Thanks to those parents and friends who helped make the week a success:
• For helping with student book distribution: Mrs. Jennifer Bonello and family, and Mrs. Lauren Hanson and family.
• For hosting our hospitality table on the opening night of school: Mrs. Laurie Mikolaycik, Mrs. Cathy Porretta, Mrs. Maria Saglietto, and Mrs. Kim Tran.
• For helping with our hamburger cookout on Thursday: Mr. and
Mrs. Brian Tran.General announcements to Parents
• Volunteer Opportunities
o Help before-during-after an athletic event
o Host weekenders
o Join in sponsoring a Parent Lunch
o Take photos
• Parent Meeting for the Gala, September 12 at 7 pm.
• There are no classes on Labor Day, September 6th. Students return to school on Monday evening at 7:00 p.m.
This week’s photos were taken by Edward Lim and Fr. Gabriel. They portray the Get-to-Know-You team building activities of this past week which included guest speaker, Mr. Jim Lee. They also include fraters Alan and Maximilian on the day of their solemn profession. More photos can be found on the school’s photo gallery.
Homily preached on the Solemnity of St. Augustine by Abbot Eugene Hayes, O.Praem.
Abbot Eugene is the major superior of St. Michael’s Abbey which sponsors St. Michael’s Preparatory School.
“Renew in your Church, we pray, O Lord, the spirit with which you imbued Saint Augustine, that filled with the same spirit, we might thirst for you, the only font of wisdom, and seek you, the author of divine love.” Today these words are on the lips of the Church universal as she celebrates God’s grace poured out upon Augustine of Hippo, a bishop, a doctor of the Church, a saint. He is surely one of the most influential figures not only in the history of the Catholic Church but indeed in history overall, as his work and thought continue to serve as reference points even today.
In a book published just last year written by Cardinal Francis George “The Difference God Makes; a Catholic vision of faith, communion and Culture,” the Cardinal points out how in our own contemporary society a society which prides itself as mostly and even purely secular, in relegating religion, religious faith to some clearly delineated compartment, it is St. Augustine who shows the way back to basics. He underlines Augustine’s refusal to fall into anything resembling a church/state dichotomy: “it is not the case that the secu
lar state ought to order public life while the Church cares for the spiritual good of the people… The problem is not how to reconcile the competing concerns of the spiritual and the secular; the problem is orthodoxy, that is getting our metaphysics and our praise of God in order so that we can live in a just, rightly ordered society.”Social ethic then is the burning issue and even non Catholic Christian thinkers have had to have recourse to the thought of St. Augustine in considering it. According to the Cardinal, one of these writers steeped in the Augustinian tradition presents a unique resolution of the church/society relationship with the paradigm of “Christ as the transformer of culture.”
The Cardinal again: “According to this model the culture is fallen and hence in need of transformation, but it is also capable of conversion through the influence of Christ’s way of being. The transformation paradigm (and here our confreres working nearly 24/7 should take note) is sufficiently realistic in its honest assessment of sin but it is also spiritually alert to the possibility of a real and thorough conversion of a culture through Christ. This particular thinker, the Cardinal points out “intriguingly.. claims St. Augustine –
especially in the City of God – as the best advocate of this position and here we can agree. There is no artificial distinction between public and private and no pessimistic resignation to the intractability of the public realm. But rather in the spirit of Augustine, the whole of the public ordo is seen as fallen through false love but redeemable through the authentic love of the communio opened up by Christ.” So Augustine’s spirit and the celebration of it is not just some internal parochial or private matter but one which has tremendous implications for our seemingly increasingly disordered society.While the Church universal prays that she, her members, might be filled with the same spirit given by God to St. Augustine, her prayer which is the norm for the Church’s belief, takes on deepened significance for us here in this place. We honor St. Augustine as our Holy Father and we strive to live by his rule, which begins reminding us that before all else we have come here that God might be loved and likewise the brethren “for these are the chief commandments given to us.” Just after the rule in the Constitutions of the Norbertine
Order it is stated that:We consider St. Augustine as the man who best understood and put the apostolic way of life into practice. In his life, works and Rule, we find a form of teaching and life directed towards God in love. Fraternal union, according to the teaching of Augustine, is based on the consciousness and experience that God Himself is present in the community and in each individual person and is manifested in a manifold "communio": that of minds and hearts, of goods, of prayers, of living and working together, under the guidance of the prelate serving through love.”
A vivid expression of our profession can be found … especially in the community of the cathedral church of Hippo where clerics, in accord with the example of the apostles, lived a common life in accordance with certain vital monastic traditions: "and I wish ... to have with me a monastery of clerics."
As we pray the texts of the liturgy of the hours and the texts of the Mass today we find those prayers to be especially normative for us, here in this place, whether having been here for many years (37 years tomorrow) or just literally having arrived like our 8 postulants. The Word which we have heard proclaimed in the three readings mirror what might be called the constitutive elements of our common life. They are texts from which we can dr
aw out what we and our life is all about. It is life rooted in the one faith which we share, rooted in our single minded devotion to God's word, God's truth, seen in the gospel. It is a life in which that common faith is expressed especially in our common liturgical prayer, a prayer which by vocation we celebrate in solemn fashion, a theme touched on in the first reading. It is a life expressed in the life of charity within our community in our day to day relations with each other. We know from our Holy Father Augustine, that difficulties in common life were not unknown to him. We strive to look to his own example in this regard that when confronted with individual failing and suspicion of failing he always "erred" (if we can say that of him) on the side of leniency rather than severity. Always thinking well of the brethren even when they did what was not permitted And for superiors seeking to be loved rather than feared.Our celebration then of St. Augustine in this place reminds us in the sanctuary and explains to you gathered here what our life is supposed to be about and why when faced with failures or difficulties or challenges, we do not give up but with the help of that reality called grace, of which our Holy Father is also called the doctor, the expert, we get up and try again and again.
This then is the form of life which our eight new postulants, arrived just yesterday have come with eagerness to experience; it is the form of life to which Frater Miguel committed himself yesterday, the form of life to which Fraters Cyprian and Nathaniel renewed their commitment last evening at Vespers, finally the form of life to which Fraters Alan and Maximilian will definitively and perpetually and solemnly commit themselves in a few moments, Please pray for them especially but for all of us that this our form of
life may be always animated by that same spirit with which God filled St. Augustine, and that in being transformed day by day by this form of life Christ may transform all those whom we serve that they through Him may transform a society so sorely in need of transformation.In publishing this homily, we hope to share a portion of the spiritual treasure by which the students are enriched every day. However, this homily may not be reproduced by the parents or friends of St. Michael’s without written permission of the author.
Prayer Requests• Msgr. John Sheridan, and Ambassador Douglas Kmiec who were seriously injured in a car accident
• St. Michael’s older priests and those who care for them
• Those who suffer in the current economic crisis
• Those who are in the armed forces.
• For the repose of the soul of Sr. Mary Campbell, a Sister of St. Louis who was killed in an auto accident.
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