Gratitude to St. Thomas
Gratitude to St. Thomas [1]
Iustum deduxit Dominus per vias rectas
Wis 1.10
Misericordias Domini in aeternum cantabo
Ps 88.2
Fecit mihi magna qui potens est
Lk 1:49
The decisive test of my life
Talking about oneself, as such, is not exhibitionism or narcissism, as long as we do not speak so much about what we have done, but rather about what God has done in us and using us, despite our sins and our disobedience to Him. This is the spirit I want to assume and the method I want to follow as I prepare to recall some important facts of my life. If a poor man has received a large inheritance from a rich gentleman aimed at being distributed to the poor, what will he do? Will he not have to proclaim it joyfully to everyone on the rooftops?
Now at the end of my life, looking at my past as a Catholic, I realize with gratitude to God, that I have traveled the ways of the Lord since childhood in a continuous advancement until today. I received a decisive impulse at the age of 16, in 1958, thankfully meeting a holy priest, Don Giovanni Buzzoni, my religion teacher at the High School [ The “Liceo Classico” was intended and realized as the most perfect form of education, namely giving mastery of language, according to the "philosopher of Fascism" - as he called himself-, and reformer and educator, and yet politician Giovanni Gentile. He was, in fact, involved in the resurgence of Hegelian idealism in Italian philosophy and also devised his own system of thought, which he called "actual idealism" or "actualism", which has been described as "the subjective extreme of the idealist tradition," even claimed to be superior to Hegel’s achievements (Ed.)] and then my confessor. I suffered a profound crisis of certainty, having been poisoned by Cartesian subjectivist skepticism, atheistic existentialism, and Benedetto Croce’s historicism.
Above all, the meeting with Descartes - in High School - provoked in me an anguished doubt about the veracity of sensible experience, and therefore the existence and truth of the same external reality as it presented itself to my intellect, an atrocious doubt, which had never previously occurred to me: do our sensible perceptions correspond to external things outside of us?
How to be sure? Descartes artificially provokes doubt, but, in reality, he does not solve it at all with his famous cogito, which is rather an unnatural and forced contortion of thought about itself [2]. After all, Cartesian gnoseology and metaphysics are nothing but a resumption of ancient Greek sophistry: being is what appears to me and so suits me, because in this way I do what I want, without having to account to anyone else.
Moreover, in connection with Descartes, who did not reach sensible reality, I was troubled by Sartre’s atheistic existentialism, then fashionable [3], which, adding to the Cartesian doubt, led me to believe that existence did not add anything to non-existence.
Another experience that hurt me a lot, aggravating my existential crisis, happened when I encountered -always in High School - Giacomo Leopardi. I already had difficulties in interpersonal communication because of my doubt about the objective existence of external reality, so even people did not seem to me as real entities, but as my imaginations.
This led me to bitterly withdraw into myself, without the confidence of being able to contact an external reality, which I doubted. Even the certainty suggested by Descartes of the existence of my thinking self was not enough for me, since I can indeed be aware of thinking; but think what? My ideas? (But I don't know if they match things!) Think things out there? ( But I'm not sure whether they exist!). And so, we are all over again. And my body? I draw it, in fact, with the senses (But the senses are deceiving!). And so?
Meeting Leopardi made me discover myself in him, mostly in his deep feeling alone. I am thinking of the «lone sparrow» or bitter loneliness, which he could not explain and was yet unable to overcome. But unfortunately, Leopardi's physical appearance was deformed, therefore his physical appearance did not attract the interest of others. I, thank God, didn't have this problem, but mine was that psychological problem I just mentioned.
I’d add the fact that Leopardi, perhaps due to a bad education received, was a squeamish aristocrat. It repelled him from contacting common and simple people of his town, Recanati, which he disparagingly called «natìo borgo selvaggio [native wild village (Ed.)] ». He was indeed the victim of the same contemptuous feeling as Horace: “Odi profanum vulgus, et arceo.”
That wasn't my problem either. Again, because of my crisis of skepticism tending towards nihilism, I was instead infected by Leopardi's total absence of interest in others, excluding of course ambition to gain fame as a poet among scholars. I had no thirst for human glory, but what gnawed at my soul was always this doubt about the existence of others. It was nihilism. (Emanuele) Severino [A prominent Italian Gnostic thinker (1929-2020). He argued that the history of the West is the history of nihilism since all forms of Western culture would equate being with nothing, they would deny being and, with being, the search for truth. To get out of nihilism, and save the West, it would be necessary for him to go back to Parmenides (Ed.)] wrote an interesting essay on Leopardi's nihilism, highlighting that for him everything comes from nothing and everything goes to nothing. I wonder how one can stand with such a view.
And yet, even this squalid vision of existence is the effect of that same pride that is at the origin of Cartesian idealism. I understood this later by approaching Thomistic realism. In fact, both in Descartes and in Leopardi there is the denial of being or of reality, replaced by the ego: in Descartes, the cogito, which, as Fabro [ Cornelio Fabro (1911-1995) was an Italian Thomist philosopher and religious priest, one of the most important ones of the 20th century, the founder of the Institute for Higher Studies on Unbelief, Religion, and Cultures; well known for his prodigious philosophical production, he took part on the last century's scholastic revival of Thomism. Besides his profound knowledge of St. Thomas Aquinas and of modern thought, he was deeply fond of the metaphysical existentialism of Søren Kierkegaard (Ed.)] rightly observes, looks like a flight; in Leopardi, the connection to reality is replaced by the spasmodic desire or romantic dream of gaining fame among the learned.
