Jeudi 28 janvier
Communauté de Bruxelles

Remise du grade académique de Maître en Sacrée théologie  au frère Ignace Berten OP

Première partie: Un Dieu trop humain?




Pause musicale: "On the Rapid whirwind's wing see I fly to seek the fair" (Haendel)
O. Berten (Baryton), E. Antoine (Violon), X. Deprez (orgue).

Seconde partie: Un Dieu trop humain?

9 décembre 2009: Conférence de Monseigneur Jozef de Kesel 

Pour écouter l'intégralité de la conférence de Monseigneur Jozef de Kesel, donnée à Bruxelles le 9 décembre:

24 novembre 2009

Croyez-vous en l’Esprit Saint, à la sainte Eglise catholique
et à la communion des saints ?
Eugenio Boleo OP (FR) & Alain Arnould OP (EN)

10 novembre 2009

Croyez-vous en Jésus Christ, son fils bien aimé qui est descendu aux enfers
et réssuscité des morts ?
Ignace Berten OP (FR) & Bob Eccles OP (EN)

3 octobre 2009

L’encyclique sociale de Benoît XVI, Caritas in veritate

Présentation, perspectives et questions par Maria Lissowska, économiste & Ignace Berten OP, théologien.

27 octobre 2009

Croyez-vous en Dieu le Père tout puissant, créateur du ciel et de la terre ?

Mark Butaye OP (NL|FR) & Philippe Cochinaux OP (FR)

  13 octobre 2009

Introduction : the historical context of the Creed / Le contexte historique du Credo
Michel Van Aerde OP (FR) & Patrick Lens OP (EN)

  2 juin 2009: Célébration festive

Célébration festive autour de la Trinité!

Première mondiale de la cantate de Willem Ceuleers par l'Antwerps Collegium Musicum o.l.v.

Méditation en français sur la Trinité Ignace Berten, auteur du livre "Croire en un Dieu trinitaire"

7 mai 2009: Conférence

Fr. CLAUDIO MONGE OP

ACCUEILLIR DIEU
L’hospitalité dans les traditions d’Abraham

L’hospitalité représente et engage toujours le divin. Dans le judaïsme, le christianisme et l’islam, il s’agit d’un « hôte mystérieux », qui peut être Dieu comme c’est le cas pour Abraham.
Claudio Monge, dominicain, docteur en théologie des religions, spécialisé dans la civilisation turco ottomane et vivant à Istanbul, nous a présenté la valeur de l’hospitalité en analysant les mythes, symboles et motifs artistiques de l’univers culturel commun aux trois monothéismes.

5 mai 2009: Concert

Du 13 au 17 avril: European meeting in Brussels

Excerpt of an article, written by MArk DAVOREN, op, and published on the blog of the Dominican students of the English province: http://www.godzdogz.op.org

During Easter week the European Dominican Network (EUDONET) organised a weeklong conference on the institutions of the European Union in Brussels. The event aimed to demystify some of elements of the leviathan-like EU and explore how the Church can minister to it. The occasion also allowed members of the Dominican family, including student-brothers from Poland, England, Germany and the Spanish provinces, to meet and get to know each other.

As well as meeting officials of the commission and parliament of the EU we were fortunate to meet with a Deputy Assistant Secretary General of another great example of European co-operation, NATO. One of the highlights of the week was a meeting with the Deputy-General Secretary of COMECE, the Commission of the Bishops' Conferences of the European Community. This provided opportunity for a lively debate and discussion on how the Church should formally work with the EU and on the Christian roots of Europe.

The week was a great success. There was a marvellous sense of fraternity among the members of the group and many friendships were formed (as well as many fine Belgian beers tasted, especially in the Dominican-run pub The Blackfriars). At times it occurred to me that whilst the EU seems to struggle in its endeavour to increase European co-operation it forgets that the Church has allowed this type of relationship to flourish for over a millennium, not only in Europe but throughout the whole world. This certainly can be seen in the Order of Preachers, as this week itself demonstrated

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9 avril 2009: Conférence de Carême:

Conférence du frère Jean-Marie Van Cangh sur l'Eucharistie.

donnée en la communauté de Bruxelles, le jeudi 9 avril 2009.

