By Anthony Barich
ARCHBISHOP Barry Hickey will headline a major University of Notre Dame Australia event that seeks to encourage an intellectual engagement with the Catholic faith on 7 June.
The Archbishop will speak on Church and the Modern World at midday in the Michael Keating Room on Cliff Street in Fremantle as the second event in the Bishops Speaking Out series that Cardinal George Pell launched in Sydney on 29 March.
Archbishop Hickey’s two-hour address will discuss the roles of the clergy and lay people in representing the Church in the modern world.
The Bishops Speaking Out series is an initiative of the university’s Centre for Faith, Ethics and Society (CFES) which aims to develop “ethical intelligence” confirmed by faith to promote action which serves justice, charity and the common good.
The discussions in the Bishops Speaking Out series aim to give the audience a deeper understanding of the Church’s involvement in issues relevant to education, health, social justice, religious commitment and community life.
Parramatta Bishop Anthony Fisher OP will continue the series in November at UNDA’s Sydney campus, while Canberra-Goulburn Archbishop Mark Coleridge and Darwin Bishop Eugene Hurley will speak as part of the Bishops Speaking Out series next year.
The series is part of the mission of a Catholic university like Notre Dame to “keep alive the learning that allows reason to flourish and prosper and not wither up into dry rationalism – which is able to study the amoeba in acute detail and recognise and explain the reality of love”, Cardinal Pell said at the 29 March launch.
In explaining the contribution that Christianity has made to intellectual life, Cardinal Pell challenged the view that “the faith that modern reason critiqued was irrational”.
He argued that the idea “Christianity induced the so-called Dark Ages” is undermined by the contribution which Christian monasteries made to the preservation of learning.
“Far from burning books and destroying the learning of Ancient Rome, Christian monasteries hoarded books in their libraries and set monks to work throughout Europe copying the Latin texts of learned pagan writers such as Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, Pliny and Horace and ensuring their preservation,” the Cardinal said.
In addition to his lecture that day, Cardinal Pell also launched Solidarity: The Journal for Catholic Social Thought and Secular Ethics, a bi-annual publication that is a joint project between CFES, UNDA and the Office of Justice and Peace of the Sydney Archdiocese. The publication promotes ethical reflection on a range of topics and issues of practical importance and theological and secular significance.