However, neither my will nor human glory mattered to me, but only the need to know whether reality exists or does not exist and, once it is established that it exists, whether it can be known or not. For Kant, it exists (the «thing in itself»), but it cannot be known. St. Thomas instead made me rediscover both being and knowing. But that doesn't matter to many of us. What almost all of us are interested in is affirming ourselves. This justifies the greater success of Descartes compared to St. Thomas.
The Cartesian self-foundation of one's ego leads many today to show off and to inflate their ego so much up to an atheistic or pantheistic choice. I have never felt this temptation because I have always felt that I am not founded on myself, but that I, therefore, need a Foundation external to me, based on reality. Now, however, the eventuality proposed by Descartes that this external reality did not exist did not attract me at all but rather distressed me, because I understood that it led to the denial of the existence of God as the foundation of reality and myself. The desperate temptation was therefore that of nihilism.
How did I get out of it?
They dug a pit in front of me and fell into it.
Ps 57:7
My problem was not, as was said then, that of the "meaning of life", that of how to behave, but it was more radical: it was the problem of the meaning of existence. A psychologist or a moralist or a good pastor or a good confessor was not enough for me: I needed a metaphysician. Metaphysics was not for me the academic interest in abstract knowledge: no, it was for me a matter of life and death. For this reason, in my thirty-year teaching of metaphysics in the so-called Bolognese Studio, I have always found myself so persuasive with students, because personal experience was added to scientific knowledge.
And so it occurs that St. Thomas made me meet the right person in Don Giovanni, who healed me in 1958 with the metaphysics and gnoseology of St. Thomas: he gave me the certainty that the things I see outside of me exist and I can know them, so the principle of identity or determination exists, as it does for the principle of causality and the principle of finality, the first principles of speculative reason, on which all our knowledge is built. So, God exists.
Having found God was my consolation, even though I know very well that my sinful self, smoothed by Descartes, would appreciate the external reality - and therefore God - did not exist, so one regulates himself without Him. The humble, on the other hand, that is, the realist, feels the need for God and rejoices in His existence because he finds in Him his creator, and his moral guide, and help in difficulties, and counselor in doubts, and comforter in afflictions, and support in trials, and the loving father who corrects him in defects, and his supreme good and the ultimate goal of his life.
On the contrary, to the proud and the carnal man the existence of God - to Whom has to account for his work -, bothers him. And to prevent reason from coming to discover it, applying its principles, he restricts it, blocks its path in the horizon of ideas and phenomena, and invents a gnoseology "ad usum delphini" which invalidates the objective existence of being and reality, in such an idealist manner, preferring, therefore, the hallucinatory gnoseology and the visionary metaphysics of Descartes.
Don Giovanni, presenting me - through Maritain - the Gnoseology [4] and Metaphysics of St. Thomas [5], let me rediscover at the same time the being or the real, as well as the possibility of knowing the truth of reality and knowing God. It was the discovery of the famous Thomistic gnoseological realism, firmly rooted in reason and inculcated by Sacred Scripture itself.[6]
And to achieve this goal, Don Giovanni used a simple but profound method. I remember that he asked me if I could help but determine myself with evidence and sensitive certainty. I remember that I was sitting in a certain way on a given chair and I could not fail to recognize as evidence that I was sitting in that particular way in that given chair.
The problem of knowledge and the real out there was solved. Of course, that was nothing more than a first, humble empirical beginning of common sense. But the specter of idealism vanished and the light of realism returned: that realism with which I had begun the path of truth as a child. Descartes was vanquished! Sartre was vanquished! Croce was defeated! Leopardi was defeated! Later I began ravenously to study through Maritain the gnoseology and metaphysics of St. Thomas. But the resurrection had irrevocably begun.
The departure for a safe journey
From that moment, I set out on the path of truth, without anyone ever being able to move me. I began even to spread the truth myself. That was the first seed of a Dominican vocation that would continually mature in the reading of Maritain's works, first of all, starting in 1959 - and then, since 1960, in the reading of the works of St. Thomas.
So it was that in 1958, grace to St. Thomas - mediated by that holy priest who was Don Giovanni, my "Elijah"-, the gift of the Dominican charism, without even realizing it, having found in me, his "Elisha", a good soil, tilled by Don Giovanni himself, took deep roots in me, so firmly and ineradicably, that in more than sixty years, since that far 1958, nothing and no one, neither human creature, nor the devil, neither temptations nor trials, neither sufferings nor threats, neither seductions of the flesh nor of the world, have ever been able to spoil or remove, just as one does not take away from a living what makes him live, without thereby making him die.
This is the meaning of the words I pronounced when, in 1975, I declared my solemn profession in the Order: "usque ad mortem". Of course, I could, in principle, be legally expelled from the Order, but then I would wonder if it wouldn’t rather be the case applied instead to those who hunt me, being unworthy of belonging to the Dominican Order.