Méditations de Carême

   Extrait du DVD "Seize lectures bibliques", réalisé à l'initiative d'Alain Arnould à l'occasion du Congrès International pour la nouvelle évangélisation Bruxelles-Toussaint 2006.

Fr Ignace Berten OP
La fresque de l’Anastasis - Une promesse qui ne connaît pas de frontières?

Fr Mark Butaye OP
Horror, beauty and consolation. The Isenheim crucifixion by Matthias Grünewald

Méditation par le frère Mark Butaye:

Fr Bob Eccles OP
The mocking of Christ by Fra Angelico

Méditation par le frère Bob Eccles:

We are looking at a very strange image, and the closer we look, the odder it becomes.  Two people sit with their backs firmly turned to Jesus, who is being spat at and struck by a disembodied head and hands.  He holds a stone and a stick as mock sceptre and orb, and sits on a block that does for a throne, and he is wearing a crown  of thorns that curiously doesn’t draw blood.  The crown and the regalities would show that we are at the point where Pilate’s soldiers shout, Hail king of the Jews.

But if that was so, the chap with the natty headgear ought to be wearing a Roman soldier’s helmet?  The Romans put a red or purple robe on Jesus; here he wears a gleaming white robe and a blindfold.  What is going on?  I’ve put a Dominican missal alongside, open at the words,  Let us all rejoice in the Lord, celebrating a festival day in honour of the crown of the Lord, on whose solemnity the angels rejoice, and give praise to the Son of God, alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.   An Easter-tide festival of the mocking of Christ!
Isn’t that very strange too?

We are looking at a wall painting that sits, as it always has since it was painted by Fra Angelico towards the year 1450,  in an individual cell in the priory of the Observant, that is to say, Reformed Dominicans in Florence,  San Marco. Observant or reformed groups go for a revival of their inheritance, they need to reinvent their tradition.  It was painted for a cell, not for a drawing room or an art gallery or even a chapel.  Only one person at once will see it, a brother in his cell,  but he’ll live with it day by day.  The scene is represented on the window wall, which thus presents two openings,  to the outer world of Tuscany and to an inward world.  Like an open book, the mystery of salvation is held before the brother’s eyes.

So to see it properly, we have to learn to sit in a cell.  In the thirteenth century that great man Thomas Aquinas was approached by a young friar for advice on how to study.   Thomas very kindly wrote him a little book, the shortest of books, De Modo Studendi.  What he said was, to be a Dominican you have to learn to love your cell.  Here is your space of study and contemplation.  So don’t go rushing off to the common room for a chat,
when you are overcome by that medieval complaint accidie, otherwise the blues. persevere in your reading and meditation: stick to your cell,  cella  in Latin,  if you want to be admitted to the wine cellar, cella again, of the Lord.  Thirsty character, a young friar. But his purpose is to bring the fruits of contemplation to others.

Catherine of Siena, a lay Dominican of the 14th century, was the youngest of twenty or more children and never found that ‘room of one’s own’.  She had to invent a cell of her own imagining, where as she says, she could be like a tired woman who shuts her door and gratefully climbs into bed.  So retreating into the cell of her heart, she discovers herself as the one who is loved into being by the Lord.  She speaks about this as the cell of self knowledge.  Not self knowledge of the kind some modern people aim for with techniques like the Enneagram, what the Sisters get up to on wet afternoons, but knowledge of oneself as the beloved disciple who lives in presence of her teacher, redeemer and friend, and so is fully realised as she grows into the stature of  the fullness of Christ.

A modern Dominican of course must also learn to be happy in his or her cell, as he or she chooses the pictures for that book on the Trinity, or teaches and preaches on the Web through Domuni or Torch, or accompanies people by mail who are making the retreat in the city.  This person will still have images of Christ and Mary and Dominic on the wall, like our brother did in Tuscany, over five hundred years ago.  So, let’s sit with our brother, and see what he sees.

