My temporary profession to the Secular Franciscan Order will take place on 02 December 2008 (Tuesday) at 1640 hours before the Blessed Sacrament at the sanctuary of the Church of the Visitation Seremban. All are welcomed to witness the occasion.

The Secular Franciscan Order (SFO) is a community of Roman Catholic men and women in the world who seek to pattern their lives after Christ in the spirit of St Francis of Assisi. The Order was founded by St Francis himself about 800 years ago at the beginning of the thirteenth century.

The Secular Franciscan Order is approved and recognised by the Holy See by the official name of Ordo Franciscanus Saecularis (OFS). It is open to any Roman Catholic not bound by religious vows to another Religious Order. It is made up of the laity (men and women) and also secular clergy (deacons, priests, bishops).

The Holy See has entrusted the pastoral care and spiritual assistance of the Secular Franciscan Order (SFO), because it belongs to the same spiritual family, to the Franciscan First Order (Friars Minor) and Franciscan Third Order Regular (TOR).

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The Catechism of the Catholic Church affirms the following:

In the [Catholic Church] subsists the fullness of Christ's body united with its head; this implies that she receives from him “the fullness of the means of salvation” (CCC #830).

It goes further to explain the following:

The Church is catholic: she proclaims the fullness of the faith. She bears in herself and administers the totality of the means of salvation (CCC #868).

It is now a world that no longer takes delight in such absolute statements. These statements, for the many relativists of various degrees one meets in the intellectual arena, are too arrogantly certain. Such protestors say, “We must never take any one group or denomination of believers to be in full possession of the truth”.

This statement usually means that every group has some fraction of the entire body of truth, and that full truth is found only when one embraces the sum of all these fractions of truth. And many actually audaciously call this “ecumenism” - to be sure, many Catholics are guilty of this too.

Underlying this statement is to be found a series of logical fallacies.

Many claimants of this statement do not realise that such an assumption is intrinsic to their argument. The nature of his claim, that no one body of truth encompasses truth in its completeness, presupposes that the claimant himself knows what a complete body of truth must look like. If he himself had no possession of the full truth, he should not know what the full truth is like. And if he possesses not the full truth, he has no logical basis - without first having known full truth - of knowing that other groups have incomplete bodies of truth. If every body of belief, as he claims, is incomplete, then there would be no standard of fullness by which all other bodies of faith claims are to be measured. This would render his own claim arbitrary at best and defective at worst.

Therefore, the fallacy in this position lies in its self-contradiction. It is found in the assumption that the knower knows the extent of truth propositions required to constitute a “fullness” of truth. Even if he does not yet possess the full truth, it assumes that he at least possesses the capacity to collate the sum of truths found in every group of believers, and consequently emerging with a set of full truths. Furthermore, even if he has not yet attained the sum of truths or the fullness of truth, this position must necessarily assume that he can and will one day attain the fullness of truth.

But in the first place, if such fullness of truth was at all possible, then why would this knower be the only one for whom it was possible to attain that fullness? Why would it not be possible for any one group of believers to have attained it prior to the claimant’s attainment of this fullness?

In reality, certain beliefs held by the various groups, even if they are all Christian, may be mutually exclusive because they totally contradict one another. In such cases, someone must be wrong, and the other right. One cannot therefore assume that all the different truths of the various groups of believers can be indiscriminately taken together to form a greater whole.

In this sense, to almagamate the various bodies of truth to form a complete whole, one would have to in the process purge these various bodies of truth from their errors before merging them together. But such an enterprise, again, actually assumes that one is in possession of the complete body of truth in order to recognise truth from error. And the irony is, if one already possessed that complete body of truth, he would not have a need to bring together the various bodies of truth to form a greater whole in the first place.

Hence, when one makes such a statement, the question must arise as to who or what constitutes the final arbiter of completeness and orthodoxy. The one who makes such a relativistic claim is not very much of a relativist himself after all, because his claim implicitly implies completeness in the claimant’s own body of faith claims.

Such a relativistic viewpoint of the deposit of faith shows itself to be a logical fallacy on various accounts when one thinks deeper about these claims. In saying “we must never take any one group or denomination of believers to be in full possession of the truth”, it refutes exclusive claims to completeness. But it refutes exclusive claims in a very exclusive way. It accepts exclusively people who reject exclusive claims, and rejects people who accept exclusive claims. In the final analysis, it shows itself to be more exclusivistic than those who make exclusive claims but acknowledge that others’ exclusive claims may not be in agreement with their own.

To set the record straight, I am not objecting to any group of believers’ claim over absoluteness and completeness in their “deposit of faith”. In fact, I am arguing in favour of it. Because this would be the only way by which one can judge any other belief to be incomplete. It takes a claim to complete knowledge of the deposit of faith to recognise incompleteness.

