Southern California Wanderer Forum "Handing on the Faith in a Faithless Age" By KATHARINE MASTELLER The celestial choir of Thomas Aquinas College wove sacred melody throughout the greetings, conversations, and presentations of this year's 6th Annual Southern California Regional Forum, held at Santa Teresita Hospital in Duarte. Mother Mary Assumpta Long, Rev. Hugh Barbour, O.Praem., Professor Duncan Stroik, and historian Dr. James Hitchcock discussed various aspects of "Handing on the Faith in a Faithless Age." "When Christ returns, will He find any faith on earth?" Mother Mary Assumpta asked. Foundress and Superior of the Sisters of. Mary, Mother of the Eucharist, Mother Assumpta challenged all present to recognize the vital faith alive in the world despite all the evil and faithlessness surrounding them. "Despite all the deceitful influences of the world, we are called to take a responsible part in the Church's mission by living our call to Christ in holiness, not in superficiality. God has deeper ambitions for man than the world does," Mother Assumpta said. "Ever since Original Sin, God has chased man seeking Him out and finally came to make His dwelling among men." Mother reminded her listeners of the necessity to pray for an increase in faith. "I have seen faith lived and it is the most beautiful thing in the world," Mother said. We all have room to improve our belief in Our Lord. "If you do have faith and pray for an increase, then Christ will find faith on earth when He returns," Mother said. Duncan Stroik, Professor of Architecture, Design, Theory and Drawing at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, IN, and Rome, followed Mother Assumpta's talk with a slide presentation of Church architecture and a discussion about the importance of recognizing the church building as the "domus Dei" or "house of God." While showing several slides of church interiors and exteriors, Stroik made two things clear: first, liturgy needs to inform architecture; and second, that the Church's architectural history must be a part of the expert's understanding. When either of these perspectives are absent, the church architecture suffers. Noting that there has been a "cultural amnesia" for the last 50 years, Stroik suggested as an antidote six things a church building should reflect in order to be defined theologically: 1) the church as sacramental, a place where we receive the sacraments; 2) the church as liturgical, a place for the rites to be performed; 3) the church as a place for the elements such as chair, altar, alb, etc.; 4) the church as devotional - private and public; 5) the church as iconographic and symbolic, bringing to the forefront the power of the visual; and 6) the church as a sacred place. In closing, Stroik advised used of the term "House of God" to promote these theological ideas and make banalty harder to sell when renovations are discussed. Speaking on "Tradition: Living and Catholic," Rev. Hugh Barbour, O. Praem., Prior of St. Michael's Abbey in Silverado, CA, divided his talk into two parts, the first focusing on the origin of tradition and the crisis of tradition faced today; the second addressing the remedy for this crisis. After reading the passage in Acts describing Pentecost, Fr. Barbour said the original sense of tradition was that it was public, universal, divinely established, and available to all. He then went on to explain the three senses of tradition that the Church teaches: first, the teachings that God Himself gave to the apostles, the truths that He wanted them to teach for the salvation of the human race; second, those traditions which the apostles received from Christ orally; and third, the continuous transmission of tradition by the Magisterium of the Church, assisted by God's grace. The crisis we face today, Fr. Barbour continued, is because tradition can be and has been neglected, obscured and not passed down. While the ultimate responsibility for handing down tradition belongs to bishops, it sometimes falls into the hands of the laity to uphold and protect it. However, since tradition is guaranteed, supernatural and eternal, we are really facing a crisis of Christian civilization - the forms, the way of life, the art, music and sensibilities. Noting that the Church is born once and for all from the pierced heart of Christ on the cross, Fr. Barbour said Christendom develops slowly and is purified by grief, effort and setbacks. It is born from the hearts of saints. Therefore, restoration of the liturgy, social institutions, places of worship require us to seek to be saints, confident in God's grace. The saints were the ones who produced the tradition and the culture, Fr. Barbour said. "The tragic and apparent loss of so many good things is for us an opportunity to say to Our Lord, as many saints did, 'Lord, I desire only You.' Only if we are single-hearted can we produce what the saints produced. This is what we lost ...the civilization of the saints." The final talk of the day was delivered by Dr. James Hitchcock, a professor of history at St. Louis University and well-known Catholic author. Hitchcock showed how a historical faith, such as ours, is one in which Christian life can truly deepen and unfold. A religion outside of history, such as Greek mythology, only leads to despair. Time is bondage, a curse to man that repeats itself endlessly. But because God became man, He entered into time thus joining it to eternity. Christianity therefore redeems time, making it the stage on which we work out our eternal salvation. Hitchcock explained that "even though the Faith doesn't change, our comprehension of it deepens. We must always measure our faith against purity of the original revelation but we can have confidence to look to the future. We have to probe more deeply as we face new issues such as women priests or cloning. Our present Holy Father gives us a good example of this by the enormous body of writings he has produced attempting to address difficult moral issues of the age." Hitchcock went on to say that the Incarnation is the central event of history but it unfolds itself in new ways in each age. "We don't replicate the past but we don't surrender ourselves to the spirit of the times." To surrender oneself to the age is to become aimless. We need our ties with the past and in history to have direction for the present in all we do. More than 250 attendees from virtually every part of California participated in this year's forum. The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass was celebrated in the hospital's beautiful St. Joseph's Chapel with the college choir singing the Hassler Mass.