Prayer

For those of us whose apostolate is within the world, the prayerful power and contemplative intercessions of the religious has our back, for they are a mighty arm of the Church and their prayer is one of the sharpest swords of the Word, now as it was centuries ago, when St. Teresa of Avila wrote these words: "I think we should act as people do when, in time of war, the enemy has overrun the country and the king finds himself hard pressed. He retires into a strongly fortified town from whence he sometimes makes a sortie. The small company with him in the citadel, being picked men, are better than a large army of cowardly soldiers; thus they often come off victors, they are not vanquished for there is no traitor in their ranks and famine alone can conquer them. No famine can force us to surrender--it may kill us--it cannot vanquish us! But why have I told you this? To teach you, my sisters, that we must ask God to grant that, of all the good Christians in this fort, none may desert to the enemy, that no traitor may be found here, and that the captains of this castle, or city--that is, the preachers and theologians--may be proficient in the way of our Lord. Since most of these are religious, you must pray that they may advance in perfection and may follow their vocation more perfectly. This is very necessary, for, as I said, it is the arm of the Church and not of the State which much defend us now. We, being women, can fight for our King in neither way: Let us, then, strive so to live that our prayers may avail to help these servants of God who have laboured hard to arm themselves with learning and virtue with which to help their Sovereign." The Way of Perfection. [1565]. (1997). Rockford, Illinois: Tan Books and Publishers. (pp. 16-17)

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The Church

760 Christians of the first centuries said, "The world was created for the sake of the Church." God created the world for the sake of communion with his divine life, a communion brought about by the "convocation" of men in Christ, and this "convocation" is the Church. The Church is the goal of all things, and God permitted such painful upheavals as the angels' fall and man's sin only as occasions and means for displaying all the power of his arm and the whole measure of the love he wanted to give the world.

Just as God's will is creation and is called "the world," so his intention is the salvation of men, and is called "the Church." (Catechism of the Catholic Church, #760)

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Catholic Intellect, Catholic Will

"For the soul's full functioning, we need a Catholic intellect as well as a Catholic will. We have a Catholic will when we love God and obey God, love the Church and obey the Church. We have a Catholic intellect when we live consciously in the presence of the realities that God through his Church has revealed. A good working test of a Catholic will is that we should do what the Church says. But for a Catholic intellect, we must also see what the Church sees. This means that when we look out upon the Universe we see the same Universe that the Church sees; and the enormous advantage of this is that the Universe the Church sees is the real Universe, because She is the Church of God. Seeing what She sees means seeing what is there. And just as loving what is good is sanctity, or the health of the will, so seeing what is there is sanity, or the health of the intellect." Theology and Sanity. F. J. Sheed. (1946). New York: Sheed & Ward. (pp. 3-4)

Saint Thomas Aquinas

How his work and spirit influences Lampstand.

My journey to the Catholic Church passed through the gates which led me to the Angelic Doctor, via a path marked by a solicitous friend, leading to Opus Dei and Jacques & Raissa Maritain, and it happened like this.

Before I had started studying Catholicism, but after I had begun thinking about it, I mentioned my interest to a friend, who I did not know at the time was a Catholic, and she suggested I begin by learning about Opus Dei.

I did, and soon after had dinner with an Opus Dei priest, Father Kelly (who still provides for me the model qualities I look for in Catholic priests) and soon after that dinner I contacted the Opus Dei publishing house, Scepter Publishers, and as a result of a conversation with Kevin, I was directed to the book Liturgy and Contemplation, by Jacques and Raissa Maritain, which we are blessed to now have access to online at http://www.ewtn.net/library/THEOLOGY/LITCOM.HTM

This book continues to exert a profound influence on me--maintaining its permanent spot in my bedside book stack of twenty or so seminal volumes--with Chapter III of Part II, Contemplation and the call to perfection, with its opening line "Dominating the whole spiritual life is the call to perfection." so rousing me that I copied it out (this was before I found it online) and carrying it around for months rereading it as the opportunty arose.

This introduction to the Maritains eventually led me to Saint Thomas, especially after I read what Raissa Maritain wrote.

"My First Reading of the "Summa Theologica"

"The first and admirable advice which Father Clerissac gave me, advice which was truly inspired, was to read Saint Thomas. While Jacques was busy at his work for Hachette and with his first articles, I--a recluse because of illness and therefore dispensed from any obligation to see people or to go about--could devote the best part of my time to reading and meditating on the Summa Theologica.