It so happened that when I entered the Order in 1971, I was already Dominican in spirit for ten years, although of course, I recognize that to be a Dominican friar one must belong to the Order juridically, so I will always be grateful to my Superiors and formators for welcoming me and having mercy on me. Yes, yes, because, if one doesn’t know, when a postulant asks a Dominican community to be admitted to the Order, in turn, the Superior asks him: “What do you ask?”And the postulant answers: “God's mercy and yours!”
Don Giovanni secured in me two fundamental rational notions, which then were the unshakable basis of my subsequent thought: the notion of metaphysics and the notion of knowledge. Metaphysics is understood as knowledge of the real entity, which starts from the experience of things, an entity that analogically preaches of the world and of God.
Thus metaphysics culminates in natural theology, that is, in the rational demonstration of the existence of God starting from the experience of things and applying the principle of causality. The rational knowledge of God as the first creative cause of the world then becomes the basis of natural religion and natural ethics.
The notion of knowledge means adapting the intellect or thought to the real and not, as Descartes maintains, to one's ego. This is the truth of knowing, so the error is the lack of adaptation to reality. This is what is called "gnoseological realism" or "objectivity of knowledge", as opposed to idealism, which would like to make being coinciding with thinking, in such a way that being become [or transform in (Ed.)] “being thought.” Existence does not vanish into nothingness, and it is not a simple idea of ours but conceals in its depth the absolute, the eternal, the necessary, the infinite good: it hides God.
The truth, then, depends on my adaptation to the objective being, which is in front of me ("ob-jectum"), and does not depend on my idea. And that’s not all I can know. Instead, from the idea, and in the idea I reach and know as it is a real or a being external to my thought or my idea, that real or being, which Thomas calls "res extra animam".
The benefits that St. Thomas grants us
The unique greatness of St. Thomas lies in the stupendous union he brings about between doctrine and charity, wisdom and holiness, instructing one's neighbor and learning from God. He has a medicinal or therapeutic conception of doctrine. When he deals with heresies, he does not warm and does not disdain, as do certain preachers in which anger prevails over mental clarity, thus endangering charity because charity is born only from the truth, but Thomas assumes the seriousness and calm of the doctor, who diagnoses the disease and prescribes the cure.
The disciple of St. Thomas receives as an inheritance an incorruptible intellectual patrimony, which he can enrich and transmit to subsequent generations over the centuries, as demonstrated by the centuries-old Thomistic school.
Those who follow the doctrine of Aquinas, which the Church has always recommended and from which the Church has even derived some dogmas, are sure to follow sound Catholic doctrine.
The disciple of Aquinas acquires a criterion of sure discernment to recognize and distinguish in doctrines truth from error, to find the truth, and to refute error even in the most difficult cases. He does not allow himself to be deceived or seduced even by the most refined and cunning heresies.
The disciple of Aquinas possesses a sense of the universality of truth, so he is open to truth wherever it comes from or finds it even where others see only error.
The disciple of St. Thomas, conscious of the distinction between the natural order of reason and human virtues on the one hand, and the supernatural order of faith and Christian virtues on the other one, is qualified like no other to practice a constructive dialogue with any reasonable man on the common basis of reason, characterizing man as such and therefore possessed by every man, whatever religion or culture it belongs to.
The disciple of St. Thomas clearly sees the motion of grace towards free will: how the divine will moves the free human act to the fulfillment of the supernatural good, so God not only leaves the human will free but causes and creates the very act of will. A willing, which, however, if it is sinful, as sinful, is all and only fault of the sinner, so that the just is the second cause of his virtues, while the sinner is the first cause of the sin he commits.
At the same time the Thomist, knowing that the right use of reason leads to faith, is the missionary and evangelizer best qualified to spread the Gospel to all peoples, as is amply demonstrated by the history of the Dominican missions from eight centuries to today.
The disciple of St. Thomas does not see fractures - in the history of the magisterium of the Church- between conservation and development, tradition and progress, fidelity and renewal. But sees in the history of the magisterium of the Church a continuous deepening and clarification, a continuous explication of the knowledge of the Word of God "eodem sensu eademque sententia", as St. Vincent of Lerins, said, so that it is better and better known, without additions and deductions and changes of meaning.
The disciple of St. Thomas, at the moment in which he has in him a guide to wisdom, also has - in his writings and his examples of life- a guide to the holiness and perfection of the Christian life, although, obviously, the examples of life are suitable above all for intellectuals and scholars.
Thomas is also a great teacher of Law, Morals, Asceticism, and even Mysticism, shown by his treatises on the gifts of the Holy Spirit and on the spiritual life. Because of his profound sense of Catholicism, he observes ecclesial discipline to the maximum, even as a religious, and is, therefore, a great teacher of ecclesial communion with the Supreme Pontiff.
I have received the greatest signs of consensus, approval, and doctrinal solidarity from the disciples of St. Thomas. My best friends and teachers in theology are Thomists. My admirers and disciples, lay people, religious or priests, men and women, young and old, learned and not, are people willing to accept the doctrine of St. Thomas.
Instead, I’ve received the most serious misunderstandings, hostilities, or ideological oppositions from enemies or false friends of St. Thomas [from within the Order itself, however surprising this may seem: "He came among his own, and they did not receive him" (Jn 1:11)] like the Modernists and the Rahnerians, apart from non-Catholics.
