The 2023 Pluscarden Pentecost Lectures to be given by Fr Richard Price
30th May – 1st June 2023
Tuesday 30th May at 3.00 pm Faith in a Society without Faith
Wednesday 31st May at 10.30 am Reading the Bible Today
Wednesday 31st May at 3.00 pm Silvio Pellico as a Model Christian for Today
Thursday 1st June at 10.30 am Religion and Experience
Each year the Abbot and Community of Pluscarden Abbey sponsor a series of four lectures by an invited Theologian on an aspect of Catholic Theology. Previous Lecturers have included Fr Aidan Nichols OP, Fr Thomas Weinandy OFM Cap, Fr Anthony Meredith SJ, Fr Paul McPartlan, Prof. Carol Zaleski, and Dom Erik Varden The Lectures are held on the Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday after Pentecost in St Scholastica’s Retreat House at the Abbey. They are open to all. In 2020, because of Covid lockdown, the Lectures had to be cancelled; in 2021 and 2022, they were live streamed. Hopefully, this year we will be back to normal and the Lectures will take place at the Abbey as before.
The Lecturer
Fr Richard Price is a retired priest in the Archdiocese of Westminster and a former lecturer at Heythrop College, London.
He received an MA and DPhil from the University of Oxford and his BD and MTh from London University. From 1981-2018 he was a Lecturer at Heythrop College, and from 2010 was Professor of the History of Christianity at the college. He is also an Honorary Research Fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London. A long-term specialist in Patristic Theology and Church Councils, he has been described as “an extremely gifted scholar and functions as a walking encyclopaedia of Church History”.
He has contributed a vast number of articles to various journals and books, on the Ecumenical Councils and other topics; and in 2021 published The Council of Ephesus of 431: Documents and Proceedings (Liverpool University Press.
Since his retirement, Fr Richard has been much in demand as a lecturer and panellist and his talks can be found on YouTube.
The Lectures
Living the Faith in the World of Today
What new challenges does the modern world present to Christian believers? What are they, and how can they be coped with?
This series of talks addresses a broad range of problems – from that of living in an increasingly godless society to that posed by doubts as to how to read Scripture.
It speaks of the need to cultivate one’s own spiritual perception of the world, and uses an autobiography by a nineteenth-century Italian to illustrate how to maintain Christian patience and charity in a context where we have to depend on our inner resources rather on a supportive environment, for that is the situation of a Christian today.
Lecture 1: Faith in a Society without Faith
The statistics of churchgoing, of religious commitment and of belief in God in the western world generally all show a precipitate decline since the early sixties, one without parallel in the history of Christianity. And those of us who are still believing and practising cannot but be influenced by people around us as to how we react to the challenges and trials of life, at a level more instinctive than what we claim to ‘believe’. We believe in God, we go to church, but how important is this as regards our anxieties in the present and our hopes for the future? We need to be honest with ourselves, to discover where our faith is still alive and kicking, and to build upwards and outwards from that.
Lecture 2: Reading the Bible Today
Fundamental to Christian faith is a reception of the message of the Bible, but how do we understand the ‘Word of God’? Does the ‘inspiration’ of the Bible mean that God is the true author and the human writers secretaries who wrote down what the Holy Spirit dictated? If in contrast, as modern biblical scholarship does, we turn the biblical authors into writers dependent on their own understanding and beliefs, with great variation between them, where does that leave us? I shall argue that both options – the traditional and the modern scholarly one – are open to us even today.
Lecture 3: Silvio Pellico as a Model Christian for Today
As a model Catholic for our times, I have chosen Silvio Pellico, an Italian layman who was imprisoned throughout the 1820s by the Austrians and wrote of the harsh treatment he endured in a book – ‘Le mie Prigioni’ (My prisons) – which had an enormous impact in his day. His memoir is an expression of extraordinary patience, resignation and even generosity to his captors. It is still worth reading today as an expression of a truly Catholic reaction to tribulation. To read his memoir is to recover a sense of what it truly is to be a Christian, just as much in the difficult circumstances of today as in Pellico’s own time.
Lecture 4: Religion and Experience
Traditional Catholicism was highly sceptical towards any claims, especially by lay people, of having a ‘hot line’ to God or Jesus or Mary or one of the saints. But as Catholic culture around us disintegrates, personal religious experience needs to be reassessed; for how without a vivid experience, a sense of a call from God, can our faith maintain its hold on us and be a real inspiration when we live in a secularized society? I shall outline what I believe to be a Christian perception of the world and above all of our fellow human beings and of the revelation of God through them, as something that can give body to our faith without being fanciful or presumptuous.
For further information contact the Abbey at monks@pluscardenabbey.org
or check the website: www.pluscardenabbey.org