Card. Michael Czerny S.J. at the Vatican.
(Image by Wikipedia (commons.wikimedia.org), Author: Juan della Torre) Details Source DMCA
Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) August 6, 2022: Pope Francis' recent penitential visit to Canada was well-covered by international secular and religious news media. Subsequently, I decided to write the following letter to the Czechoslovakian-born Canadian Jesuit Cardinal Michael F. Czerny (born in 1946; Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1978), Prefect, Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development.
Your Eminence:
When I was in the Jesuits (1979-1987), I was in theological studies at the Jesuit theologate at the University of Toronto when Pope John-Paul II visited Canada in 1984 - the country in which you grew up. Along with many other Jesuits in the Toronto area, I traveled to Midland, Ontario, to participate in Pope John-Paul II's celebration of Mass in a field adjacent to the shrine of the North American Martyrs in Midland.
Consequently, I followed the news coverage of the first Jesuit pope's recent penitential visit to Canada. For example, I read Cindy Wooden's article "Raising banner, protesters raise questions about 'Doctrine of Discovery'" in the National Catholic Reporter (dated July 29, 2022). I also read Christopher White's article "Pope Francis says Catholic Church committed cultural 'genocide' of Canada's Indigenous people" in the National Catholic Reporter (dated July 30, 2022).
In it, among other things, White says, "Canada's bishops have been working with Vatican officials for a formal rescission of the policy [known as the 'Doctrine of Discovery'], which has been an ongoing demand of many Indigenous advocates."
In my estimate, such a formal rescission document would also serve as a suitable follow-up document for Pope Francis to issue to follow up his February 2020 post-synodal apostolic exhortation Querida Amazonia, on the one hand, and, on the other, his June 2022 apostolic letter Desiderio desideravi.
I have discussed Pope Francis' two documents in the following two review essays that are now available online through the University of Minnesota's online conservancy:
(1) "Pope Francis' 2020 Apostolic Exhortation, and Walter J. Ong's Thought" (URL: http://hdl.handle.net/11299/211640);
(2) "Pope Francis' 2022 Apostolic Letter, and Walter J. Ong's Thought" (URL: https://hdl.handle.net/11299/228208).
As you can see from the titles of my two online review essays, I am fond of promoting the mature work from the early 1950s onward of the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and media ecology theorist Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955).
Even though you may already be familiar with Ong's mature work from the early 1950s onward, I would nevertheless like to highlight his life and work here briefly.
Ong's massively research Harvard doctoral dissertation was a study of the verbal arts of rhetoric and logic (also known as dialectic) from antiquity up to and beyond the French Renaissance logician and educational reformer and Protestant martyr Peter Ramus (1515-1572). In 1958, Harvard University Press published Ong's doctoral dissertation, slightly revised, in two volumes:
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
