THE THOMISTIC
INSTITUTE AT YALE
By Joe Falvey, J.D. Candidate, Yale Law School
BISHOP ROBERT BARRON:
AQUINAS AND THE NEW EVANGELIZATION
On May 13, the PFIC conferred
an honorary Doctorate in Sacred
Theology on Most Reverend
Robert E. Barron, Auxiliary Bishop
of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles,
who gave the Commencement
Address to this year’s graduating
class. In his speech, Bishop
Barron brought the wisdom of
the Church’s Common Doctor,
St. Thomas Aquinas, to bear on
several obstacles to the New
Evangelization. The following are
excerpts from the address:
“I should like to begin by paying tribute
to the Dominican Fathers, who have
played such a decisive role in my own
development as a Christian, a priest, and a
theologian. I have often told the story of my
awakening to the faith under the influence
of Fr. Thomas Paulsen, a young (at the time)
Dominican friar teaching at Fenwick High
School outside of Chicago. One warm
spring afternoon in 1974, Fr. Paulsen laid
out the fundamentals of Thomas Aquinas’s
argument from causality for God’s existence,
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and his lecture was, for me anyway, like the
ringing of a bell, like a clap of thunder. It
gave me a sense of the reality of God, which
I have never lost, and it set me on a path
that I have really left, and which has led me
to where I stand right now.”
“Biblical religion constitutes the greatest
humanism ever proposed, indeed that
ever can be proposed. Many of the Church
Fathers summed up Christianity with the
pithy phrase, ‘Deus fit homo ut homo fieret
Deus [God became man that man might
become God],’ implying tha