Fr. Peter Ryan, S.J., Executive Director of the Secretariat of Doctrine and Canonical Affairs at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, presented this year’s Tekippe Theological Forum lecture. Fr. Ryan called the seminary community to a more profound appreciation of the universal call to holiness that manifests in different and complementary ways according to each person’s unique vocation. “This teaching is not new,” he said, “but it was lost sight of by many in the Church for quite a long time.” In explaining why that happened, he offered two arguments: the influence of a view of reality, drawn from Greek philosophy, that fails to appreciate the centrality of material reality and the effect of a legalistic understanding of morality that fails to see that being fully moral means “being all one can be”—which of course is what holiness is.
He encouraged the seminary community that, in helping lay people discover and live out their vocations, the priest prepares material for the kingdom of God since, as Gaudium et Spes 39 teaches, if we remain faithful, we will find “all the good fruits of our nature and enterprise . . . burnished and transfigured” in the kingdom that Christ hands over to the Father.