Yet, if I resisted, I knew how to defend myself, assert my reasons, recognize my wrongs, correct myself, bear with patience, and offer for my sins, I owe it precisely to the teachings, to the examples, that come to me from this blessed Order, which welcomed me and in the first place I owe it to the intercession of the Saints and of St. Thomas, as well as to the confreres and sisters, who were close to me, prayed and offered for me, understood me, consoled me and helped me.
Graces received
Overcoming the crisis of skepticism and identity - thanks to the help of Don Buzzoni, inspired by Thomistic theoretical and educational principles-, produced in me a renewed and more conscious certainty of the truth, a hunger for knowledge, and a great desire to communicate it to others. They were the first seeds of Dominican preaching. "Contemplata aliis tradere".
For the moment, in 1963, God made me meet a young lady, mother of five children, Mariangela Baroncelli Molducci, a woman of great faith, an elementary school teacher, endowed with a very marked aptitude to take care of the education of youth in human and Christian virtues.
She had formed around her a circle of people, young and old, who shared her charitable commitment in favor of others in the difficulty of various kinds, health, psychological, economic, environmental, work, social, cultural, and religious. She identified in me, whom I wished to make useful, a collaborator and an intellectual reference in that kind of solidarity, fraternity, and friendship, which had its inspiration in the Thomistic ethic, which was the basis of Maritain's "great friendships"[7], of which both Mariangela and I were aware as great admirers.
In 1965 I enrolled at the University of Bologna in the Faculty of Philosophy intending to know modern thought and evaluate it in the light of St. Thomas, according to Maritain's method. I graduated in 1970 and taught history and philosophy for a year at the classical High School in Faenza (“Liceo Classico” (Ed.)]. In the meantime, thanks to the closeness with some friends and the Carmelite nuns of Ravenna, it raised in me a love for contemplation, the study of Scripture, asceticism, silence, solitude, penance, prayer, fraternal life, charity, and friendship, in helping and preaching to the poor, especially in the spiritual sense: the seekers of God, and of truth and wisdom.
Already in 1966 Maritain, the greatest of the Thomists of the '900, made me understand the meaning of the Council in the book "Le paysan de la Garonne", a reading that put me in the wake of the authentic interpretation of the Council, that of St. Paul VI, against the modernist instrumentalization already insurgent and against the Lefevrian reaction.
In 1971 I entered the Dominican Order in the Convent of Bologna. I didn't know anyone there. There was, however, a Theological Study. To tell the truth, I imagined meeting disciples of St. Thomas as I had already known for example in a previous friendship, the Thomist follower of Maritain Father Guido Casali, and in my readings or acquaintances, especially Father Garrigou-Lagrange, Father Clérissac, Sertillanges, Gredt, Journet, Gilson, Spiazzi, Father Guido Casali or Father Pietro Lippini. And I had already been studying St. Thomas and Maritain for ten years.
And instead, apart from Father Guido and the excellent Father Provincial Enrico Rossetti, who welcomed me into the Order, and some true teachers, such as Father Galli and Father Roberto Coggi, my disappointment was strong in finding confreres opposed to St. Thomas.
In particular, I entered the Order without knowing anything and without anyone having ever spoken to me before about the famous Dominican theologian Edward Schillebeeckx, a cunning impostor, whose danger I immediately realized when I came into contact with his thought, marked by a form of historicist and evolutionist existentialist empiricism, destroyer of metaphysics and the immutability of dogma.
It was a discovery that left me astonished and scandalized because I never imagined that such a brazen modernist could easily flourish in the Order. And the issues that increased my scandal and my indignation were that there existed in the Order such a brazen current of his supporters, that did not hesitate to openly oppose the censorship of the CDF of the early 80s against him, as if he were a poor victim of the papal dictatorship. In reality, his heresies were so serious, that he deserved to be excommunicated and expelled from the Order, while he was held in the palm of his hand by his supporters.
I noticed, however, that there were also Thomist theologians in the Order, who rly rejected Schillebeeckx. So, I plucked up the courage and began to fight him. My first article was dated 1984 [8]. Thank God, no one, neither from inside nor outside the Order had the imprudence to hinder me or stop me in this work of purification of theological thought in the light of Aquinas, so that I was able to fight Schillebeeckx from then until now with many publications and even school courses, until my last publication four years ago, for the “Chorabooks web editions”- Hong Kong-, directed by Maestro Aurelio Porfiri [9].
Another new bitter surprise was that of the entry into the Order in Bologna - starting in 1997, even under the Thomistic guise (incredible to say!) of the pantheistic idealism of Emanuele Severino - by Father Giuseppe Barzaghi [10]. In seven centuries of history of Dominican theology [11] it had never happened – except perhaps in the Eckahrt case – that the Order was infected with this disease of the spirit, the fruit of pride and impiety. I refuted Barzaghi's thought [12] showing on the one hand the falsity of idealism and on the other the absurdity of the attempt to mistake Thomas as a pantheist.