And so this is the Catholic position – we assume (no, we believe!) that our body of truth, our deposit of faith, is complete. And we hope that our dialogue partners would assume the same about their own bodies of faith. Otherwise there would be no grounds for dialogue, only grounds for teaching and evangelisation.

I call this logical fallacy dialogical relativism.

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Next Sunday will mark the first day of the new liturgical year, beginning with the season of Advent leading to Christmas and beyond.

I'm excited at the things that will be taking place next year, particularly the Easter Vigil when my wife and parents will be received into full communion with the Catholic Church. But for now, let's leave the future to the future.

Yesterday was the Solemnity of Christ the King, which marked the last day of the liturgical calendar of the Church. In a sense, for some of us, Christ is already truly King. But in another sense, that lordship is yet to be realised in its fullest sense.

In commemorating the solemnity of Christ the King, the Church looks forward to more than a mere political reign of Christ over the universe. We look forward to the establishment of ultimate justice, the pervasion of eternal peace in the world. And that is why we look forward to the coming of the King.

We seek the coming of the day when all creation will be renewed, recreated, revitalised, rebeautified, all this to become a new heaven and a new earth.

This solemnity provokes us to reflect on how the world invariably falls short of justice and equality, of how people are still so polarised by their differences in race, religion, sex, education, and social class regardless of how the human race claims to be more progressive than ever before. It is the day when we are reminded of how the Church longs for the coming of the day of the Lord, when all such discrimination and bias will dissipate from the face of the earth.

Peace. Authentic peace and harmony between humanity and God, among humanity, and between humanity and all creation - this is what we long for. And inasmuch as the world has tried to bring about the realisation of these hopes in various ways, our efforts often end up leading to more varied forms of polarities.

Because peace and harmony are truly possible only when Christ is King.

A Blessed Regnum Christi to all of you. I hope it has been a fruitful year for you. May we continue to look to Mary our Mother and the angels and saints for their constant prayers for us pilgrims in our journey towards the day when Christ will truly be King in the most visible way possible.

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These are two pictures taken during my talk at NUS last Thursday:

There's me giving a critique on materialism and introducing the audience to St Augustine's teaching on "Using the World".

This was taken during the interaction moment. Let me introduce a couple of them. On the far left in blue shirt is Samuel Wang (doctoral student at Trinity Theological College and Lutheran pastor). The elegant looking man with a beard and dressed in a black shirt is Dr Syed Farid Alatas (Associate Professor of Sociology at NUS). On the far right in white shirt, Friar Father John Wong, OFM.

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Advice given by an accomplished theologian to a junior theologian on 14 November 2008 on being a servant of the Church

None of our personal interests in academic accomplishments must compete with our service to the Church. When having to choose between being an accomplished speaker at a seminar and writing a position paper for the Church which might not even be published, choose the latter. Because a theologian is first and foremost a servant of the Church.

In regards to creativity and room for manouevring in our theological constructions, obedience is a prerequisite. Many people are of the view that freedom for theological exploration must take place in a way that defies the Church. They couldn't be more wrong. There is much room for creativity within the scheme of obedience. But obedience comes before creativity. Because a theologian is first and foremost a servant of the Church.

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In two days' time, I will be delivering a talk at the National University of Singapore. Interestingly, this talk was organised by the Religion Cluster of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.

This has got me thinking about the relationship between Sociology and Theology. Being involved in the field of Theology, it's common for us to consider our relationship with Sociology, but from the primary perspective of Theology. Perhaps it is also appropriate that we now consider the relationship between Theology and Sociology, but this time from the primary perspective of Sociology.

Sociology has a particular way of studying religion, and it is called the Sociology of Religion. It seeks to understand the role of religion in society and how people make meaning of life through religion.

I would like to posit that Sociology's assessment of religion is possibly less accurate if it seeks to study the role of religion dispassionately without taking into serious consideration the confessional claims of religion, i.e. Theology. Beyond Sociology's own assessment of religion and its social role, it is more crucial for Sociology to understand how religion defines its own role in society - this will certainly provide for a more realistic definition of religion and religiosity.

Of course, the Sociological community would examine confessional statements of religious communities in different light as compared to the Theological community itself. That is a given that must be accepted by virtue of the sheer nature of Sociology itself. But yet, I am also suggesting that the Sociological community would benefit from attempts to study and understand religious claims on the terms of the religious communities themselves. In this instance, acceptance and agreement are not as crucial as understanding is.

Sociological realities are studied based on a premise of objectivity, observation from a "healthy" distance. But I am challenging this premise. I am suggesting that sociological realities - and in this instance, religious realities - are better understood when studied from the positions of the people's convictions, practices, values, and passions. Only then will the meanings held by the religious people be understood by the Sociological community; not perfectly, but perhaps less inaccurately.