"For two years, ever since our baptism, the starting point of all our thinking, whether about philosophy or life--and for us the one has always been inseparable from the other--that starting point has been the faith by which we now lived, whose praises we sang incessantly in our heart and whose power to give order to all things we ceaselessly admired. We left the philosopers for the time being to argue among themselves; we were at rest in a temporary neutrality in their respect; we set aside all their philosophies until further notice. It was a delight to live far from their quarrels and little by little to let our human reason grow strong again, to let it repair itself in the sunlight of the eternal truths....

"It was not without trembling with curosity and foreboding that I opened for the first time the Summa Theologica on the "Treatise on God." Was not scholasticism, according to the reputation which had been given it, a tomb of subtleties fallen to dust? And would not even the Prince of the schoolmen himself throw a little of this dust on the flames of our young faith?

"From the very first pages I understood the emptiness, the childishness of my fears. Everything, here, was freedom of spirit, purity of faith, integrity of the intellect enlightened by knowledge and genius.

"The serene calm of the style, in appearance so impersonal, the peaceful bearing of the reasoning which gives to each word the meaning closest to the intellectual intuition from which it was born and, for this very reason, giving it the fullness of its savour; the spiritual power, almost angelic, which allows Saint Thomas to enfold within the briefest of his propositions innumerable truths each linked the one to the other according to the very hierarchy of real beings--everything was luminous for me in what I read, and it was with incessant thanksgiving that I pursued my reading.

"Writing these pages I find myself again in the happy emotion of that first contact with the thought of Saint Thomas."

Maritain, R. (1945). Adventures in grace: (Sequel to) We have been friends together. (Kernan, J. Trans.) New York: Longmans, Green and Co. (pp. 14 - 16).

A central element of Lampstand's work is to understand and defend the traditional criminal justice related teaching of the Church, particularly that of protecting the innocent through bringing justice upon the head of the aggressor, and Saint Thomas cemented the traditional teaching of the Church by explaining the love in the heart of the judge when sentencing the agressor to death for crimes of "great wickedness".

"When, however, they fall into very great wickedness, and become incurable, we ought no longer to show them friendliness. It is for this reason that both Divine and human laws command such like sinners to be put to death, because there is greater likelihood of their harming others than of their mending their ways. Nevertheless the judge puts this into effect, not out of hatred for the sinners, but out of the love of charity, by reason of which he prefers the public good to the life of the individual. Moreover the death inflicted by the judge profits the sinner, if he be converted, unto the expiation of his crime; and, if he be not converted, it profits so as to put an end to the sin, because the sinner is thus deprived of the power to sin any more."

Summa Theologica. (1948). II-II, Q. 25, A. 6, Reply to Objection II. http://www.newadvent.org/summa/3025.htm#article6

Saint Thomas understood that the criminal's penance and redemtion operates in eternal time rather than worldly, because he, like all of our saints, lived in eternal time rather than worldly.

Saint Thomas is a powerful ally in the conversion of criminals and as I more deeply understand the truths of the Catholic faith which he illuminated with such light, our work will be that much more enhanced.

Pope Leo XIII, in his 1879 encyclical about Christian philosophy writes:

"Then the Doctors of the Middle Ages, whom we call Scholastics, set themselves to do a work of very great magnitude. There are rich and fruitful crops of doctrine scattered everywhere in the mighty volumes of the Holy Fathers. The aim of the scholastics was to gather these together diligently, and to store them up, as it were, in one place, for the use and convenience of those that come after...(p. xiv)

"Now far above all other Scholastic Doctors towers Thomas Aquinas, their master and prince. Catejan says truly of him: "So great was his veneration for the ancient and sacred Doctors that he may be said to have gained a perfect understanding of them all." Thomas gathered together their doctrines like the scattered limbs of a body and molded them into a whole. He arranged them in so wonderful an order, and increased them with such great additions, that rightly and deservedly he is reckoned a singular safeguard and glory of the Catholic Church...(pp. xiv - xv)

"But now we come to the greatest glory of Thomas--a glory which is altogether his own, and shared with no other Catholic Doctor. In the midst of the Council of Trent, the assembled Fathers so willing it, the Summa of Thomas Aquinas lay open on the altar, with the Holy Scriptures and the decrees of the Supreme Pontiffs, that from it might be sought counsel and reasons and answers." (p. xvi)

On the Restoration of Christian Philosophy, According to the Mind of St. Thomas Aquinas, The Angelic Doctor. (pp. xiv - xviii) St. Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologica (Fathers of the English Domincan Province, Trans.) (1948). Christian Classics, Ave Maria Press: Notre Dame, Indiana.

The Lampstand Foundation

Saint Thomas Aquinas

How his work and spirit influences Lampstand.