This week’s priest: Fr Anthony Van Dyke OP, spiritual director extraordinaire.
By Anthony Barich
When young people tell Dominican Father Anthony Van Dyke that Mass is boring and praying is monotonous, he agrees – that it’s boring to them.
But once they delve into the mystery of God, “who is love” (Jn), and is not just lov-ing; and that they are part of a very special purpose in this plan of love, Mass and prayer becomes something quite different.
This journey of the transformation of one’s faith is part of the Dominican way, says Fr Anthony, the eldest child of 13 from the Netherlands, now based at his Order’s Doubleview Priory.
Fr Anthony, 74, who has three sisters who joined Religious life, has been heavily involved in youth ministry in his 10 years in Perth. Youth are often drawn to him. He is chaplain to the Missionaries of the Gospel, one of Perth’s newest Associations of Christ’s Faithful founded by 31 year old Sr Bernadette, known as Clare Pike in her former life as a Law graduate.
His Order, also known as the Order of Preachers, was founded by St Dominic in 1216 “to respond to a desperate need for sound, orthodox preaching in the face of a fatally confused notion of God, Christ and His Church”, says their Australian Promoter of Vocations, Fr Dominic Murphy OP.
The situation is not so different today, Fr Anthony says, as the vast majority of people leaving school drift away from the Faith, claiming that prayer and Mass are boring.
“The primary reason for this is that they have not had the opportunity to grow in the Faith,” he says.
This is where the Dominicans come in – preaching the faith so that the mysteries come alive.
As his Dominican predecessors did, Fr Anthony likes to look at the mystery of God in a “radical way”. When a six year old St Thomas Aquinas asked his teacher at Monte Casino monastic school, ‘what is God?’, he posed a question that would pursue him his whole life. He became one of the great Doctors of the Church.
With Dominicans, Fr Anthony says, there is more emphasis on the mysteries of Christ – “the most loving man who ever walked the earth” – rather than on morality.
Once the mystery is explored, morality is transformed into living a life of love for others, through Christ.
The Faith is transformed from an intellectual pursuit for the preacher to a personal affair for the faithful who come into contact with Dominicans, whose special charism is preaching as the fruit of a life of study and contemplation, delving into the mystery of God through Scripture and the great writers of the Church – St Aquinas and Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, to Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI in recent times.
“From Scripture we have something to hold on to – ‘God is love’ – not just ‘lov-ing’. Therefore it stands to reason that everything in the world is ‘a word from the mouth of God’,” Fr Anthony says.
“No wonder St Catherine of Sienna says ‘God has fallen in love with the beauty of His creature’. So every person is a creature of love, and whatever we do in our life, we can never stop God from loving us.”