In particular, the Thomists of the ‘800 and the first half of the '900 had fought with valor against idealism and pantheism, repeatedly condemned by the Church. We also really missed this bad luck, to aggravate the current difficulties and sufferings of Dominican theology! Even on this serious question no one, neither in the Order nor from outside the Order, has refuted my criticism of Barzaghi.
In any case, I must admit that, after all, it was my membership in the Order that allowed me to become acquainted with and study other Thomistic theologians, ancient and modern. Among the ancients, there were Goudin, Melchior Cano, and Card. Gaetano and Giovanni di S.Tommaso and, among the moderns, Dummermuth, Lepidi, Schwalm, Zigliara, De Groot, Schultes, Del Prado, Ramirez, De Tonquédec, Mattiussi, Gardeil, Merkelbach, Giacon, Degl'Innocenti, Toccafondi, Zacchi, Cordovani, Olgiati, Vanni Rovighi, Joret, Meynard, Chenu, Congar, Ghini, Lobato, Royo Marίn, Composta, Boccanegra, Héris, Hugon, Bogliolo, Card.Ciappi, Pizzorni, Caldera, Livi, J.-H. Nicolas, Perini and many others. Very important is the interpretation of the metaphysics of St. Thomas made by Fabro, an acute critic of Rahner's idealism.
In these fifty years since I became a Dominican friar, apart from these names certainly Thomists, I have always noticed in the Order about metaphysics the difficult coexistence of two currents in conflict with each other: a small minority more attentive to culture and intellectual life, admirer and, if not a lover, at least respectful, of metaphysics, which is like saying devoted to St. Thomas; and a secularized majority indifferent to St. Thomas, not to say hostile, influenced by moderate modernism of the style of Schilleeeckx, which is the cause of the decadence of the Order, which manifests itself, above all, in the closure of convents, and in the almost zero incidences of the Order in the leading cultural, religious and theological debates of our time.
The great grace that I attribute to the intercession of Thomas, “Eucharistic Doctor”, was the grace of the priesthood, being ordained in 1976 by Bishop Ersilio Tonini, then Archbishop of Ravenna in the Cathedral of Ravenna, that Cathedral that - since I was a child - I had attended so many times together with my dearest mother, to whom I owe my first initiation into the faith. Very far then from just imagining that happy event thirty years later, if only because, as a boy, I did not want to become a priest. Indeed this idea repelled me. And if I became a priest – and I am happy about it today more than ever – it was owed in obedience to the invitation formally addressed to me by that holy man called Father Enrico Rossetti, the Prior Provincial, who in 1971 welcomed me into the Order.
With the grace of the priesthood, St. Thomas enlightened me, particularly about the Redemption of Christ, the sacrifice of the Mass, and the Sacrament of the Eucharist. Today, unfortunately, as we all know, many heresies are circulating in these very important fields of dogmatics: the denial of the priesthood as the power to celebrate Mass and confess sinner, and vice versa, relegated to a simple "presidency" of the community; the priesthood of women; the denial of divine punishments as a call to penance and conversion; the denial of the satisfactory value of Christ's sacrifice; the fable of the God "who suffers"; the thesis that all are saved; the denial of the dogma of Eucharistic transubstantiation, replaced by the Lutheran thesis of "Christ in the bread", so that when the faithful receive Communion, they do not eat the flesh of Christ, but eat blessed bread; the Mass considered not as a sacrifice, but as a banquet.
Now it is evident that on these points the doctrine of Aquinas offers excellent aids and criteria of evaluation and discernment to distinguish the true from the false, orthodoxy from heresy, in full fidelity to Scripture, Tradition, and the Magisterium of the Church.
I was obviously inspired by the doctrine of the Common Doctor of the Church when in 1975 I licensed in theology at our Bolognese Academic Theological Studio with Father Galli - a distinguished Thomist moralist, and my Master and author of many authoritative publications on the subject. The thesis deals with the psychological aspect of the difference between men and women, a theme that I have deepened later until today.
Always to St. Thomas, recognized as a Master and an intercessor, I was inspired and addressed in all my scientific and popular publications. In 1976 I wrote my first scientific article on the question of the priesthood of women in "Sacra Doctrina," the Studio Bolognese’s theological journal.
In 1979 my Superiors appointed me to teach in our Studio in Bologna, a position I carried out until 2011 when I became emeritus. In 1984 I graduated in theology at the Angelicum in Rome with a thesis on the gift of wisdom under the direction of Spanish Father Alvaro Huerga, an illustrious historian of Dominican spirituality.
I consider that I owe to the inspiration of St. Thomas also my interest in the dignity of women and in particular in the difference between the soul of man and that of woman [13] and the question of the condition of man and woman in the resurrection [14]. I summarized my thoughts on this subject in the book "The Consecrated Couple" [15].
This interest in my ministry - as a preacher and guide of souls - is, in some way, an echo of the special gift that the Holy Father Dominic enjoyed of profound knowledge of the female heart, which led him to be an excellent and esteemed guide of the religious, to the point that Pope Gregory IX - wanting to put order and discipline in the female monasteries of Rome - entrusted to St. Dominic this delicate task before the Holy Patriarch began organizing the preaching of the friars. And the Dominican tradition of flanking a monastery of nuns in every city that hosted the Order is well known so that they could receive adequate spiritual assistance.
In 1982, on the proposal of the great Dominican Thomist theologian Father Raimondo Spiazzi, I was suddenly and unexpectedly called to collaborate with St. John Paul II in the Secretariat of State, where I remained until '90. I, therefore, consider this auspicious event a grace of St. Thomas. In fact, in the office, I was able to make ample use of my Thomistic preparation, to the extent that, one day, while I was having lunch with the Holy Father and a few other people, the then Substitute of the Secretariat of State, Monsignor Eduardo Martinez Somalo, addressing the Pope and pointing to me, said to him: "Your Holiness, this is our Thomist!". In return, the Holy Father revealed an expression of evident satisfaction.
In 1992 I was associated with the Pontifical Roman Theological Academy, at the suggestion of a great Thomistic Christologist, Msgr. Antonio Piolanti. (Another grace granted to me by St. Thomas.) Since then, here too I have had the opportunity to deploy my Thomist preparation, and exercise it, especially with my collaboration with PATH, the journal of the Academy, namely with articles commenting on the magisterium of Pope Francis.
In 1995 I was invited by Father Livio to collaborate with Radio Maria [ Radio Maria is an Italian Catholic radio station founded in 1987 and directed by Father Livio Fanzaga, a learned and pious Piarist priest. Its main purpose is, to use the words of Pope John Paul II, the "new evangelization" (cf. the encyclical Redemptoris Missio), and to make Christians grow in the faith and on the path of holiness. It belongs to the World Family of Radio Maria network. The network involves 74 countries on five continents, through 85 radios which broadcast the audio in 50 languages. There are 20,000 Radio Maria volunteers at the service of over 30 million listeners around the world (updated March 23, 2023, Ed.)], a position I held until 2016. I also consider this a beautiful and long experience, that I was able to perform, a grace obtained from St. Thomas. And, in the course of many years, I have been able to transmit to tens and tens of thousands of attentive listeners, in the light and under the protection of Mary, the noblest wisdom of the Angelic Doctor.
In 2007, in a completely unexpected way, I was requested by the then Postulator of the Order, Father Vito Gomez, to attend - as vice-postulator, together with my confrere Father Efrem Jindracek, the other vice postulator - the Cause of Beatification of the Dominican theologian Father Tomas Tyn, needless to say, a very faithful disciple and zealous popularizer of the Common Doctor. I knew Father Tomas very well, having lived with him in the convent of Bologna from 1973, the date of his arrival, until 1982, when I was transferred to Rome.
This position as Vice-Postulator, which I carried out until 2012, allowed me to make known and disseminate the theology and spirituality, and holiness of Father Tyn, who was an appreciated theologian in our Dominican Study in Bologna.
This work has therefore enabled me to produce the double fruit of making known both St. Thomas and Father Tyn, a Dominican theologian saint, who spread and commented on his thought in his school lessons, and in his preaching, and his priestly ministry, and his publications. Currently, on behalf of the Superiors, I continue to deal with the figure and work of the Servant of God, collecting material, responding to requests from devotees, and publishing studies or articles on him in this blog [see below, Ed.].
A grace received, not without the intervention of St. Thomas, I also consider the task to hold the ministry of Exorcism, which I received in 2010 from the Curia of Bologna, a position that I then left in 2012, having been transferred to the convent of Fontanellato, near Parma.
I also mention here St. Thomas, because for many years now I had acquired a certain reputation as a demonologist both with my preaching and my publication, since 1985, of the book "La buona battaglia", for the Edizioni Studio Domenicano of Bologna, a book that had three editions. Naturally, I referred to Thomistic angelology and demonology, for which, as it’s known, St. Thomas is called the “Angelic Doctor.”
Concluding remarks
The greatest problem of my 16 years, as the reader now knows, was this: if thought is not adaptation to reality, what satisfaction can the thought itself give us? And how can we be indifferent to whether real exists or does not? Yet the Cartesian is satisfied with precisely this. He is not interested in reality; he is interested in his thought and in the affirmation of himself, because the adaptation to reality leads to the discovery of the existence of God and this annoys him very much, because it leads to the discovery of God and to the knowledge that we depend on Him and that therefore our good lies in doing His will. Instead, the Cartesian wants to do his own will.
The fact is that, as a result of original sin, there is in us the idea suggested by the devil that our good does not lie in doing God's will, but ours. So, to be able to justify ourselves in our rebellion against God and in our desire to absolutize our will, we elaborate - like Descartes - a gnoseology for which thought does not have - as its object - the real, but itself. We reduce the real to our thoughts, and so block thought from the way toward God. If we continue to speak of God, that "god" is nothing but ourselves.
The crisis that came to me at the age of 16 was provoked by the fact that for the first time in my life, in High School, I crossed ideas that refused to adapt thought to reality or because they doubted it - like Descartes - or because (like my teacher of letters, Prof. Franco Mollia) they mention of course the "true historian’s reality,” but they did not admit universal and immutable truths, and they affirm that there are no definitive truths: what is true today will become false tomorrow, and what was false yesterday is true today. It was the historicism of Benedetto Croce derived from the historicism of Gian Battista Vico: "Only what we do is true" ("verum ipsum factum").
