A Neighborly Civic Holiness | Fr. Augustine Thompson, O.P.

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4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 26 August 2022

⏱️ 61 minutes

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Summary

Fr. Thompson's slides can be found here: https://tinyurl.com/8smyu7xm This lecture was given on June 16, 2022 at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C. as part of The Civitas Dei Summer Fellowship: "The City of God in Modernity: Culture and Ecclesiology." For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Fr. Augustine Thompson, O.P. is a Catholic priest of the Order of Preachers and currently serves as Praeses (Director) of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies at the University of Toronto in Canada and Professor of History at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkleley, CA. He holds a Ph.D in medieval history from the University of California. Until 2009, he was Professor of Religious Studies and History at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA. His books and publications focus on medieval Italy and medieval religious history.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Tamistic Institute. For more talks like this, visit us at
0:05.9	tamistic institute.org. Having examined some of the institutional and ritual aspects of the
0:15.7	religious dimension of the high Italian city republics, I would now like in conclusion to look at their citizens in a more personal way.
0:24.2	This means looking at some of those whom their fellow citizens looked at as especially holy,
0:31.2	models of communal piety.
0:33.9	Each Christian society produces saints after its own image of holiness, and medieval Italy, communal Italy was no exception.
0:42.4	The city made the saints.
0:45.3	Citizens of the communes found their saints not in the monastic or clerical world of churchmen or among nuns, but among themselves, the lay faithful. Recognizing holiness,
0:56.4	they canonized it themselves, calling on the popper hierarchy only rarely to ratify their decisions.
1:03.9	The religiosity of the period's holy persons, its saints, was really that of the city and the
1:09.6	local church, albeit lived more intensely.
1:13.0	Although not wholly typical of ordinary lay piety by their very exceptional behavior and styles of life,
1:19.6	the saints and their cults were a fixture of the communes.
1:23.6	In short, the spiritual geography of the Italian republics would be incomplete without them,
1:30.0	and so I am ending with them.
1:32.4	12th century Italian cities found their saints among the spiritual fathers of the Mother Church,
1:38.5	but these were bishops with a difference.
1:42.3	They defended true religion and the independence of their cities.
1:47.1	Bishop Obaldo of Gubio uttered prayers from the walls of his besieged city and set the enemy
1:53.5	armies to flight. This, with his many works of charity, inspired outpourings of devotion.
2:00.1	Soon after Obaldo's death,
2:01.8	successor, Bishop Teobaldo,
	...

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