Roman Forum Conference
Gardone Riviera, July 9, 2010
GARDONE RIVIERA, Italy, July 14, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – LifeSiteNews.com attended the annual Roman Forum conference in Gardone Riviera in the north of Italy this week and sat down with Professor John Rao, author and lecturer in history, and the Forum’s organiser.
LSN: I guess I’m mostly interested in the history of the Roman Forum first.
JR: It was founded by Professor Deitrich Von Hildebrand in 1968. And the immediate cause for the foundation was the desire to defend Humanae Vitae and the Christian conception of life, and bringing new human beings to life and sustaining those lives. Which was something so important that he felt that it needed a greater lay effort than existed at the time. Then it became clear that in order to defend Humanae Vitae, and defend everything it stood for, there had to be a deeeper defence of the entire tradition of the Church.
LSN: So you would be speaking then of the ‘Tradition of the Church” with a capital ‘T’…
JR: Tradition as a whole, which is the only thing that counts, the fullness of the faith. Pope Benedict has made it clear that what has happened in the last 40 years has certainly not been helpful to the Church at all. As a consequence, what we’re doing is simply following along in the lines that he himself is emphasising today.
I should add that the pope, as Cardinal Ratzinger was a good friend of Michael Davies who was someone who worked with the Roman Forum from the very beginning. And Michael Davies would tell us year after year just how much Cardinal Ratzinger was supporting the kind of work that we were doing. To try to reintroduce people to the whole of tradition. A tradition that is absolutely necessary in order to fight abortion, in order to fight contraception and everything else that was significant to us in the foundation of this organisation.
[NB: Michael Davies was an English teacher and writer on Catholic issues through the decades following the close of the Second Vatican Council. He was influential in European Catholic circles in his efforts to salvage the doctrinal as well as liturgical traditions of the Church. In 2004, when Davies died of cancer, Cardinal Ratzinger wrote a warm letter of condolence lauding Davies’s achievements.]
LSN: I’ve attended many of the conferences and I’ve seen that no matter what the topic, whether it is economics or history or philosophy, they have always either considered the implications for the life and family issues, or had them as a central theme.
JR: Everything fits together. You start trying to deal with one issue and you end up finding that you have to bring all the others into the picture.
Between 1968, and 1992 when we set up this more elaborate programme involving a systematic programme of lectures in New York and then in Italy, we looked back at what we were doing and thought that what was happening was that we were being merely reactive. Every time there was an attack on the Church, on Church doctrine, on Catholic faith and morals in general, that we would simply react to that attack. Then we realised that what we needed to do was systematically to educate our own people.
And, I should add, educate ourselves as well. Because it’s so easy to say, ‘Well, I’m fighting the good fight, and therefore I know everything about what is necessary to fight the good fight. And you can do that also in the movement that calls itself the ‘traditionalist’ movement. You can say we’ve adopted the word ‘tradition’ and therefore we know everything about the tradition. And then you can find yourself backed into a corner defending only a tiny little piece of the heritage of the Church.
But I thought we needed to systematically examine the whole tradition of the Church from the roots, and see whether we really knew what that whole tradition was. And then learn more about what needed to be used and appreciated and probed more deeply in order to fight the specific battles such as that against contraception and abortion.
So since 1992, we have studied the history of the Church period by period. And in the last three years, we’ve tried to bring it down to what needs to be done broadly at the political, social and economic level. This is to incorporate what we’ve learned about the whole of the Catholic tradition into our daily concerns today.
LSN: It’s so pleasing to hear the people here talk about the big picture. We find in the pro-life movement, people can compartmentalise the issues. They think that there is nothing really deeply wrong with this society and its structures, it’s just that we happen to have this law allowing abortion and when we overturn that everything will be fine. But we at LifeSiteNews.com definitely take the big picture approach, that this is a massive societal, cultural shift that has happened over the last two centuries or more, away from these traditional natural law principles. And it’s good to see that there are others who are looking at the larger picture.
The lectures have been so ‘high-brow,’ so academic, and I’m wondering if you get only academics and theorists attending or do you see activists as well?
JP: This year, I have to say, the level of the participants seems to be particularly high. As one of my colleagues, and one of the directors of the foundation, Fr. Richard Munckle, said last night at dinner. He feels he’s going to be lecturing today before an audience each of whom could be up lecturing. And as Chris Ferrara said, it’s intimidating in many respects.
But back to what you were mentioning about the broader picture, even the people who are directly associated with the question of the traditional liturgy who are here today have been repeating over and over it is not simply about ‘the Mass’. It’s not a question of just the Mass, it’s one of the whole of the Catholic tradition. Political, social, doctrinal, devotional, philsophical. And again, it’s also artistic, literary, musical. It’s necessary rhetorically as well to be able to tell a good story about what is a true story. The true story of Christ and Christ’s redemption of the world. Whereas what we’re fighting is a rhetoric that is concerned with words alone, telling a good story just to be able to promote a given viewpoint, regardless of the substance.
What I’m going to be saying today when I sum up the conference, that we need everything. We need every supernatural help, in order to bring things back to the life and family issues.
LSN: Who are some of the people who come regularly? You’ve been doing this so long, you must have an impressive list of alumni.
JR: We do. Apart from our founder, Deitrich von Hildebrand, there are people who have been coming to this for 18 years. This year we have about 50 percent new people from eight different countries including England, Australia, Estonia, Poland, Austria, Italy and the the US. [Pro-life] groups are sending more representatives each year. We have this year a Dominican priest, a Franciscan, an Augustinian; we have secular priests and representatives of the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter.
We include among our regulars our chaplain, Monsignore Ignacio Barreiro from Human Life International, who has been coming to these from the beginning. Bruno Quintavalle is another who always comes. He has done much work in Europe for the pro-life movement back in Britain. He’s a workhorse for the movement there.
