St. Albert the Great
Nov. 15, 2018
Collect
I was
to have celebrated the noon Mass at Nativity in D.C., as usual on Thursdays;
but we had our 1st winter storm of the season, and Nativity staff advised me to
stay home. But here’s the day’s homily.
The
Collect of today’s Mass tells us that God “made the bishop St. Albert great by
his joining of human wisdom to divine faith,” and it prays that God will, in
turn, help us to “come to a deeper knowledge” of himself thru our “progress in
learning.”
In
other words, human knowledge and human culture—the arts and sciences, languages
and customs—not only are compatible or can be compatible with religious
realities, with God’s revealed truths, but they definitely also can aid our
understanding of God, our knowledge and love of him.
Albert
was a German Dominican of the 13th century, a learned university professor—one
of his pupils was St. Thomas Aquinas—provincial of the Dominicans in northern
Europe, and a bishop and counselor of Popes.
Altho he taught and wrote in the areas of Scripture and theology, he was
among the 1st to take up the philosophical writings of Aristotle, newly
introduced to the West in Latin translations, and to show how they could foster
our perception of God and God’s workings in the world. This was a cultural breakthru of Christendom
akin to what digital technology has done for Western society in the last 50
years, or what the advancement of women has done in the last century and a half
(and has the potential to do in the underdeveloped world).
But St.
Albert didn’t limit his intellectual curiosity to philosophy and theology. He took great interest in the entire natural
world as well: physics, chemistry,
astronomy, minerology, botany, zoology.[1] For him, the natural world was another book
inspired and written by God to reveal himself to humanity. Albert’s the patron saint of scientists for
good reason.
He’s
also just one example of the Catholic Church’s long, close relationship with
science that has included his contemporary the English Franciscan friar Roger
Bacon, the great French chemist and microbiologist Louis Pasteur, Belgian
astrophysicist Fr. George Lemaitre, father of the Big Bang theory—to name only
a very few among hundreds of Catholic men of science. The Vatican astronomical observatory is 2
years older than the U.S.
If
there are opponents of authentic science today, they’re not found in official
Catholicism. There are people who deny
evolution or climate change, who deny the biological facts of human sexuality
by calling gender just a mental or emotional construct (if you think you’re a
girl, then you’re a girl regardless of objective science), who deny the
scientific evidence of the humanity of unborn human life. On such matters, you would find St. John Paul
II, Pope Benedict XVI, and Pope Francis on the side of science, in the
tradition of St. Albert.
Albert
isn’t a saint because of his science, however, or even his philosophy and
theology. As Pope Benedict observed, he
was a man of faith, prayer, and charity.[2] He nourished his spiritual life with the
sacraments and the Word of God.[3] His one great desire was “always to be
conformed to God’s will, in order to desire and to do everything only and
always for his glory.”[4]
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