Speakers at the Symposium in the 1875 Hope Club at Brown University,
left to right: James Matthew Wilson, Robert Royal, James Keating, and Fr. Paul Clarke O.P. of Providence College who provided the invocation

While not nearly as old as the two main tentpoles that support the life of our campus, spiritual and otherwise, the Portsmouth Institute is the relative newcomer. Nevertheless, founded in 2009, it has rightly taken its place alongside Portsmouth Abbey (founded 1919) and Portsmouth Abbey School (founded 1926) as an integral component of our community life. In fact, the 2013 edition of The Portsmouth Review spoke of community when it made clear the two major goals of the Institute: “to establish a community – physically and virtually – where issues relating to Catholic life, leadership and service in the 21^st Century could be engaged and explored, and to take advantage of our magnificent setting and architecture on the shores of Narragansett Bay to emphasize the tradition of academic and spiritual excellence at Portsmouth Abbey and School.” How prescient those identifiers were at the time because, after those first years of actual physical and in-person activities, on campus and elsewhere, recent events by necessity were presented virtually, including the 2021 Portsmouth Institute.

Not so the 2021 Providence Symposium held in-person Thursday, October 7, on the campus of Brown University in the historic Hope Club founded in 1875. It was preceded by a Mass for the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary in Brown’s 1834 Manning Chapel celebrated by Prior Michael Brunner O.S.B. and concelebrated by Fr. Edmund McCullough O.P.  Friends of the Institute, including several Portsmouth Abbey Oblates and monks, then gathered in person for the program titled Reclaiming the Catholic Imagination featuring guests whom the evening’s moderator, Dr. James Keating, Associate Professor of Theology at Providence College, called “two major figures in American Catholicism.” The School’s Humanities Program was the sponsor of the event.  Dr. Keating drew early applause when he spoke of Chris Fisher, the Institute’s Executive Director, as “a ball of energy and creativity.”

Br. Benedict proclaiming the Mass’ 1st Reading, the Responsorial Psalm, and the Alleluia at the 1834 Manning Chapel at Brown University

The event's speakers were Dr. Robert Royal and Dr. James Matthew Wilson. Royal is the editor-in-chief of The Catholic Thing, president of the Faith and Reason Institute, and a writer who has authored, edited or translated 15 books. Wilson is a poet, critic, scholar and the Director of the MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Saint Thomas in Houston. In his introductory remarks, Professor Keating applauded the use of the program’s title, Reclaiming the Catholic Imagination, and said he hoped that the speakers might answer his own appended question, “...but from what?” He called Royal “the juggernaut of The Catholic Thing,” his popular podcast known for its intelligent Catholic commentary for which, he says, “he writes something every day, 365 days a year.” As for Wilson, Keating called him “one of the most stimulating young intellectuals of the Catholic Church...and a doer!” His book of poetry, Vision of a Soul, according to Keating, is “learned and beautifully, beautifully, written.” Throughout his talk, Royal referenced Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Friedrich Nietzsche, as well as Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and Dante’s Inferno, reciting certain passages of the latter quite confidently in Italian. “Beauty doesn’t have to be pretty,” he explained, “but how do we distinguish between beauty that is different: a beautiful liturgy or a beautiful sunset or a heroically charitable act? The transcendent can always break in on us.”

James Matthew Wilson, University of Saint Thomas, Houston

Regarding the program’s title concept of “reclaiming,” Wilson began his segment by stating that “reclamation is a returning to the past from which we’ve come” and later brought his thoughts full circle by gently admonishing the audience that “if you didn’t have the past, you’d have nothing to talk about.” This reminded him of the invitation he received to attend the 2018 San Francisco premiere of “The Mass of the Americas in the Extraordinary-Form,” a liturgical composition by Frank La Rocca and commissioned by Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone. (In his review at the time, Robert Royal wrote that it “struck a much better note of inculturation” in that it was rooted in both Americas, North and South.) Wilson recalled being moved by “pilgrims on their hands and knees” approaching St. Mary’s Cathedral that day and he was later asked to write “a poem, actually a volume, The River of the Immaculate Conception, a reflection of America’s Catholic past.”  He reflected Thursday evening, too, on another chapter in this country’s early Catholic history, a more pacific chapter than others. He spoke of when “French Jesuits came, not with arms and guns but in canoes, gliding down rivers, grace entering into nature, not to be superior but to enter into a companionship with them.” Surely these were “encounters of grace and communion.” The same may be said of the encounters before, during and after the evening’s event. 

Chris Fisher, director of the Portsmouth Institute

In concluding, guests were asked to mark calendars for the next in-person, deo volente, Portsmouth Institute scheduled for June 11-12, 2022.