Every year it’s filled with people who always see how each of these ‘border issues’ are essential to what they’re doing. So when they leave, the have more ideas about how to continue their work.
LSN: So, what’s next. At dinner last night, I was hearing people talk about how you’re moving into a new phase.
JR: What we’ve done is separate how we are approaching things in New York from what we’re doing here in the summer programme in Italy. Back in New York, we’re still in 1378, so I’m hoping to be able to get back to the present before my own demise.
But here next year we are going to approach the whole question of the broad Catholic tradition in a different way. We’re going to give the programme the title, “New Beginnings”. Because we’ve summed up what the problems are over the last three years. In 2008, we talked about the spirit of the high middle ages, the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries, when values finally descended to the earth. When the transforming Word actually brought the full impact of what the Incarnation meant to various aspects of life. Obviously, it didn’t complete it, but it made it clear that things had to change in every aspect of life. It was at that moment in history, when the Word of God incarnate were having their major impact, that the enemies of what was being done were coming out into the public.
In 2009, we discussed how this [anti-Christian movement], shaped through the naturalism of the Enlightenment, became a dominating force in western life, driving us to the margins of society.
This year, we’ve been talking about how the Church in the 19th century and the 20th century tried to come to terms with and fight against a worldview that had marginalised it and was totally hostile to what it [the Church] was seeking to do.
So having summed that all up, the question is what’s next. And one of the things that we have to emphasise next year in this “New Beginnings” approach, is the fact that there are going to be more and more people, as the situation deteriorates in all regards, who are going to awaken to the fact that there is a big problem in the world. And who are not going to be necessarily part of different hostile groups that have existed historically, with whom we have an adversarial relationship. They’re going to be real seekers. And what we want to do is provide a forum, that we control, that we’re guiding, that is Catholic in character that might be able to give to such seekers some kind of welcome and guidance and friendship in a way that we can nevertheless direct to a real, clear, purposeful goal.
We don’t want to end up being an ecumencial project that just simply asks people what they think and what they feel and the like. We have something to teach them, but we also want to do so recognising that they’re honestly seeking answers.
The world we live in is perfectly happy with us being a kind of insular Catholic club. That will sit here and have our little meeting, and have a nice dinner afterwards but not have any impact on the world outside. And we don’t want that to be the case. We want to open the gates.
LSN: The pro-life movement around the world necessarily compartmentalised the way it focuses on our issues, our topics. But I’ve noticed that the younger generation of pro-life activists have a much more comprehensive view of the cultural corruption, partly because a lot of them have been victims of it. After years of doing this educational work against the Culture of Death, do you think that the global pro-life movement can succeed, is it possible to succeed without this larger cultural and philosophical context?
JR: I don’t think it can succeed without the larger context. It might be able to win temporary victories without the larger context, but again, what counts for our opponents is the spirit that motivates them, and not particular mechanisms that they utilise to impose the consequences of that spirit. If Roe v. Wade were overturned, the spirit that leads people to desire abortion will try to find another way of introducing it.
The journal that I worked with when I was doing my doctoral thesis, La Civilta Catholica, in the 19th century had an interesting article that said that the spirit of the anti-Catholic movement would utilise whatever tool worked at any given moment. So if it was [political and economic] centralisation in one country, they would use centralisation. If it was decentralisation, they would be decentralisation. If the courts are the tool for being able to promote their goals in a given country, they would use the courts. But if the courts turned against them, they’ll emphasise the democratic spirit and argue that the courts are working against the popular will.
So that what might happen is that there could be in any given country, even in the United States, a temporary victory. But unless what happens is that the entire hostile force against us, which dominates the whole culture, is opposed, and ultimately defeated in every sphere, it’s going to rear its head.
I would certainly not oppose overturning Roe v. Wade, but I think it’s important to know that that’s not the end of the game. The murderers would not think they had to give up the battle, they’d find another way to deal with it.
They would pull out the democratic card. That’s the problem with the so-called liberal democratic system, it can be used for anything.
LSN: I noted that you used the term ‘anti-Catholic spirit’ and we know that the people in these abortion organisations are working in accordance with that spirit. But it struck me that this anti-Catholic spirit that is working to destroy the Catholic worldview, the Catholic consciousness, sounds like the supernatural. We’re not talking about individuals necessarily, we’re talking about powers and principalities.
JR: We’re talking about both. And in complicated ways. There’s a diabolical element that’s here, obviously. The problem of course from a historian’s standpoint is that you don’t have the mechanism you need to to say that this is specifically the work of the devil or not. And I would be one to say that [the abortion movement] is the work of the devil. But the problem, as St. Augustine says, is that it is very difficult to separate out the work of supernatural forces and individual motivation and changeable acts of free will. Each of us can end up doing the work of God or the work of the devil, depending on what choices we make. Sometimes our choices are not for the good. And therefore we can end up, even unwittingly, being the agents of what we ought not to be the agents of.
And as St. Augustine points out too, sometimes those agents of the devil end up doing things which God can pull good out of. You’ve got all sorts of forces at work. You’ve got people who think they’re doing good, but are actually aiding the diabolical forces. And then you’ve got people who are willingly cooperating with demonic forces.
We have, in the Roman Forum, always been involved in the pro-life movement. In fact, many of the people who were involved in this, especially in the period of the Rescue movement, were in and out of jail regularly. In the past, some of our conferences were endowed because we were worried about people being in jail and not being able to come here. And certainly some of the things that I saw as I was involved in protests outside the Planned Parenthood, indicated a real, direct joy in being diabolical agents.
We’ve got this problem in dealing with people are are seeking illumination and are good-willed. But there are hostile forces out there that are not going to be won over. Or dealt with in any kind of friendly dialogue.