The Current

The recent release of "Fratelli tutti," the third encyclical of Pope Francis, provides an appropriate starting point for this month's reflection on service in our community. Headlines on the Vatican News website refer to it as a "radical blueprint for post-COVID world" and "a call to disrupt our lives and pay attention to the world." In our monthly "Works" column, we take a brief look at our own small corner of that world, and our connection to its larger fabric, in the service this fall that some of our students are undertaking. While they are hopefully taking up the task of preparing the post-COVID world, they are dealing directly with some of COVID's present limitations. And despite those, through virtual and in-person work, they are finding creative ways to live out the gospel in action. (Read more.)

Brother Sixtus Roslevich, in an October note to oblates and friends of Portsmouth Abbey, offers a reflection on the theme of "words." Inspired by his interaction with some of the texts he has found in his inherited office in the monastery, and their physical link to the community's past, the very tangible experience of words elicits his own attempt to verbalizing an experience of words, of the Word, and of what may be beyond words. The photo here is of this editor's own copy of the Graduale, "ad usum" - a monastic phrase Brother Sixtus discusses. Read "Words: A Reflection."

Father Michael welcomed the students back to Church Assembly this past week, marking the reentry into Fall. His reflection was in fact presented in two separate assemblies to the School, divided in half to meet spacing requirements for the church. He addresses the changing seasons of our lives, and the development of our self-understanding - and of the Church’s - in light of faith. “Life is a progression of seasons. And so is our spiritual life. The environment in which we live changes, and we must change with it. Saint Paul says, 'When I was a child, I used to talk as a child, think as a child, reason as a child; when I became a man, I put aside childish things' (1 Cor 13:11). For many of us, the truths we learned as children, expressed in simple ways and in simple stories, seem attacked or challenged by the expanding body of truth we call science. It need not be…” Father Michael emphasized the importance of recollecting, particularly in this election season, the positive teaching of the church, and not merely “what we are against.” And adding that, “We are all sinners, whatever the season,” Father Michael exhorted the School reconsider the “great news” Jesus offers, of forgiveness and salvation. (Read Fr. Michael's Church Assembly presentation here.)