Bede the Venerable

Father Bede Aboh

I've returned from this month's Formation class and am still alive and kicking, both physically and spiritually. As for my fears about how I'd be able to handle Aquinas and the rest of our material, I think those fears were partly justified and partly overblown on my part. I learned that the difficulties that I have been having with Aquinas were largely shared by my fellow Aspirants, and our stories of initial frustration and how we dealt with this were very (and almost eerily) similar. However, as I told several confreres this afternoon, if my mind were an egg, Father Bede Aboh, Pastor of St. Mary's in Oak Ridge and our instructor for this weekend's series of classes on philosophy, has managed to crack the shell.

Father Bede managed to have me understanding enough Aquinas to be able to write a short paper comparing the epistemology of Aquinas with that of Plato-I feel confident enough to write it (praying that it is up to Father Bede's standards, of course) believing that I can produce something that at least appears as though I know what I am writing about. I could not have done that before this past weekend began, so that tells you something not only of Father Bede's knowledge of philosophy, but of his ability to convey that knowledge to others. Of course, not all of this material was foreign or unintelligible to me. Yesterday afternoon, late in Father Bede's lecture, he drifted on to what for me is familiar ground when he discussed John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. A lot of my confreres know that my minor in college was history, but my major was Political Science, and both Locke and Hobbes are required reading for any student of political theory. Locke's Two Treatises of Government and Hobbes' Leviathan were two examples of competing ideas of human nature and political theory, with Locke positing that human nature is basically founded on reason and tolerance, while Hobbes believed that human nature was savage because of human greed (both Locke and Hobbes agreed on a seemingly inherent ability for humanity to be greedy) and that life without control would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Hobbes, being a Royalist who had returned to the boiling chaotic cauldron of Cromwellian England, thought that people should trust the power that protects them-the opposite of Locke's social contract, rooted in the choice of the individual.

The discussion of these giants of the political world is what finally cracked the egg of my mind, because in all of the years I spent studying comparative politics, it never really dawned on me that these men were philosophers in the same sense as Aquinas, and Aristotle and Plato before them (let alone someone like Bertrand Russell), they simply belonged to our own age, and in my mind I began to compare the ideas of Locke with Aquinas as I was coming to understand them. Talk about hitting me over the head. It took until Sunday afternoon, but Father Bede inadvertently managed to do that. Political people really are in our own little mini-world, and it is easy to forget that politics can be, and often is, composed of deeper philosophical questions...so it finally began to make some sense...some sense...finally.

Perhaps the most important thing that stuck in my mind from this weekend, however, was the discussion we shared after Vespers Saturday evening. The scripture reading for the First Vespers of Sunday this week was 2 Peter 1:19-21:

We possess the prophetic message as something altogether reliable. Keep your attention closely fixed on it, as you would on a lamp shining in a dark place until the first streaks of dawn appear and the morning star rises in your hearts. First you must understand this: there is no prophecy contained in Scripture which is a personal interpretation. Prophecy has never been put forward by man’s willing it. It is rather that men impelled by the Holy Spirit have spoken under God’s influence.

After Evensong was complete, Father Bede asked for the scripture lesson to be read again, and then asked what we believed that the Apostle meant when he said "there is no prophesy contained in Scripture which is a personal interpretation. Prophesy has never been put forward by man's willing it." I responded that I believed this meant that we as individuals had no authority to interpret Scripture, but that we must defer to the Church as a collective body. Another Brother Aspirant said, correctly, that we should defer to the magesterium. "What is magesterium," asked Father Bede. "The teaching authority of the Church." Father Bede then said specifically to me that I should be careful with the use of the words "collective body." He said that he had a seminary professor that was utterly obsessed with the term "collective body" and she used it to try and undermine and undercut the authority of the bishops and the Pope. I responded, of course, that I would never do such a thing. In my heart, I was thinking "may the Lord strike me if such vile schismatic thought were to proceed from my tongue when teaching in His Church's name." While I understand what I meant by the term "collective body," and I think Father Bede understood what I meant-and for that matter, so did the class-Father's recounting of his heterodox seminary professor made me think twice about ever using that term in the same context again, that's for sure.

Father Bede then told us to "remember that when you are ordained, the words you speak carry weight. When you speak of the Church's teaching authority, some people will look to you for that authority." This was why, Father said, we must be well-formed before being allowed by the Church to enter into ordained ministry.

Father Bede came to our country from Nigeria, and he began seminary at 11 years old-11!  He went through minor seminary and then major seminary, and he said that there were a couple of times when he contemplated quitting, but that he asked the Lord to lead him out of there if he wasn't supposed to be a priest-the Lord didn't. He said that he loves being a priest, and that "this is the only life I have ever known."

One of the many things that Father shared with us is the difference in attitude toward the priesthood that Catholics have in Nigeria, as opposed to the attitude that Catholics have in the United States and other Western countries. "In this country," said Father Bede, "we have to beg men to become priests, but in Nigeria men are begging to become priests." Seminaries have had to turn otherwise-acceptable men away there, because there are simply not enough spaces for those who want to get in. The so-called Third World seems to have become the First World of clerical and priestly life. How selfish has our culture become, when men in a place like Nigeria beg for a life of general obscurity in the name of spiritual riches, but many Catholics in our own country scoff at the idea of their children becoming priests or religious because "I want grandchildren?" We ought to be ashamed of ourselves. The Lord will take our spiritual blessings away from us and give them to people who will make use of them if we are not careful.

I hope Father Bede comes back and visits our class again-I would really like to hear much more from him.