For them, there are no absolute, abstract, immutable, objective, irrefutable truths, valid for everyone, but every time, in every culture, every man has his particular truth, because the truth is a free product of each of us - as he likes. These ideas troubled greatly me, but I saw that my schoolmates had no problem accepting them. On the other hand, I perceived very well that my thought could not be based on itself and consequently could not either my will. I felt my ontological insufficiency, so the proposal that was made to me, while others accepted it, really horrified me. I felt its groundlessness and illusoriness.
It seemed to me that we were falling into an abyss, what Kant calls the "abyss of reason". Don Giovanni, to whom I had turned desperately, comforted me with great patience and charity and reiterated and re-founded, in a decisively persuasive way, the certainties of my childhood: metaphysical certainty – the certainty of the existence of reality -, gnoseological – the truth as an adaptation to reality – and religious certainty and faith (my relationship with Christ and with the Church).
I realized an enormous consolation for which darkness became light, a light that has not yet abandoned me. Of course, the speculative problem was solved forever, but the moral problem remained alive, that is, my daily need to carry on my journey of conversion and purification from my sins, in the continuous effort to practice the truths most certainly acquired.
What I must guard against now is the excess of certainty, that is, too much haste, caused by the presumption, which I sometimes have, to express negative judgments, without a sufficient and careful prior examination of the opponent's thesis. I trust my experience too much and I must instead remember that I too am like everyone, including the Pope, a poor fallible sinner.
The temptation to do my will and not God's has certainly remained. But at least I know my duty. Looking around, however, in the current chaotic ecclesial situation, where troubles and evils of all kinds occur, I feel like a lucky shipwrecked at sea, having escaped a shipwreck, and the words of the Psalm come to my mind:
"His faithfulness shall be thy shield and breastplate; you shall not fear the terrors of the night, nor the arrow that flies by day; The plague that wanders in the darkness, the extermination that devastates at noon. A thousand will fall on your side and ten thousand on your right; but nothing can strike thee, for your refuge is the Lord, and you have made the Most High your dwelling place. You shall walk on aspids and vipers, and you shall crush lions and dragons" (Ps 91:5-9, 13).
It is exactly my experience, since I put myself at the school of St. Thomas, especially in the Dominican Order. I certainly do not forget St Paul's warning: "Wait for your salvation with fear and trembling" (Phil, 12). I am repulsed by the good-natured ‘misericordismo’ of Rahner or von Balthasar, which ensures that everyone is saved and I know very well that it is false, it is an addiction that puts consciences to sleep.
Instead, following the example of the Saints, I try to combine fear and confidence, because fear alone leads to despair, as was happening to me at the age of 16; but confidence alone - as in Descartes and Luther’s concern- is not the remedy for despair, but is an opposite sin: it is a sign of pride and presumption and provokes precisely that divine wrath, which is believed to be avoided, being the object of mercy alone.
Looking at my history, I see with satisfaction that I built a solid building on the rock. I have accumulated many goods, drawing them from the same secure asset, from the same inexhaustible and healthy source. I trafficked my talents. Once the foundations were laid, I left and I was able to continue and progress in the same direction, on the same line. I never had to change course, undo and start again on new foundations. I foresaw the goal from the beginning and am now close to it. I haven’t mistaken the road nor I did deceive myself. Having received a centuries-old inheritance, what I will pass on as an inheritance will last for centuries.
In truth, Thomas came to confirm me on a journey that I had already undertaken since I was a child, ever since, with that holy Carmelite parish priest, who was Father Torello Scali. I studied the catechism in the parish or, as it was called, the "doctrine", a skimpy and poorly printed blue booklet - we are in 1948 - but full of wisdom: "Who is God? God is the most perfect Being creator of the heaven and the earth. Why did God create us? To know Him, love Him and serve Him on this earth and enjoy in paradise." It is the purest metaphysics. And a child can understand it very well. They are the same foundations on which I built everything. Here Thomas is already implicit.
He came to my rescue explicitly, when in high school I came across that imposture that is the cogito of Descartes [16] and in the historicism of my teacher of letters Franco Mollia, who said: "There is no truth. There is only the opinion." The doubt about the existence of the truth was the greatest test of my life [my italics (Ed.)]. St. Thomas drew me from that trial through Don Buzzoni. Since then my spirit has been so armored against the spirit of lies, that it enables me to overcome, with the help of the grace and intercession of Aquinas, every trial, to endure every suffering, to refute every error, to reject all the aggressions, temptations and snares of the world and of the devil, turning to my advantage, what the evil one tries to ruin me.
The joy of these last years, which the Lord grants me, is that of being able to distribute to young people and share with confreres, friends, and scholars, following the example of the Holy Father Dominic, of whom we sing "aquam sapientiae propinasti gratis", all those doctrines and wisdom notions which, as a disciple of the Common Doctor, I have accumulated in the course of these sixty years, since, in the now distant 1959, I began reading first the Thomist Maritain, and then, from 1960, Thomas himself directly.
