A Time of Transition: 1996-2004

1987-Rev. Thomas Russman, 1996-Dr. Jerome Kramer 1998-Rev. Jack Gallagher, OFM Cap appointed Center serves as Interim Center CSB serves as Interim Director Director Center Director

A Time of Transition

1999-Dr. Christopher 2000-Dr. Daniel McInerny 2002-Dr. Mary Catherine Martin appointed Center appointed Center Director Sommers appointed Center Director Director

Rev. William A. Wallace, OP delivered the 1996 Aquinas Lecture on the topic “The Modeling of Nature.” His text of the same name was published the same year.

Center for Thomistic Studies Advisory Board Meeting October 17, 2000

INTRODUCTION OF CARDINAL FRANCIS GEORGE

In the 1998 Encyclical, Faith and Reason, Pope John Paul II described our age as struggling with a crisis of truth. For many in our time, the idea that human beings can find definitive answers to life’s most urgent questions—Who am I? Where am I going? How should one live?--is a delusion and a snare. And without reason’s ability to discern a truth which transcends everything of man’s own making or feeling or sensing, the divine call to the transcendent, to the Truth of Jesus Christ, can only appear as something arbitrary.

As a guide to the way out of this crisis, the Holy Father followed the tradition of his Predecessors in recommending the work of the 13th-century Italian saint, Thomas Aquinas. For no thinker in the history of Christendom has better understood and articulated the harmonious relationship that exists between faith and reason. In works such as his masterful Summa theologiae, St. Thomas Aquinas showed how the light of reason and the light of faith, because they are both gifts from God, have no contradiction between them. Faith builds upon and complements the achievements of human reason; it does not destroy or ignore them.

The Center for Thomistic Studies, the University of St. Thomas’s only PhD program and the only graduate philosophy program in the United States uniquely devoted to thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, was founded to promote Aquinas’s understanding of the essential and positive contribution of the human mind to the life of faith. Since 1980, the Center has enabled outstanding students to gather with leading Thomistic thinkers in a setting conducive to solid and creative scholarship. And now, poised at the entryway to Christianity’s Third Millennium, the Center stands ready to uphold the cause of truth against the prophets of un-reason prevalent in our day.

The Center is aided in this task by a distinguished Advisory Board, several of whose members came together on campus this afternoon to discuss strategies for the future. Our speaker tonight, Cardinal Francis George of the Archdiocese of Chicago, is certainly the most prominent member of the Center’s Advisory Board. A native of Chicago, Cardinal George entered the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate on August 14, 1957. He studied theology at the University of Ottawa and was ordained to the priesthood on December 21, 1963. He earned a master's degree in philosophy from The Catholic University of America in 1965—writing, I understand, on Thomas Aquinas’s De potentia—and he received his doctorate in American philosophy from Tulane University in 1970. In 1971 he received a master’s degree in theology from the University of Ottawa, and during the years of his academic study, and shortly thereafter, he taught philosophy at the Oblate Seminary in Pass Christian, Mississippi, at Tulane University, and Creighton University.

Cardinal George’s ecclesiastical accomplishments are of course even more impressive than his academic ones. He was Provincial Superior of the Midwestern province for the Oblates in 1973-74, and Vicar General of the Oblates in Rome from 1974 to 1986. He returned to the United States to coordinate the Circle of Fellows for the Cambridge Center for the Study of Faith and Culture in Cambridge, Massachusetts from 1987-1990. During that time, he obtained a Doctorate in Sacred Theology from the Pontifical University Urbaniana in Rome.

On July 10, 1990 Pope John Paul II appointed Cardinal George Bishop of Yakima, in Washington State, and then appointed him Archbishop of Portland on April 30, 1996. Less than a year later, on April 8, 1997, Pope John Paul named him the eighth archbishop of Chicago, the first native Chicagoan to serve in that office.

On behalf of the Center for Thomistic Studies, its faculty, students and staff, let me say what a tremendous pleasure it is for the Center to host Cardinal George here this evening. And now please join me in welcoming to the University of St. Thomas: His Eminence, Cardinal Franics George.

UNIVERSITY OF ST. THOMAS CENTER FOR THOMISTIC STUDIES

2001 AQUINAS LECTURE

Thursday, February, 2001 4:00 PM Cullen Hall

Presents

REV. MAURICIO BEUCHOT, O.P.

The Center for Thomistic Studies Aquinas Lecture 2002

Professor Alasdair MacIntyre Senior Research Professor in Philosophy University of Notre Dame Lecture title: “Agents, Actions, and the Ultimate Human End”

Thursday, February 21, 2002 4:00 PM Cullen Hall

Reception to follow

Alasdair MacIntyre is one the world’s most distinguished philosophers, and also one of the most vigorous contemporary defenders of philosophizing in the tradition of St. Thomas Aquinas. The author of more than thirty books, Professor MacIntyre has become best known for his trio of works, After Virtue (1981), Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988), and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy and Tradition (1991), the last of which being based upon his Gifford Lectures delivered in the University of Edinburgh in 1988. In the extended argument of these three works, Professor MacIntyre has sought to reveal the intellectual weaknesses in the prevailing moral and political theories of our day, while urging a return to a Thomistic understanding of the human good and for the need of a tradition of inquiry by which to reach that understanding. Professor MacIntyre has taught at Oxford University, Princeton University, Brandeis University, Boston University, Wellesley College, Vanderbilt University, the University of Notre Dame, and Duke University. Since the Fall of 2000 he has been Senior Research Professor in Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. His most recent book is Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (1999). From Insider, 2003

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