In the fifty or so scenes which decorate San Marco, painted by Fra Angelico
(born around 1390,  died  1455) and members of his workshop, Dominicans – St Dominic, St Peter Martyr, St Thomas Aquinas – are seen in presence of Christ, sometimes with other saints.  They are not simply attending or witnessing, they are entering into the mystery in contemplative prayer.  More about this in a moment.   In the scene which is before us,  St Dominic sits with his back turned to the sufferings of Jesus.   He is nearest to us and at once commands our attention.  It isn’t the mature, experienced founder and father of the Preachers but a young Dominic, intent on his book. The hands, the biographers speak of his long hands, are expressive of wonder and absorption. Un beau gosse, this, not a ravaged ascetic, but a son of grace.  In his youthfulness he brings to mind the bookish young friar whose cell this would have been.  All Fra Angelico’s Dominican figures look well cared for and as though they dressed and presented themselves with some self respect.  We are reminded again of Aquinas and what he says about bodily life in the context of the love that is called charity, caritas.  Our bodies were created by God, so we can serve God with our bodies, and should love them with the charity with which we love God.  Our bodies help us to happiness, and that happiness will overflow into our bodies, so that they too can be loved with charity.  Take your body for a swim and just once in a while, let it have chocolate.  In the fifteenth century of course they didn’t do chocolate, they did a vegetable diet, blood letting and a shave once a fortnight.

The figure on the left is the Mother of Jesus who is the patroness of the Order, our only abbess.  She is shown as the virgin of humility, with plain sober garments,  the position of her hands mirroring those of Dominic.  Now the postures adopted by Dominic in fresco after fresco of San Marco, stem all from a very influential model, one that was heartily adopted by the Observant Dominicans of the reformed houses of Tuscany and taught to the novices.  It’s a short text with simple illustrations called the Nine Ways of Prayer of St Dominic. Especially for the Observant friars of Tuscany, Dominicans learn to be Dominicans by praying as Dominic did.  And Dominic, his contemporaries all agree, was very physical and extravert, bounding about, prostrating himself before the altar, spending the hours of the night on the cold stones of the church, praying the Scriptures with outbursts of  tears and joy.

To learn to do all these ways come back again, and again, we haven’t time to teach you all at once. But there is all about it in a good recent book by Sister Catherine Aubin. And another by Simon Tugwell.   So Dominic is shown here interacting with the Word of God, just as our Lady is meditating  on the treasure stored up in her heart.  Before we leave our lady let’s mention another fresco in San Marco which shows the annunciation and here it is not the angel who kneels, in fact Gabriel is standing up, it’s  Mary the humble servant who is kneeling before the angel – you never see that.

The Virgin of humility,  mother of the friars.  Well, you might not think that humility is a very obvious trait of the Dominicans you know, I couldn’t possibly comment.

The figure of Jesus mocked is refulgent with light, coming from the right of the painting as we look at it, light that wells up from the robe and the platform and shines from the blindfold that hides the eyes, so fine a cloth that we can see that his eyes are closed.   No blood appears here.  The crown of thorns does not drive into the flesh.  Disembodied hands slap and strike, a disembodied head doffs its cap and spits; his ironic kingship is emphasised by the dud sceptre and orb and the plain green background, for this reminds us of other pictures of kings, where a richly embroidered  cloth of honour hangs behind a medieval throne.  The green here is rather the colour of life and of hope, as it is in liturgy. The bizarre disembodied tormentors actually belong to a familiar genre, this type of picture is known as an Imago pietatis.  But here the figure of Jesus seems imbued with inner peace.  He sits here calmly.

