What is truth?

Homily

Wednesday of the 5th Week in Ordinary Time C2

8 February 2022

transferred Feast of St. Albert the Great

Golden Mass 

St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center at the University of Kansas

AMDG +mj

What is truth?

I'm sure you recognize this question most famously said by Pontius Pilate, a Roman governor.  Pilate is exasperated by Jesus, who had responded to his questions by saying whoever belongs to the truth listens to my voice.  Whatever, says Pilate.  My truth is this impossibly treacherous political and moral trap before me.

What is truth?

I dare say it's the most pivotal and essential question at a university.  I pray today that it's a unifying question at KU.  St. Albert, our patron for today's Golden Mass, contributed greatly to several universities, even founding a couple.  He saw a tremendous value in a unified search for truth among a community of learners.  By example. St. Albert put the scientific, philosophical and theological pursuits of truth together, to mutually purify and enrich each other.

I hope you find yourself in your real life moving between these disciplines which grant access to the one fullness of truth.  I'm sure you do.  I wish I studied more, but recently I've played around with a free online class entitled from the Big Bang to Dark Energy.  The class was immediately helpful when I just read a commentary in First Things, a journal on how religion affects politics.  The commentary was a reminder that the Big Bang cannot and should not be identified with the moment of creation ex nihilo by God.  Fr. Lemaitre, the Catholic priest involved with the Big Bang theory, cautioned even the Pope against such a temptation to identify the two, reminding the Pope that the revealed doctrine of creation will perhaps always be made reasonable not by science, but by philosophy.  Then last night, my facility manager taught me how a kegerator is engineered so I can make sure we have beer for our theological discussion nights here at St. Lawrence.  

It's great fun, you see, for the scientific, philosophical and theological disciplines to enrich and depend upon one another. It's so much better than attempts to misrepresent and cancel each other.

We joke in my diocese that our best priests were STEM majors in college.  To take nothing away from other approaches that access truth, it seems that STEM majors when they want to have a special aptitude for putting the pieces together, connecting material, spiritual and theological dimensions and realities.

Anyway, today's Scriptures also point us toward a unified approach to truth that frees one to live.  Solomon, who from the dreamy subconscious psychological realm was asked by God what he wanted, asked for wisdom.  Such is a theological grace given to the baptized in the sacrament of confirmation, elevates the nature of Solomon so that he can see as God sees.  Solomon picks up a nice research benefactor today, in the Queen of Sheba.

Jesus in the holy Gospel for today corrects scruples by confirming that the moral life is never reducible to the material body, but involves a free act of the will in relation to the philosophical transcendental of goodness.

So here we are, praying to God that our pursuit to Pilate's political question - what is truth? - would be enriched through an integrative not compartmentalized pursuit of truth at KU.  I think it's what St. Albert would want.  Great doctor of the Church, pray for us!