The dazzling critique by an Australian scholar
on the post-synodal exhortation. “We have lost all foothold, and fallen like
Alice into a parallel universe, where nothing is quite what it seems to be”
by Sandro Magister
ROME, June 7, 2016 - Keep an eye on the author
of the volume above, the first critical version of a masterpiece by Saint Basil
the Great lost in the original Greek but come down to us in an ancient Syrian
version attested to in five manuscripts, published two years ago by the
historical publisher Brill, active in Holland since the 17th century.
The author is Anna M. Silvas, one of the
world’s most renowned scholars of the Fathers of the Church, especially
Eastern. She belongs to the Greek Catholic Church of Romania, and lives in
Armindale, Australia, in New South Wales.
She teaches at the University of New England
and at the Australian Catholic University. Her main fields of study are the
Cappadocian Fathers – Basil, Gregory Nazianzen, Gregory of Nyssa –, the
development of monasticism, female asceticism in early Christianity and in the
Middle Ages.
She also gives courses on marriage, family, and
sexuality in the Catholic tradition at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute on
Marriage and Family in Melbourne.
The following is her commentary on the
post-synodal apostolic exhortation “Amoris Laetitia,” delivered before a packed
crowd with bishops and priests and then published on the website of the Parish
of Blessed John Henry Newman in Caulfield North, near Melbourne.
The original text of the commentary is
supplemented with footnotes and an epilogue with a passage from Saint Basil,
omitted here.
But not another word. The commentary by Anna M.
Silvas is a must-read. Brilliant, acute, expert, straightforward. A luminous
example of that “parresìa” which is the duty of every baptized person.
Read Anna Silvas' speech at this link:
