Each year the Center for Catholic Studies sponsors a retreat in August for faculty and staff members. In order to prepare for the beginning of the new academic year, faculty and staff take time apart from their busy schedules to reflect on Catholic Studies’ mission in light of their work for the center and for the department. Daily Mass is celebrated, and participants have time for fellowship and quiet reflection.
Each year the Center for Catholic Studies sponsors a retreat in August for faculty and staff members. In order to prepare for the beginning of the new academic year, faculty and staff take time apart from their busy schedules to reflect on Catholic Studies’ mission in light of their work for the center and for the department. Daily Mass is celebrated, and participants have time for fellowship and quiet reflection.
During the three-day retreat, De Souza led participants through four of Pope Benedict’s recent addresses: “Europe’s Crisis of Culture,” delivered as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger the day before Pope John Paul II died; “Three Stages in the Program of De- Hellenization,” the controversial address given at the University of Regensburg in 2006; the 2008 address intended for delivery at Rome’s La Sapienza University; and the 2008 talk given to Catholic educators at the Catholic University of America. Discussion focused on the Pope’s call throughout these documents to expand the realm of human reason by not limiting it to present-day positivist philosophies but by seeking to reattach it to its long and rich heritage in Greek and Judeo- Christian thought. “From the beginning Christianity has understood itself as the religion of the ‘Logos,’ as the religion according to reason,” Benedict states, and human reason reaches its fullness when united with faith.
Participants came away from the retreat with a renewed sense of the center’s mission as it participates in the larger mission of the Catholic university: to educate the whole student by teaching the truth through reason in the light of faith.
