Liam Fanning
Staff Writer
A canon lawyer and a noted Vatican journalist spoke on issues facing the Catholic Church to a crowd of students and visitors Wednesday night in the J.C. Williams Center.
The event, called “Calming the Storm: Navigating the Crises Facing the Catholic Church and Society,” was presented as an interview between the Very Rev. Gerald Murray and journalist Diane Montagna. The topics they discussed were taken from their recently published book of the same name.
Murray, who is also a frequent commenter on EWTN’s “The World Over with Raymond Arroyo,” said, “One of the most difficult things I know of as a priest is to love people who don’t love you back. It doesn’t matter how people treat us. We have to treat them with a Christ-like spirit.
“I really think it all starts with a rejection of metaphysical realism,” Murray said, speaking on the issues in the Church and in larger society. Elaborating, he said society today trends toward idealism, “which is basically where man’s mind is the only categorizer, so things don’t have an inherent nature, and there’s no commonality in creation.”
Murray said all individuals use “realism as our natural means of living.” People recognize that, by the very fact of their nature, they practice things like eating and sleeping, he said.
“But when it gets to certain topics where people want to do things that go against the natural order, that’s where we get into problems,” he said.
Reading a question from the audience, Montagna asked Murray: “What has been your most successful approach to defending objective truth?”
He said, “You’ve got to have a little bit of courage to do it. I get on TV, and I know I’m going to be criticized, but it doesn’t really matter.”
Senior Andrew Orenson said that he enjoyed the event, saying, “(Murray) says that we as Catholics now more than ever must learn the faith through study and live it through prayer.”
The event was sponsored by the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology, which published Murray and Montagna’s book through Emmaus Road publishing.