate to animate matter, which is currently very poorly understood.”

“But I think from a spiritual point of view what people are excited about is the possibility of other intelligent beings that could potentially inhabit some of these worlds,” Öberg continued.

“That’s where you get into some of the most controversial and exciting meeting points of the scientific pursuit of what may or may not exist, intelligent extraterrestrial life, and what we can deduce from Scripture or Church teachings on the likelihood of their existence. What kind of aliens would be compatible with the interpretation of Scripture?”

Neurology professor Dr. Stephen Meredith from the University of Chicago; Dr. William Carroll, a research fellow at Oxford; and Dr. Daniel de Haan, a divinity professor at Cambridge, also presented lectures.

Fr. Nicanor Austriaco, OP, presented on evolutionary theory.

“My question is how do you explain the appearance of novel traits in the biological realm from a biological perspective that appeals to four causes, one of which is efficient?” said Austriaco, who received his Ph.D., in biology from MIT.

“To invoke a first cause would make no sense to many of my colleagues at MIT who are doing science, but the attempt there is to try within a particular conceptual framework to make intelligible sense of what is actually happening,” he continued in a discussion among all of the lecturers.

On the theory of evolution, Legge explained that God’s creative activity is not in competition with explanations for the origins of being that are framed with the created universe.

“Creation means not just a first moment in time, but a relation of radical ontological dependence on God as creator. And, at the same time he endows creatures with the power to cause, and that means that creatures really can cause things to change in the world,” said Legge.

“We can investigate what’s happening with creaturely causes, including a theory of evolution about how you have the diversification of species over time and the emergence of more complex forms of life. That doesn’t threaten in any way the fact that God creates the world or that God has a providential plan,” he continued.

Dr. Jonathan Lunine, vice-president of the Society of Catholic Scientists and a professor of astronomy at Cornell University, elaborated on that point.

“Science provides us with a way of understanding the natural universe, the processes that occur, how that universe has evolved through time, but it doesn’t give us the metaphysical question of why are we here and what is behind it all,” he told CNA.
 
Unlike most scientific conferences, this symposium included an option for daily Mass and a holy hour, giving it a distinctly Dominican flavor.

Catholic speaker Matt Fradd, who has a graduate degree in philosophy, told CNA that the meeting “has been like drinking water from a fire hydrant with people who are about 17,000 times smarter than me giving talks on neuroscience and evolutionary theory, so it has been great.”

Legge told CNA that the symposium aimed to help participants grow in love for God through scientific understanding.

“To learn to love the Lord with your mind means to devote everything, all of the resources of your mind, to understanding what God has created and, ultimately, trying to understand as much as it is possible for us — God himself,” Legge told CNA.

“I think that is an important thing for every Catholic who is engaged in the life of the mind,” he said.

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Denver, Colo., Mar 9, 2018 / 10:46 am (CNA).- The Jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac once noted a correspondence between the Reformation’s criticism of Mary and its criticisms of the Church. That correlation is in some sense logical – you can’t have Mary without the Church, nor the Church without Mary. They exist in such an intimate and mutual relationship that one cannot be fully understood without the other. And we see clearly enough in our present day what happens when they are separated: Mary, elevated in excess, loses her humanity and begins to appear as a quasi-fourth-person of the Trinity; and the Church, reduced in excess, loses her divine foundation and appears as an exclusively male-run institution.

This is far from the vision of the early Church, where Mary and the Church were viewed together in a single reality – the New Eve. Jesus Christ, the New Adam and the true spiritual father of mankind, fittingly chose a New Eve to be his helpmate and the true spiritual mother of mankind. This New Eve has two forms: the personal form of Mary and the collective form of the Church. But Mary precedes, being the Church in seed-form before Pentecost.  She alone was given the singular grace of her Immaculate Conception in order to take on the unique role as the Mother of God. She stands at the foot of the Cross as the Church, but also more than the Church; for she personally participates in her Son’s redemption and his foundation of the Church.

At Pentecost, Mary’s mediating maternity becomes the heart of the Church, permeating it with an all-encompassing Marian character. Mary is the Church’s mother, and in her, the Church is mother. For this reason, we can marvelously say – through Mary’s divine motherhood, the Church gives birth to Christ sacramentally in the Eucharist and spiritually in souls!

This beautiful vision of Mary and the Church was largely lost to modern man until the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). There, the treatise of Mary was placed within that of the Church, restoring the ancient relationship (cf. Lumen gentium, Ch. 8). But with that came a tragic turn. After the council, Mary’s identity seemed to dissolved into the Church, and Mariology went into a kind of post-conciliar winter.  The modern Catholic sentiment towards Mary changed – now, some thought, we were “rid” of the shame of our bizarre medieval fixation. Now, some claimed she was finally “one of us” – relatable, authentic, truly in the Church.  

But Pope Paul VI, with prophetic intuition, saw through those theological illusions and countered them by declaring that “the Blessed Virgin Mary is the Mother of the Church” (Paul VI, Address at the conclusion of the third session of Vatican II, 21 November 1964). If Mary is the Mother of Christ, and the Church is the Body of Christ, then Mary is the Mother of the Church. He knew, as did his successors, that the defense of Mary’s dignity is intimately tied to the preservation of the faith’s integrity.  

Last Saturday, the Vatican announced that Pope Francis had decreed a new liturgical memorial. Beginning this year, on the Monday after Pentecost, the Church will universally celebrate Mary as the Mother of the Church. By this, the Church is not merely encouraging Marian piety. The Church is inviting us to see more deeply the Marian character of the Church’s maternity.

St. Leo the Great formulated this fifteen centuries ago on Christmas: the birthday of the Head is the birthday of the body (Sermon 26, De Nativitate). Meditating on the unique Christian mystery of the Incarnation reveals the pattern of all divinization – re-birth in the order of grace. And birth always requires a mother. To celebrate liturgically Mary as the Mother of the Church is to weave into an organic unity the cross, the Eucharist and maternity. Only through them, St. Leo said, does one “quit the old paths of his original nature and pass into a new man.”

And in our age of self-reliance and neo-pelagianism, perhaps we would do well to quit another old path: that of Marian minimalism, and pass into the newness of this feast, celebrating with joy and filial love, Mary, Mother of the Church.

Father John Nepil is a priest of the Archdiocese of Denver. His opinions do not necessarily reflect the editorial perspective of Catholic News Agency.

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