Friars of the Order of Order of Preachers

Dominican Cooperator Brothers Study

“Dedicating Ourselves to God, Following Christ to Lead an
Evangelical Life in the Order" (LCO 189, I)

DOMINICAN COOPERATOR BROTHERS OF THE UNITED STATES
GATHER FOR AN HISTORIC MEETING
(5/8/2012: for immediate release)

Is the Order of Preachers dying? Such a question would seem absurd to some, alarming to others, but the “vocation crisis” of men interested in the consecrated life as Brothers in the Church today is very real. The decline has been especially felt in the Order by the Dominican Brothers, who, as one brother described, have seen a 57% decline in numbers since the 1980s, as compared to a 20% decline in the number of Dominican priests (cf. Curia Generalizia Frati Domenicani).

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The following article is borrowed from the DOMINICANA E-Magazine of the Eastern Dominican Province.  Dominicana is a publication of the Dominican Students of the St. Joseph Province, who live and study at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, DC. The blog is updated every weekday, and the journal appears twice a year. To contact the editors of Dominicana please write to dominicanadhs@gmail.com.

Yiayias Nagging Morals

Last year a Greek food company produced a series of creative and wildly popular ads that juxtaposed modern young people doing what modern young people do—cohabiting, dressing immodestly, and being a stay-at-home dad—with a wizened old Greek grandmother (Yiayia) laying down the law in a brief but forceful way. (My favorite line: “Are you two married? But you living together, eh? You are going to hell!”)

In the wake of the Obama mandate on contraception, a chorus of Catholic bloggers produced a distinctly Yiayia-like solution to the widespread problem of Catholics flouting Church teaching on a host of moral issues: tell them they are going to hell.

Ordinarily level-headed writers conjured gleeful idylls in which bishops descend upon their dioceses like Rambo, laying public sinners and heresy to waste with rapid-fire excommunications, and priests replace their homilies with booming pulpit declamations against their congregations’ wicked ways. Some commentators thought the Obama mandate was a sign that the time for carrots has passed, and that the primary solution for the Church’s moral problems should now be the stick.

Both Yiayia and these bloggers have made some important errors about the Christian life. There are deeply and critically true things in what they are saying, of course; morality does matter, the Church and its ministers do have an obligation to care for souls by moral guidance, and sometimes a short, sharp shock does awaken people to the temporal and eternal consequences of their actions.

But we would do well to attend to the errors. The scold assumes that people who are acting badly will change their ways if they just hear the truth told to them often enough. This is not true. Telling a cohabiting couple that they are going to hell will only convince them to change their ways if they already believe that hell exists, that it’s possible to go there, that their action in the world can influence whether they go there, that the Church has the authority to rule on what sends people there, and that you have the authority to speak to them about their personal decisions. Of these five necessary beliefs, many people only hold the first with any certainty, reserve the second and the third for Hitler, Stalin, and people who smoke, and reject the fourth and the fifth without much consideration.

Thus we have been led back to the deeper problem that undergirds the first. A certain kind of Catholic assumes that the fundamental problem in the Church today is a crisis of morality. This is not true. Behind the crisis of morality lies a deeper crisis: a crisis of faith.

Read all this article at its source on the
Eastern Dominican Province Dominicana blog

The prayer of Compline has always been treated with special care within the Dominican Order and elsewhere.  Our own house of studies, St. Albert Priory, celebrates that office publicly each night of the academic year, but on Sunday the office is concluded with a processioon out of the chapel along the cloister walkway, to the stature of Our Lady and then, during the O Lumen, into the cloister garden to the statue of St. Dominic in the central coi pond.

Attached to this message is a video of the Salve Procession as celebrated in Ireland.  The music is identical to that of St. Albert Priory.  Click the title of this post to see the link to the video.

Br. Andrew Dominic Yang, 24, is from sunny Orange County, California. He obtained his B.A. in Political Science from the University of California, San Diego, where he encountered the Dominicans at the campus’ Newman Center. Amazed by the powerful preaching of the friars, he started seriously discerning priestly vocation during this time at college. A proud Korean-American, Br. Andrew Dominic has worked in the banking industry for the past 2 years. He is extremely grateful to have the opportunity to serve God through His Church, and to share his Novitiate year with the parishioners of St. Dominic’s.

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Br. Andy Opsahl, of Sacramento, California, is 31 years old. He obtained his B.A. in Journalism from California State University, Sacramento in 2005. Since then, he has been a reporter for Government Technology magazine, a national trade publication. As a journalist, Br. Andy learned to distill complicated concepts into practical explanations and aims to apply that skill to the Catholic faith as a Dominican preacher. He has also written several screenplays and hopes to make movies as part of his work for the Order of Preachers.

Meet all the Novices for 2011-2012

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First Vespers
24th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Br. Ambrose Sigman, OP