St Albert the Great Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP Ss Domenico e
Sisto, Roma As students and professors learning and teaching in
a Catholic university, the idea that we must believe in order to
understand is not all that controversial. Understanding is not
limited to the accumulation, dissection, and explanation of
facts about the material world. Central to the humane project of
reasoning about the world is our right and duty to make ethical
judgments and good moral choices. We cannot call ourselves human
beings (much less Christians) if we begin our investigations of
the world with the idea that all we need to do is observe,
collect, and explain in purely empirical terms. How do you
chronicle the genocides of Rwanda w/o reaching a moral judgment?
How do you explain the holocaust of legalized abortion w/o
challenging the ethics of medical science? “Seeing” for
Christians cannot be a cold, clinical exercise in objective
observation. Because we first believe, we understand. We first
believe that we are loved creatu