Registration for Lyon available on March 5, 2015.
At the Brussels Consultation, L to R: Doris Donnelly, Cardinal Godfried Danneels, Dominique Lambert, Rafael Vicuna, Pamela Mason, Rev. Shawn McKnight, Michael Heller.
We had the pleasure of meeting with His Eminence Cardinal Benjamino Stella (Prefect, Congregation of the Clergy). L to R, Doris Donnelly (Director, Cardinal Suenens Center), Cardinal Benjamino Stella (Prefect, Congregation for the Clergy), Cardinal Godfried Danneels (Brussels-Malines), Reverend Jose Funes, S.J. (Director of the Vatican Observatory), May 16, 2014
L to R: The delegation with Archbishop Jorge Carlos Patrón Wong, Secretary for Seminaries, Congregation for the Clergy, Vatican, May 16, 2014.
“The Big Bang, which nowadays is posited as the origin of the world, does not contradict the divine act of creating, but rather requires it.” (Pope Francis,
October 27, 2014)
Giovanni di Paolo, The Creation and the Expulsion from Paradise, with “mappamondo” c. 1445. This extraordinary panel at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, is a fragment from the predella of an altarpiece painted for the church of San Domenico in Siena. At the left, God the Father, supported by 12 blue cherubim, flies downward, pointing with his right hand at a circular “mappamondo,” which fills the lower half of the scene. The representation of earth is surrounded by concentric circles, including a green ring (for water), a blue ring (for air), a red ring (for fire), the circles of the seven planets, and the circle of the Zodiac. On the right, in a separate scene set in a meadow filled with flowers, Adam and Eve walk to the right against a line of seven trees with golden fruit. Their heads turn back toward a naked angel, who expels them from Paradise. Below them spring the four rivers of Paradise, which extend to the base of the picture.
We anticipate extending an invitation to major Roman Catholic seminaries in the United States to develop science courses in their pre-theology programs. College seminaries will be invited to do the same. Rectors, Academic Deans, and faculty authors of the most promising projects will gather under starry nights and sunny days in Tucson, Arizona, for encouragement from accomplished and accessible speakers and support from educators who will assist in refining proposals for implementation into the seminary curriculum.
Click here for a preliminary schedule
The goal is not to make seminarians into scientists but rather to provide a challenging, increasingly necessary, rewarding and very do-able effort towards scientific literacy.
WHY ARE WE DOING THIS?
Official Church documents, especially since the Second Vatican Council, have promulgated a positive spirit of cooperation between science and theology, replacing an adversarial mindset that existed in the past. The aggiornamento of VCII reinforced time and again that we live in a world dominated by science and technology and that “recent studies and findings of science, history, and philosophy raise new questions which influence life and demand new theological investigations” (Gaudium et Spes, 62). Far from being intimidated by astonishing advances in science, Pope John Paul II wrote often of the reciprocity between the disciplines of theology and science, and that “theology will have to call on the findings of science to one degree or another as it pursues its primary concern for the human person, the reaches of freedom, the possibilities of the Christian community.” (Pope John Paul II, Letter to Reverend George Coyne, S.J., Director, Vatican Observatory, 1988).
And especially because . . .
To no one’s surprise, seminaries have been urged to be in constant touch with developments in science. Two of the many directives to be noted are these: “Let those who teach in seminaries . . . collaborate with men well versed in other sciences” (GS, 62), and in the philosophical disciplines, “acccount should be taken of the more recent progress in the sciences” (Optatam Totius, 15). Simply put, scientific literacy is necessary to respond to the signs of the times for the New Evangelization.
The Cardinal Suenens Center – John Carroll University
“We are perched on the frontier of future knowledge. The God who created and sustained His evolving universe through eons of progress and development has not placed our generation at the tag end of the creative process. He has placed us at the beginning. We are here for the future.”
Sir John Templeton