Dear Friends:
Does being Roman Catholic actually have a distinct practical significance in daily political, economic, and social life today?
Any serious examination of the situation in the western world at large, and the United States in particular, would have to answer that question with a resounding “NO”.
Why should this be the case? It is not simply because many Catholics have abandoned the Faith and that those who are still practicing it are generally powerless. It is to a large degree due to the fact that even well-intentioned believers, deeply committed to doctrinal truth and liturgical purity, have never been taught the full Catholic vision or lived in an environment in which remnants of that idea still exercise some unconscious impact on men’s minds and hearts. Under these circumstances, they mistake what is familiar to them for what its good and Catholic.
Unfortunately, what is familiar to them is not distinctly Catholic at all. It is merely a long-lived “conservative” and “libertarian” pathway to implementing the vision of the always anti-Catholic, secularist Enlightenment; a pathway that has been more successful in dismantling Catholic influence over political, economic, and social life than any of the many other more violent historical roads to the same naturalist goal. In succumbing to this temptation to embrace the familiar, Catholics sell out their birthright for a mess of pottage, and blindfold themselves to the mistake that they have made.
The special apostolate of the Roman Forum is to remove that blindfold and stimulate both believers and searching non-believers alike to study the fullness of the Catholic doctrinal, spiritual, political, economic, social, and cultural tradition; to understand more completely what is theologically and historically meant by the “restoration of all things in Christ”; and to see that this is very distinct from anything that conservatives and libertarians as well as liberals tell us that it is.
We cannot carry out that apostolate without your support. Allow me to take a moment of your time briefly to outline what we do and why we need your financial help to do it.
New York City Lectures in Church History
For the last eighteen years, the Roman Forum has been the only organization in New York City and the surrounding area offering people not enrolled in an academic program a continuous and systematic, university-level course in the history of the Catholic Church and Catholic culture. The 2009-2010 series, Counterattack: Primal Assaults on the Medieval Catholic Synthesis (1270-1378), is so essential to understanding the growth of contemporary problems as to seem to be a course in current events. Lectures take place on Sundays at the Catholic Chaplaincy of New York University: St. Joseph Church, 371 Sixth Avenue in Manhattan. They include opportunity for questions and discussions with refreshments.
Roman Forum Modern Image and Catholic Truth Series
A special set of conferences with visiting speakers over cocktails and dinner. All deal with the self-defeating character of the dominant naturalist view of life and the richness of the contrasting Catholic vision. These will take place during the entire weekend of December 5th-6th, 2009, in commemoration of Blessed Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors (1864), and that of April 24th-25th, 2010, when the Forum celebrates the Birthday of Rome (the Parilia).
Summer Symposium on Lake Garda, Italy
For nearly two weeks during the summer, forty to fifty symposium participants transform Gardone Riviera, a small town on Lake Garda, the largest and most beautiful lake in Italy, into an international Catholic village. There are daily traditional masses in St. Nicolò, the seventeenth century parish church, Vespers in the Oratory, superb organ and choral music, lectures, exquisite food and wine, concerts, dances, and day trips to surrounding sites, such as Venice. For attendees, many of whom come back year after year and feel like a large extended family, it is a rare and wonderful opportunity to experience Catholic camaraderie on the continent where Catholic culture first came to flower.
The Summer Symposium has a large international faculty, which this year included Christopher A. Ferrara, Esq. (President of the ACLA, writer, and pro-life activist), Michael Matt (Editor of The Remnant), Dr. Brian McCall of the University of Oklahoma (Law & Economics), the Rev. Dr. Richard Munkelt of Fairfield University (Philosophy), Dr. Duncan Stroik of Notre Dame (Architecture), and myself (History) from the United States; Monsignor Dr. Ignacio Barreiro-Carámbula of HLI (Theology) and Dr. Danilo Castellano of the University of Udine (Politics and Philosophy) from Italy; James Bogle, Esq. (a leading Catholic lawyer, activist, and writer), with Dr. Alcuin Reid (author of The Organic Development of the Liturgy, published by Ignatius Press), from the United Kingdom; and Dr. Miguel Ayuso-Torres of the University of Madrid (Law) from Spain. Faculty and students are served spiritually by numerous participants from the secular and religious clergy.
Gardone 2010 (July 1-July 12, 2010), tentatively entitled The Politics of Faith and Reason? Or the Triumph of Will and Passion?, will offer a detailed discussion of the contrast between the human political and social order flowing from the Catholic vision of God and man and the animalistic one guaranteed by modern naturalism in all of its varied forms — both the more violent as well as the more “conservative” ones.
Downloads
Lectures, newly re-mastered, including almost all of the conferences from our History of Christianity program from 1993-2007, now are available to download to your computer. 2008 and 2009 lectures are soon to come. These talks can be obtained for only one dollar per lecture or purchase on audiotape at www.keepthefaith.org.
Website
Please consult this website — whose special sections on the Theology of the Mystical Body and Letter From the Romans seek to educate Catholics on the full meaning of the concept of “transformation in Christ” — for further information on all of our events, including our NEW YEAR’S EVE dinner-dance at the NYU Catholic Center on December 31, 2009 and the Birthday of Rome weekend in April, 2010.
Donations
In order to undertake these projects properly, the Roman Forum needs an annual budget of $50,000. What does this sum reflect?
Books, storage space for them, and use of conference halls alone now cost us $15,000 per year.
More importantly, faculty, college students, priests, and seminarians who wish to offer and receive the instruction that the Forum promotes cannot be present at our programs without financial assistance. Aiding them generally takes up most of our budget. This percentage is growing now that the Forum is committed to the expansion of its international program at Gardone. Dr. Ayuso-Torres from Madrid summarized the chief reason for this broadened commitment in his lecture at the 2008 session. Unless we traditionalists learn to appreciate the universal nature of the Catholic vision and fight for its general recognition and victory, we will all rest contented with our own little parochial pieces of that heritage and destroy the entirety in the process. My Remnant article on this subject, “Are Beauty, Camaraderie, and Talk Really Expendable?” (see jcrao.freeshell.org) underlines the same point. Providing faculty, priests, and students scholarships for such a program can be expensive — but its fruits are incalculable.
The Roman Forum may not be able to promise immediate benefits — like a tax cut — through your aid, but we work, as Thucydides said, with the conviction that what we are doing is being done for eternity. As I have written in the past, we consider every tax-deductible donation we receive to place upon us a serious responsibility to use our resources well and wisely. To show you our appreciation, we have arranged that the intentions of our benefactors be remembered once a month at a traditional Mass offered in Rome by our chaplain, Msgr. Ignacio Barreiro-Carámbula. With the acknowledgment of your donation, of any size, you will receive a note confirming that you have been enrolled in these Masses. I thank you in advance for your generosity.
Sincerely yours in Christ,
John C. Rao, Chairman
Assoc. Prof. of History, St. John’s University
D. Phil., Oxford University
Please make all your tax-deductible donations payable to “The Roman Forum”.