I think that in listening to the confessional claims of people like me from the confessional religious community, the National University of Singapore has got it right. It is not just a gracious gesture of academic humility but also an apt Sociological position to take in the academic community's endeavour to understand religion in society.

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Sherman Kuek
Published in Catholic Asian News (November 2008 Issue)

In the 2000-year life of the Christian faith, the Church has engaged in a great multitude of educational efforts. Taking the context of the West, the Church’s involvement in education is observable from ancient schools of rhetoric to the tertiary academic institutions of the High Middle Ages, from the elementary rudiments of grammar schooling to the sophistications of philosophical and scientific thought. Through these multiple levels and layers of education and human reasoning, she has been there.

True to the observation of the Pope John Paul II that a number of significant Catholic academic institutions grew ex corde ecclesiae (“out of the heart of the Church”), the great European universities such as Oxford, Louvain, Paris, Bologna, Prague and Padua arose from a Christian West. However, Western Catholic theological academia has perennially existed in a state of tension between faith and reason - between the search for logical truth and the fervour for divinely revealed truth - as if the two stood in contradiction to each other.

I firmly embrace and retain each and every thing which has been proposed by the Church regarding the teaching of faith and morals, whether defined by solemn judgment or asserted and declared by the ordinary Magisterium, especially those things which concern the mystery of the Holy Church of Christ and its sacraments and the sacrifice of the Mass and the primacy of the Roman Pontiff.

Evidently, the conventional oath emphasised the creedal aspects of the Catholic faith. However, at the dawn of this new announcement, the newly sanctioned oath replaced the old formula with three comprehensive statements:

With firm faith I believe as well everything contained in God’s word, written or handed down in tradition and proposed by the Church - whether in solemn judgment or in the ordinary and universal Magisterium as divinely revealed and calling for faith.

I also firmly accept and hold each and every thing that is proposed by that same Church definitively with regard to teaching concerning faith and morals.

What is more, I adhere with religious submission of will and intellect to the teachings which either the Roman pontiff or the college of bishops enunciate when they exercise the authentic magisterium even if they proclaim those teachings in an act that is not definitive.

This change was in all probability a response to the Vatican’s fear at the way in which many Western Catholic theological institutions were becoming increasingly secular in character. The past recent decades has witnessed a number of Western Catholic theologians either being formally censured (having their teaching licences revoked and removing their rights to be presented as “Catholic theologians”) or at least being perceived as dissident voices in the Catholic Church. The Vatican continues to monitor the movements of theological thought that flow from the Church’s theologians.

Surely and unsurprisingly, such an act of theological policing is construed by dissidents as an obsession with control on the part of the Church hierarchy. Cardinal Ratzinger’s policing activity while he was Prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith had earned him the infamous title of “the Grand Inquisitor”. These dissident voices wavered with apprehension at their prospects for survival when Cardinal Ratzinger was subsequently elected as Pope Benedict XVI in April 2005.

Is he truly the power hungry control freak many dissident voices have made him out to be? Is his conservatism so acute that he would not allow for any freedom of theological exploration which might jeopardise the stability of the Church hierarchy? For a theologian so astute and thus widely published, it would seem strange for such accusations to ring true regarding the Holy Father’s own paradigm of theology and scholarship.

According to the Pope Benedict XVI, if theology “was [merely] a systematic reflection about questions of religion, about the relationship between man and God”, then it would constitute nothing more than a “science of religion”. Essentially, theology is a field of study that deals with truth that is “greater than our own thought”. The route of theology must therefore be characterised by the formulae fides quaerens intellectum (“faith seeking understanding”) and credo ut intellegam (“I believe in order that I may understand”).

Theology speaks of the work of God in bringing the human mind to grasp truths that are beyond its own initial capacity. It is about God helping the human mind to transcend itself and to recognise realities that are beyond its own powers to understand, let alone grasp in totality.

However, this does not exclude the role of human reason. Faith and reason can coexist, but not in the order prescribed by the rationalistic mind. For the Christian mind, faith precedes reason. Yet, the content of faith is never hollow or shallow, for this faith shall always be found rational, although the former is not on any account contingent upon the latter. Faith precedes reason and seeks to help reason to understand.

The Church does not advance a bias against the interest of academic freedom. In fact, academic freedom is so deeply valued that the Church seeks to ensure that ultimate truth must be recognised in the process of this search. Although the pursuit of scientific and logical findings and the recognition of divinely revealed truth both possess discovery methods that are autonomous from each other, both fields of truth discovery find their existence in the same Source. This means that both cannot contradict each other; there is a point at which both faith and reason must converge to reveal the greater reality.