Now if we come back to the New Testament accounts of the Passion, joining St Dominic here in the foreground, and look there for the mocking of Jesus, some problems appear.  If you remember,  Jesus is blindfolded and buffeted in the High Priest’s house after his arrest.  The men there spat in his face and said, Prophesy! who was it that struck thee?  Later, in the Praetorium, the soldiers of Pilate clothed him, but not with white, with scarlet according to Matthew, purple according to Mark and John, and it was at that point that they  crowned him with thorns, and the soldiers cried: Hail, King of the Jews.  And then again, Luke tells us that it was in King Herod’s house that Jesus was mocked and, this time, given a glorious robe.  Now our artist seems to have mixed up all these stories, the blindfold and the crown of thorns and the glorious robe all appear together, in a climate of serenity and even promise.

Now lots of medieval people did try to reconcile the four gospels into one story,  one famous example is a Dominican called James of Voragine, died 1298, who wrote the Golden Legend,  a credulous take on fabulous miracle stories. James squeezes all the different gospel traditions into his account of the Passion.  Fra Angelico  may well have just followed him.  Well, we moderns famously mix the gospels too, just compare the very different nativity stories in Matthew and Luke with the nativity scene on the average Christmas card.

But what we surely need to realise here is that our young Dominican in his cell is not being invited to look at a snapshot of one moment from a single narrative, but to contemplate the entire mystery of Christ’s self-abnegation and humility, he who made the worlds.  It is a properly theological document.  The wonderful white light that reflects from the surfaces of robe and blindfold links this image with others in adjacent rooms of the priory – the Transfiguration, the Resurrection, Christ and Mary in glory – where  a divine radiance  illumines the theophany.  By the passion and cross, to the glory of the Resurrection.  

There is one further clue to the meaning of this picture which surprised me very much when I found out about it the other day, sitting in my cell, as you do.  I had already realised that all the great frescos of San Marco are not part of a series meant to illustrate the gospel story.  The reason why they don’t follow such a pattern is that what connects them, is that they illustrate great feasts of the church – the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Epiphany, the Presentation and so on.  There was no feast of the Transfiguration in the fifteenth century so that picture links to the gospel of next Sunday, the second Sunday of Lent. The programmes of cell decoration at San Marco link, then, not to a narrative reading of the gospel, but to the gospel as encountered through the liturgy.  Now what does this picture link to?   Why,  it might link to the feast of the Crown of Thorns in Eastertide.  That big Dominican missal from the 16th century, standing by the picture, is open at the right page.   In the early years of the Order two Dominicans, brothers Andrew and James, came from Constantinople with a relic of the Crown of Thorns, the gift of the emperor to St Louis of France.  Louis built the Sainte Chapelle to house it and instituted the feast of the Holy Crown, which the Order adopted for its own and has kept sometimes in April, sometimes in May.  The prayer of the Mass asks that we who venerate the Crown of Thorns on earth, may receive a crown of glory in heaven.  This feast was quietly dropped in modern times, I suppose it was too off-beat to found a feast upon a relic.  But you see how it all fits.  Our brother in his cell, as he prays like St Dominic prayed,  learns in his heart to love the feasts of the Church and of the Order.  It is the liturgy which is the teacher of life, for here we meet Christ in his mysteries.  In the Dominican tradition, public worship and private meditation are intimately bound together.

It is our humanity that is mocked and derided at Abu Graibh and Guantanamo, in so many barracks and prisons.  We are complicit in the treatment meted out to the victims of the traffic in human beings, the child labourers, for we lack the political will to effect change.  The violence of the story we also belong to, comes to a point of stillness here.  We look up to see Jesus as the victim who offers not vengeance but peace,  Jesus who is gentle, quiet, deliberate in the face of conflict and lynch mobs, refusing to take the violent bait and defend himself: he who was as all men are yet without sin; his death he freely accepted. Violence and death die out on him.  In opening his arms upon the Cross, he reveals the Resurrection.

In the Resurrection Jesus will come to the fearful disciples and bring home to them the recognition of their own lies and violence, and yet to their fear and guilt he brings the word of peace, and great joy. Jesus who in opening wide his arms on the Cross reveals the Resurrection.  The scene speaks to us on our way towards the Passover, just as it always did, inviting us to enter the peace of Christ that is renewed whenever we celebrate the Eucharist as a space of enlightenment and reconciliation.