Veritas - From the APRIM

Veritas – From the APRIM

Dominican Feud

On Wednesday 12 June Blackfriars hosted students from our fellow Dominican secondary schools: St Mary’s, St Dominic’s and Cabra, for the inaugural Dominican Feud. The aims of the evening included the building of relationships between senior students across the schools, in the context of exploring some of our Dominican heritage through a tournament in the format of Family Feud, as well as raising funds for a charity common across the four schools. The students shared time and pizza and demonstrated an openness to each other in the process of forming friendships. The night was a great success in that there were about 50 Year 10-12 students in attendance leading to about $350 being raised for the Solomon Islands communities that are administered by both Dominican Friars and Sisters.

The night’s success is largely owed to our YCS Captains, Philip Clark and Francesco Freda. Philip was the game-master who organised the brilliant PowerPoint program through which the answers were revealed. Francesco was the highly charismatic compere of the evening. All the students that attended enjoyed each other’s company and the humour generated through the games, which rose only to a level of passive competitiveness. St Mary’s College won this first feud. All schools are looking forward to this becoming an annual fixture.

Our attraction to beauty

My 9-year-old twin daughters had their Sacrament of Confirmation last weekend, which was presided over by Fr Philip Marshall in the absence of our Bishop. For obviously personal reasons, this was quite moving for me. The depth of my joy was enhanced greatly through Fr Philip’s address of the beauty of each child, their unique nature and the infinite love of God for all of them, which began at their moment of their conception. As I sat in the Church revelling in my deep joy, hearing of God’s love and the focus on the Holy Spirit, I was totally struck by the beauty of the ceremony. I also realised that many in the congregation are not regular church-goers. Were they also struck by the beauty?

Outside the Church is the often-brutal corporate world, a world that is win-at-all-cost, containing pervasively corrupt ideologies that evilly target children through the media and even through ‘education’, the nihilistic post-modern repulsion in just about every Netflix (and many other TV) program of recent years, the violence, the grievance mentality and its hate, division and anger, etc., I couldn’t help compare this ugliness with the beauty inside the Church. Surely, wouldn’t this comparison also be noted by the irregular church-goer?

Throughout the world, particularly Europe, there are the most magnificently beautiful Cathedrals built for worship and to the glory of God. They draw tourists by the millions because people are attracted to beauty. Sadly, in France at least, those that are captivated by ‘the ugly’ are deliberately desecrating Churches, Christian monuments and sculptures at a rate of three per day. They clearly need to step inside the Church, as well as churches, and open their hearts to the love of God. They need to open their hearts to beauty.

People do have a choice: the ugly or the beautiful. During the Mass, we pray that we avoid the “glamour of evil” because it contains the anti-truth and the ultimate misery. In the Lord’s Prayer, we ask for help to avoid temptation – a temptation to be trapped in only seeing the ugly. We ask to be delivered from evil – the ugliness of evil that can ruin our minds and hearts. During the Confirmation liturgy, candidates are asked: “Do you reject Satan and all his works and all his empty promises?” to which they respond: “I do.” They then go on to confirm their faith in the most beautiful of all things – the triune God, who is love. When at our best, Catholics choose to reject the ugly and pursue the deeply beautiful.

Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati (1901-1925), whose feast is the 4th July, was a man described by St Pope John Paul 2nd as “the Man of the Eight Beatitudes”. Beautiful attitudes. These are the hallmarks of a Christian and Bl Frassati certainly lived them out. In his time and context, Communism and Fascism were ugly forces opposing the Church and persecuting the clergy. Frassati was a man of substance that rejected these works of Satan. In some ways, our current climate is similar to that of Frassati’s, so it is perhaps timely to read what Frassati said at the time:

Governments today are not heeding the Pope’s warning: 

'True peace is more a fruit of Christian love for one’s neighbor than it is a fruit of justice,'

and they are preparing new wars for the future of all humanity. ...

Peace cannot return to the world without God.

When you consider history, the world that followed Frassati’s prediction of the early 1920s, namely the socialist movements under Hitler in Germany and the various Communist leaders of Russia/the USSR, the 6-7 million killed by the Nazis and the 100 million killed by the Communists, Frassati could see the danger in pursuing a grievance culture – a pursuit of ideological falsities instead of the pursuit of love, accompanied respectively by the display of ugliness instead of the pursuit of beauty. God has given us a beautiful world that He described as “very good” at the end of the 6th day of creation. This beauty is evident in nature. It is evident in the magnificent works of human endeavour across many fields, including the art within and engineering of the Cathedrals, but most of all through the beauty of true and proper love. I pray that people seek and appreciate this beauty and reject the ugly. After all, we are surely more attracted to real beauty.

Mr Matthew Crisanti

ASSISTANT PRINCIPAL: RELIGIOUS IDENTITY AND MISSION