Fr. Giovanni Cavalcoli OP
Fontanellato, 24 June 2020
Source: https://padrecavalcoli.blogspot.com/p/gratitudine-san-tommaso.html
[1] These memories disregard another aspect of my personality, now extinct: the attitude to drawing, which was born in me just at the age of six and in a prodigious way, in the sense that already at that age I knew how to make drawings, which normally can do only a gifted adult. But then it happened that at the age of 15-16. I fell into an identity crisis, from which I came out, as I tell here, in 1959, for the intervention of Don Giovanni Buzzoni, my high school religion teacher. At that time God gave birth to a philosophical vocation in me, which would then lead me to become a Dominican. At the same time, that vein of draftsman has gradually and inexorably died out. I mention it in an interview with Francesca Pannuti: Un teologo Domenicano oggi, Edizioni IF Press. Morolo (FR), 2012.
[2] Descartes tries to recover real based on the cogito, but the operation fails, because he, instead of basing himself on the veracity of meaning, appeals to divine veracity, which is completely out of place, because divine veracity serves to guarantee the truth of faith, not that of reason. Those who start from the cogito, observe Gilson acutely, remain closed inside, and cannot get out to reach reality.
Reflecting on own thinking is a very useful act, not for founding knowledge, but for the moral sciences for those of the "ens rationis" (logic and mathematics). To know what is happening outside the home, you have to leave the house. Being locked in the house, we cannot imagine what happens outside. At most, we can reflect on what we have learned outside the home.
From self-consciousness or cogito one can return to the knowledge already acquired in external reality, but one cannot leave to reach the external real. This is contacted initially, immediately, and directly by the true starting point of knowledge, which is sensible knowledge. Then the intellect can become aware of the knowledge acquired. But a thought that claims to start from itself reflectively, without that prior sensible knowledge, is a thought that turns on itself without content, a prisoner of irresolvable self-centeredness.
[3] I remember a French film of that time, "Les Tricheurs", which, in the state of bewilderment in which I found myself, disturbed me deeply, because it seemed to me that it validated this bewilderment with the description of a meaningless youthful life, without purposes out principles.
[4] Cf. Les degrés du savoir, Desclée de Brouwer, Bruges 1959.
[5] Cf. of Maritain, Sept leçons sur l'être et les premiers principes de la raison spéculative, Téqui, Paris 1933.
[6] I have amply demonstrated it in my book Christ Foundation of the World, Edizioni Isola di Patmos, Rome 2019.
[7] Cf by Raissa Maritain, I grandi amici, Vita e Pensiero, Milan 1956.
[8] IL CRITERITA DELLA VERITA' SECONDO SCHILLEBEECKX, Sacra Doctrina, 2, 1984, pp.188-205
THE CHRISTOLOGY OF SCHILLEBEECKX, Sacra Doctrina, 1, 1987, pp.65-80; THE CHRISTOLOGY OF SCHILLEBEECKX, licentiate course in theology at STAB, Bologna 1998; THE DENIAL OF HELL IN THE THEOLOGY OF K.RAHNER AND E.SCHILLEBEECKX, in Inferno e dintorni. E' possibile un'eterna damnation?, Atti del Convegno Teologico Internazionale organizzato dai Francescani dell'Immacolata, a cura di P. Serafino M. Lanzetta, FI, Edizioni Cantagalli, Siena, 2010,pp.223-251; Entry EDWARD SCHILLEBEECKX, in the ELEMENTARY DICTIONARY OF DANGEROUS THOUGHT, Institute of Apologetics, Milan 2016.
[9] John Cavalcoli, EDWARD SCHILLEBEECKX. UN CONFRATELLO ACCUSA, Edizioni Chorabooks di Aurelio Porfiri, Hong Kong, 2016.
[10] Cf. my criticism of his thought Modern Gnosticism, taking up a book by Msgr. Livi, in Fides Catholica, 2, 2012, pp.109-140. This article anticipates the condemnation of Gnosticism made by Pope Francis, who would have arrived a few years later in the apostolic exhortation "Gaudete et exultate" of 2018.
[11] Cf. my book Theologians in Black and White. Il contributo della scuola domenicana alla storia della teologia, PIEMME, 2000.
[12] THINKING THOUGHT. CONSIDERATIONS ON DIGNITY, FUNCTIONS, AND LIMITS OF THOUGHT, I, Divinitas, 3,2000, pp. 279-300.
THINK THOUGHT. CONSIDERATIONS ON DIGNITY, FUNCTIONS, AND LIMITS OF THOUGHT, II, Divinitas, 1, 2001, pp.43-72.
[13] SULLA DIFFERENZA TRA L'ANIMA DELL'UOMO E QUELLA DELLA DONNA, in Atti del congresso della SITA, Ed. Massimo, Milano, pp.227-234.
[14] LA DONNA IN S. TOMMASO D'AQUINO, in Problemi di storia e vita sociale, a cura della PUST, Ed. Massimo, Milano, 1982 pp.131-139; LA CONDIZIONE DELLA SEXUALITYTA' UMANA NELLA RESURREZIONE SECONDO S.TOMMASO, Sacra Doctrina, 92, 1980, pp.21-146; LA RESURREZIONE DELLA SEXUALITYTA' SECONDO S.TOMMASO, in Atti dell'VII Congresso Tomistico Internazionale a cura della Pontificia Accademia di San Tommaso, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, Città del Vaticano, 1982, pp. 207–219.
[15] Edizioni Vivere In, Monopoli (BA), 2008.
[16] Note that Descartes was put on the Index in 1663. But who noticed?