This also means that academic freedom cannot be exalted at the expense of divine revelation. There must be symbiotic relationship that exists between the two dimensions of inquiry. On the one hand, freedom needs faith to be its guiding light and its safeguard, in order that the authenticity of this freedom may always be preserved. On the other hand, the recognition of divinely revealed truth must be explicated and deepened through the exercise of reason. To be truly free is to be truly open to both these dimensions of divine and reasoned truth. In this sense, faith is the guarantee of the authentic freedom so desired by reason. “There can be no reason apart from or in opposition to the truth...” (Veritatis splendor, 96). When either one of these two orders seek to function apart from each other, there is an absence of authentic freedom or real openness.

When academic freedom leads to a contradiction of the faith proclaimed by the Church, it compromises its own virtue of true freedom. True academic freedom implies even a willingness “to speak uncomfortable truths which do not please public opinion” but, nevertheless, are “necessary” in order “to safeguard the authentic good of society” (Ex Corde Ecclesiae, 32). If academic theology becomes a pathetic imitation of secular inquiry prevalent in many academic institutions and sacrifices the integrity of divine revelation, it loses its prophetic power in a world that exalts the infallibility of human reason, which is itself an unsustainable notion.

Actually, the common assumption that even secular intellectual life does not operate within certain boundaries constitutes a fallacy. Every intellectual community is regulated by its own rules of research and discovery. Theological thinkers should not be ashamed of the fact that theology itself is regulated by its own unique rules of engagement as set out by the community of faith; what more when it speaks of divinely revealed truth.

Perhaps the tension between faith and reason - and its profound implication upon the much treasured academic freedom - is best explained by the Holy Father himself in his statement regarding the Magisterium of the Church: “The Magisterium, rightly understood, is a humble service that makes possible true theology”.

The policing activity of the Vatican, together with its censure of dissident theological voices in the Church, is on all accounts a most sacred duty that exists to preserve the integrity of both faith and reason. Only then is authentic academic freedom upheld.

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This tradition of church-and-world interaction poses a challenge to the church of Singapore in her interaction with a modernity that is unique unto the Singaporean nation. For decades since Singapore emerged as an independent nation, there has been insufficient articulation from the Christian theological community in Singapore pertaining to the city-state's modern culture. As the Singaporean Church matures, it is now time for her people to interact critically with her wider societal ethos in an attitude of solidarity with the country, and certainly as no less than children of the nation.

This talk highlights some dominant expressions of Singapore's unique modernity, such as secularism, materialism and pragmatism. It delineates how these expressions are variant from what seem to be similar expressions of Western modernity. Thorough descriptions and interpretations of these embodiments of Singaporean modernity will also be presented. Together with that, the speaker will rigorously critique these facets of Singaporean modernity from a Christian theological viewpoint.

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Thinkativity :

In case you haven't noticed, I've done a renovation on my little "Wall of Fame" (the row of pictures on the right bottom). This new renovation renders the icons more reflective of the present state of my faith journey.

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So here's the final installment of my photographs taken during my week at Cipanas, West Java:

This was taken on a Sunday morning, just after the Mass, at the Catholic Church in Cipanas. Ignore the two cute girls standing beside me (they're students at the seminary which I visited) and look at the background. Those are traditional musical instruments.

On that particular Sunday, whilst the Mass was still as thoroughly Roman as ever, the liturgy was sung entirely in tunes of the Sunda culture. I couldn't connect with the music, that's true, but it was really inculturation at its best! Even until now, it still rings in my head.

It so happened that the priest celebrating the Mass at the parish that morning was a guest priest. I met him after the Mass, and once he realised that I was a visitor, he introduced himself to me as a Carmelite priest. He told me that his Order had developed an entire valley into a retreat centre that was able to accommodate 5 or 6 thousand people for retreats at one go, and asked if I would be interested to visit the place with him. Which fool would say no?

So here it is, Lembah Carmel (Carmel Valley). Again, ignore those two pretty girls. Look at the little chapel behind us. That little chapel can accommodate about 300 people with lots of space to spare. Further up the hill was a humungous chapel which could accommodate 4 thousand people!

This is a view of the frontage of Lembah Carmel from a different perspective. The landscape was indescribable. A vast valley surrounded by mountains, greenery, and infested by clean cool air.

This is another place called the Cibodas Botanic Gardens. It is a very vast piece of land, again on a very high place, that is preserved as a rainforest. The natural waterfall even flows onto the road, and then back again into yet another waterfall - this must have been one of the most unique waterfall sights I had ever seen.

A stream that is formed from a waterfall.

More waterfalls.

This is the iron horse that was used to take me around to Lembah Carmel and to the Cibodas Botanic Gardens. Thanks to Pak Yosef (who works at the seminary) for having so generously offered the vehicle for my use. No lah, I didn't drive it; someone else drove me around.

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